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> The people or organizations making decisions to not protect pedestrians should be held liable for choosing to endanger pedestrians. Seems a bit extreme. If t

• bigstrat2003 3y ago
  Agreed. I think that it's in fact quite immature to act like we must always optimize for lives saved, no matter the cost and no matter how small the gain.
  • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    The important thing to remember is that dollars are always lives, but there are finite resources available. If we can save more lives spending the same money on medical research or emissions reductions or housing construction[1] then we should do that instead. [1] Keep in mind that a single new housing unit that reduces the owner's commute by 40 miles/day is good for eliminating more than half a million vehicle miles, in addition to all of its other benefits.
    • komali2 3y ago
      This presumes efficient spending of effort and capital across government, which, especially in the USA, a State comprised of up to nearly a hundred governments depending on where you're standing (federal, with federal agencies; state, with state agencies, county, with county agencies, city, with city agencies, school district, with school district agencies; etc), is not a good presumption. If a local government can get together a million bucks to install some bollards at one or two dangerous intersections, that's a win. That million dollars could never have been spent on a national emission reduction effort.
      • AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        It doesn't presume anything, it's just relative value. The local government by definition can't enact a national program, but it could certainly use the money for e.g. local tax credits for solar panels or electric vehicles or heat pumps. It could provide incentives for local housing construction or a hundred other things. They could even return the money to citizens, who would do something with it, often something good. And if any of those things provide more value than the bollards then that's what they should do instead.
        • komali2 2y ago
          This is still assuming too much efficiency. The transportation department gets a budget and spends it. Should we remove their budget until cancer is cured?
          • AnthonyMouse 2y ago
            The transportation department doesn't choose their own budget, the legislators do. Many of the things the transportation department does are life-critical -- emergency services need usable roads. And if you don't have transportation infrastructure then you don't have commerce or a tax base or money to spend on anything else. Whereas if you're asking whether they should remove other waste from the transportation budget, or any other budget, which is money spent with low value (e.g. overpaying to use a politically connected contractor), and use that money for cancer research, the answer is yes.
            • komali2 2y ago
              Clearly then, the legislators should restrict road usage to emergency vehicles only, and in order to allow other people to get to work, set up a cheap bussing system. This would be the most cost effective way to save the most amount of lives, letting you write off transport and focus on funding cancer research. So why don't they do that?
              • AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    • slow_typist 2y ago
      Your argument only holds where prices reflect the real (internal + external) cost. Otherwise you are bound to market failure (which has already happened to the transportation market).
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        The values are entirely on paper. It's a comparison you make when deciding how to allocate funding. Politicians obviously and frequently don't get the math right (or even do the comparison), but that doesn't affect what they should do if they were making better policy choices, or what voters should ask for if they're doing the numbers.
        • slow_typist 2y ago
          It is a bit more complicated since car drivers don’t pay for most of the externalities of driving. If you take individual car traffic as a given, I agree.
          • graemep 2y ago
            Not directly, but: 1. taxes - I pay hefty taxes on fuel (in the UK) and tax on owning a car 2. insurance - I have to have an insurance policy that will pay for any damage to third parties. The payment for those externalities is pooled, but paid. Not perfect, and not entirely, but a lot of it is paid.
            • slow_typist 2y ago
              Yeah the fuel price sucks. In germany car traffic is highly subsidised. It doesn’t even pay for the infra it needs. Probably the situation in the uk is not that different.
          • AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  • scott_w 3y ago
    Sweden operate Vision Zero with exactly this goal and the Netherlands also have a great record here, showing it’s possible if you actually try.
    • olalonde 3y ago
      Yet, most of its sidewalks do not have bollards.
      • scott_w 2y ago
        I’m not arguing for or against bollards, I’m specifically addressing the following claim: > I think that it's in fact quite immature to act like we must always optimize for lives saved, no matter the cost and no matter how small the gain. This is plainly incorrect, as Sweden and the Netherlands demonstrate.
      • PeterSmit 2y ago
        I would argue the point of the article isn’t “we need more bollards everywhere “, it’s “our regard for pedestrian safety is absurdly low, even cheap tools to increase pedestrian safety (like bollards) are uncommon / controversial"
      • bryanlarsen 2y ago
        Vision Zero rules are that you either need physical separation or a speed limit of 30 km/h. 30 km/h is approximately the threshold where the vast majority of vehicle-pedestrian collisions aren't fatal. They've chosen to lower the speed limit rather than add bollards.
    • mikhailfranco 2y ago
      The Dutch have gone in the other direction in some places: - deliberately mix pedestrians, bicycles and vehicles - remove all traffic signs, traffic lights and markings at intersections https://bigthink.com/the-present/want-less-car-accidents-get-rid-of-traffic-signals-road-signs/ https://bigthink.com/the-present/want-less-car-accidents-get...
• arp242 3y ago
  There's a catch-22 here because if a footpath is unsafe people won't walk there. So there will no incidents not because it's safe or because people don't want to walk there, but because it's unsafe. Or to put it in another way: https://i.redd.it/auq600rozlsc1.png https://i.redd.it/auq600rozlsc1.png – pretty sure that road has very low cyclists and very low cycle accidents. Of course not every road should have cycle lanes and bollards, but in general there's a huge lack of attention to the safety of anything that's a non-car.
