9 ms·

Looks like where I live, deaths are more closely associated with big, wide, fast roads. It's ironic that drivers get frustrated by smaller, narrower streets as

• Davidzheng 2y ago
  Are you weighing the deaths by use of the road. Otherwise it's not representative of danger level right
  • tstrimple 2y ago
    To me the comment spoke to our criminal lack of intelligent road design. It’s well known through multiple studies that road design impacts how fast people drive far more than posted speed limit signs. If we actually cared about road safety, we would design roads to be more safe and not just design a road that is comfortable to drive 60mph on and put up a 25mph speed limit. When you want slower speeds you need to make lanes more narrow. Add obstacles along the side of the road so it doesn’t feel so open. Add medians as areas where pedestrians have a refuge when daring to cross a place designed for vehicles. Add chicanes and bollards to force speed compliance in especially dangerous areas. There seems to be almost none of this happening in most places in the US that I have visited.
    • thefaux 2y ago
      We also could largely solve this problem with technological enforcement but people really hate that. If we made both the financial penalties for speeding and the probability of being caught sufficiently high, we could practically eliminate it overnight.
      • WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
        > We also could largely solve this problem with technological enforcement but people really hate that. The challenge in giving powerful entities direct control over our actions is they: directly control our actions, ceaselessly seek to control other actions, will be as unaccountable as they can be, will not ever allow control to flow in the other direction.
        • FactKnower69 2y ago
          This type of whining about slippery slope hypotheticals is ubiquitous in these discussions, but it's not very compelling up against the current reality of 40,000 unimaginably violent early deaths every single year in the US alone
          • lazide 2y ago
            Still tiny compared to heart disease!
            • oblio 2y ago
              Most of those are avoidable plus the rate of long term disabilities is about 10x the death rate (so 400 000) and of minor injuries is 10x that (so 4 million) plus... we can do both. There is plenty of money for safer road infra, DRIVERS JUST DON'T WANT IT because killing a stranger matters less than 5 fewer minutes spent commuting per day.
              • lazide 2y ago
                The same situation is true of heart disease, albeit the risk is generally killing themselves vs a random stranger. People just run out of shits to give at some point, and do what is easy.
                • oblio 2y ago
                  Agreed, especially when the opposition is formed out of several major industries in the country (car manufacturers, adjacent companies, road developers, big box stores, etc.).
      • alexpetralia 2y ago
        In my one trip to China so far, this is exactly what I observed!
        • Gigachad 2y ago
          It's the same in Australia. Speeding is quite uncommon and you'll be very quickly caught out.
      • brailsafe 2y ago
        Indeed, just because a problem could theoretically be addressed (I think solved is a reach) by technology, doesn't mean it's a sensible choice. Much like how putting a sign that says "pull" on a door that's designed to be pushed is analogous to what most places in NA do, which is to threaten people who use the road in the way it's designed.
      • Karrot_Kream 2y ago
        The reason this isn't solved is because traffic deaths are considered to be a "cost of doing business". Most pedestrian traffic in the US is in cities and due to the way funding formulas and political representation works in the US, suburban and rural areas have more political power than urban areas which care more about traffic throughput than pedestrian safety, so the issue never gets fixed. The only places in the US making headway have large urbanized areas and even they are struggling.
        • runarberg 2y ago
          Rural areas don’t have much political power either. A lot of rural America is actually unincorporated which means they don’t have a municipal level government, and instead are ruled by the county[^†]. In my experience the outsized political power is across gegraphic areas and instead is divided between classes, with the rich having almost all political power. A rich neighborhood in San Francisco hold much more political power than an improvised suburb in Fresno. Instead the reason I believe for pedestrian traffic being considered the "cost of doing business" among the political classes, is the good old hatred of the poor. Pedastrian casualties are extremely rare among the rich, as the rich usually drive almost everywhere, and if they walk, they do so in an area which they have lobbied to make safe for pedestrians. The rich don’t care if the poor die. †: As an immigrant, this feels like a major democratic oversight, one of many USA should fix if it wants to consider it self a democracy by 21st century standards.
          • ufocia 2y ago
            Let me understand this. Are you suggesting adding yet another inefficient layer of government in sparsely populated areas? BTW, in at least some states there are intermediate subdivisions of government, e.g. townships and districts, which take care of the roads even in rural areas.
            • runarberg 2y ago
              You are responding to my footnote, but ok. Yes. This is what most—all?—other democracies do. More realistically though, municipality level governments include surrounding rural areas. In areas with small towns and large areas of rural farmlands, the farmers and town residents have equal representation, but the farmers obviously have a bigger political influence (hopefully the municipality governments have enough representatives though that the townfolks have at least a couple of representatives). In reality unincorporated America also includes heavily urbanized areas (more often than not poorer than the surrounding areas). Here in Seattle this includes Skyway and White Center. But even if aside from those it is pretty unacceptable that all local planning for the community of e.g. Fairwood, or even Hobart don’t have any say in their municipality level organization, instead relying on the same county council as Seattle for their local affairs (a council with only 9 representatives for a total of 2.2 million constituents).