  • matsemann 2y ago
    I sit on the board of my country's bicycle association, and work on getting more safe cycle roads. On these public hearings for new infra, someone always tries to counter building anything cycling related with "but there are no cyclists here today, build more car lanes instead". A common retort is that bridges aren't built where most people swim across the river. It's a chicken and egg problem, and you are absolutely correct in what you address. To use a popular HN quote: build it and they will come.
    • graemep 2y ago
      > build it and they will come. It might be true, but it might not be. Many places in UK have put a lot of effort into providing cycle lanes, prioritising cyclists over cars and pedestrians to do so. It has not worked. They built it and no one came. Its pretty clear that the solution here is more and cheaper public transport. I think fixed price tickets giving you unlimited usage, better bus services to rail stations, etc. are the right approach. I hate driving, but there are some places that it is impractical to go to without a car, and times when public transport is not available. These should be minimised.
      • dazc 2y ago
        Part of the reason maybe that many of these cycle lanes are not fit for purpose. There are places in the UK where cycling became popular for the simple reason that the layout was already bike friendly. This craze of adding a bike lane, regardless of local conditions has, indeed, been a total failure.
• orthoxerox 2y ago
  Yes, we've all heard [0] and probably agreed with the person Mitchell plays, but the cost of bollards is actually really low. I can buy concrete hemispherical bollards for less that $20 a piece. Let's make the total installation cost $50 per bollard. How many bollards does a 7/11 parking need? [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqYyxvM85zU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqYyxvM85zU
  • olalonde 2y ago
    Many areas in Americas cannot even afford sidewalks...
    • TheCoelacanth 2y ago
      If you can't afford sidewalks, you can't afford roads.
      • devilbunny 2y ago
        By that logic, most of Europe (I've driven in Ireland, UK, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland) can't afford roads. There aren't sidewalks everywhere.
        • TheCoelacanth 2y ago
          They can afford them, they just choose not to prioritize them.
      • mst 2y ago
        In urban areas, yes. In farm country, not really. Places in between are debatable - and as an inveterate pedestrian who's never learned to drive, I'd tend to be in favour of many of the places in between having sidewalks. But still, a blanket "you can't afford roads" is a bit much.
  • pixxel 2y ago
    You haven’t included consultation fees, planning fees, backroom bidding markups, unions, pensions etc. What it costs you to do the job isn’t the reality of it, sadly.
• slow_typist 2y ago
  That is a utilitarian argument, but did you really think it through? If you drive a car, you increase the risk of cyclists and pedestrians to get hurt or killed. Hurting or killing pedestrians also harms the society in several ways. Tax the car sales appropriately to the risk imposed on individuals and the society and you have enough money for bollards.
  • olalonde 2y ago
    It depends on cost. If the tax required to place bollards everywhere possible amounted to 1M$ per car, would that be a reasonable tax?
    • PeterSmit 2y ago
      If the harm to society is 1M$ per car, should we be driving them at all?
      • olalonde 2y ago
        No, we shouldn't. But the cost of installing bollards and the "harm to society" are two distinct costs. There are about 2.37 pedestrian deaths per billion vehicle miles traveled in America. Even if we assign a generous cost of 5M$ per life lost, that only amounts to a 0.01$ per mile driven, which is probably not enough to cover the cost of installing bollards all over the place.
        • slow_typist 2y ago
          How about 10 bollards per sold car, you can probably get away with $ 1k per bollard (including installation), most cars cost a multiple of 10k. Let‘s see how far that gets you. You can of course modify the bollard tax by car weight or by price.
          • michaelmior 2y ago
            So $10K extra per car? Assuming we're talking the US here where the average price of a new car is under $50K, that's more than a 20% bollard tax.
• close04 2y ago
  > The people or organizations making decisions to not protect pedestrians That statement is both too generic and too specific. It's mainly driven by narrow sentiment, perhaps understandably since we're all pedestrians, especially the "choosing" part. "Endangering" is very generic. Does a functionality in your software that could be beneficial to or facilitate endangering people but you chose not to disable it fit the assessment? Is E2EE helping criminals endanger people, or protecting honest people? "Pedestrian" is too specific, there's nothing exceptional about pedestrians compared to any other mode of transportation so the statement above would need to be extended to "any decisions that did not protect people". And then it becomes very generic again.
• TheCoelacanth 2y ago
  If it's a reasonable cost-benefit tradeoff, then they should have no problem with being held liable for it. If they are only willing to make the decision when they are able to push the cost onto someone else, that indicates it's not the right decision.
• notatoad 2y ago
  you've conveniently cropped out only a little bit of what i said there to make it look like i said something else. i explicitly said bollards should be up to the jurisdiction. it's reasonable to prioritize other things. that's fine. all i'm saying is that decision should be intentional. if you're going to make a decision to prioritize aesthetics or cost, it should actually be a decision that gets made somewhere along the line. the status quo is that "should we install bollards here" is not even a question that gets asked for most applications, whether the answer to that question is yes or no.