      • roughly 2y ago
        1) build a society that requires a car to get around 2) exclusively sell cars with ludicrous acceleration and top speed 3) set legal speed limit at 1/6th the top speed of most vehicles 4) enforce strict financial penalties for operating one’s obligatory high-powered vehicle at more than 1/6th its maximum speed. I’m strongly anti-car - I think we fucked up a whole lot designing society the way we did, but at this point, actual strict enforcement of speed limits with financial penalties is just robbery. If you want fewer people to die in car accidents, build a world that doesn’t obligate everyone to drive, or build a world where the vehicles for sale aren’t all SUVs with 0-60 times that would embarrass a Ferrari from 40 years ago, but don’t just start fining people when they use the vehicle you made them buy to do the thing it was made to do.
        • xpe 2y ago
          Please be realistic about what interventions are available given the current US system. Redesign our entire road system? Sounds great, but how are we going do it? Think about the policy changes and thousands or more of political wranglings across every populous jurisdiction in the United States. Even if we get it done over the next 20 to 120 years, what are we going do in the meanwhile?
          • com 2y ago
            Like a lot of things, start with reviewing what works elsewhere, start some pilots, and what works do bigger and bigger rollouts. Like, use data. If marketers and TikTok can trick us so easily using these techniques we can do the same in socio-technical settings too. Like most things, “architectural” systems solutions will work better than point behavioural interventions, but it’s always going to be a mix. Bike safety in The Netherlands was a multigenerational effort ranging from creating standards around roads intersections, bike paths and pavements and slowly remediating old ones while building new ones. That’s only a tiny part of a society-wide effort to improve quality- and length-of-life measures, but like the US Interstate highway system, has had measurable results in terms of economic and social outcomes. Some actions taken today will have individual results tomorrow. Some in 30 years. Better get started, right?
        • 2y ago
  • Swizec 2y ago
    GP is describing traffic calming road design. Where planners make roads purposefully feel less safe in certain neighborhoods because that statistically makes them safer per mile driven. A common example here in SF is to add unnecessary bends to an otherwise straight alley. This stops people from speeding right through a residential area because it's straight and empty. An example you may have seen in more rural areas is a straight road with an unnecessary curve before a stop sign or before entering a town. This forces you to slow down in a way that a speed limit doesn't. https://globaldesigningcities.org/publication/global-street-design-guide/designing-streets-people/designing-for-motorists/traffic-calming-strategies/ https://globaldesigningcities.org/publication/global-street-...
    • davidw 2y ago
      It's also separating things out. We need larger, faster roads to get from city to city - that's kind of inevitable. But the way you design those is to completely separate out bikes and pedestrians from them, and also limit access to them. Think of something like an interstate freeway. Slow, local streets are relatively safe because of the slow speeds and the priority on building places that cater to people and businesses rather than moving automobiles as quickly as possible. The 'in between' things, "stroads" are what tend to be the worst of both worlds. They do often include some token bike/pedestrian infrastructure that is not very safe, and they include lots of places where other cars exit/enter the road and turn lanes and just a lot of potential for bad interactions in unexpected ways. The Strong Towns folks do a pretty good job of outlining this, and in terms of fixing it, I've seen some interesting stuff related to street design in the Netherlands.
      • AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        The trouble is why the "stroads" came to be to begin with. Motorists will generally prefer whatever route gets them to their destination faster, but shops want to be where the traffic is, because they want motorists to stop and patronize them. So the shops want to set up right next to the high volume traffic path. But then pedestrians patronizing the same shops will be adjacent to that high speed high volume vehicle traffic. In theory there are designs that can address this, i.e. you interleave roads so that each block is bounded by a high speed road for vehicle traffic on one side and a low speed road for pedestrians and cyclists on the other, keeping them separate but still allowing businesses to be accessible to both. But now you run into politics: The motorists may now have to walk up to a city block to get where they're going and the anti-car people are going to object to there being high speed roads and parking lots in the city whatsoever. Meanwhile making the change requires a budget allocation to do the work, so in the absence of consensus the status quo prevails.
  • theGnuMe 2y ago
    What are you trying to say?
    • deepsun 2y ago
      They likely say that more people use fast roads, so it's expected to have more accidents. The safest road is one never used.
      • david-gpu 2y ago
        > The safest road is one never used. The safest road is one without motor vehicles. Pedestrians and bicycles cause a tiny number of injuries even when traffic is high.
        • HPsquared 2y ago
          Cyclist hitting a pedestrian at 20mph is more dangerous than 2 cars hitting each other.
          • socksy 2y ago
            Are there suddenly no pedestrians and cyclists on the roads with the cars? A cyclist hitting a pedestrian at 30km/h (fucking fast for a normal cyclist btw) is a rounding error both in terms of how much it happens and how deadly it is compared to a car hitting a pedestrian at 30km/h
    • magneticnorth 2y ago
      He's saying that if a stretch of highway has traffic volume of 10 million trips taken on it in a year and an average of 2 deaths per year, that is still much safer than a neighborhood street which sees 10,000 trips per year and averages 1 death per year. (numbers made up to emphasize a point, a neighborhood street with 1 death per year is pretty obviously unsafe)
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  Speed and convenience also matters. I like big, fast, and wide roads because they let me and many others get to where we want to go quickly. It’s a trade off. We shouldn’t let “think of the children” safetyism decide what the balance is, since that line of thinking is extremist and does not consider what is at stake on the other side of the argument. Efforts to eliminate every last death on streets are a waste of time since we’ll never achieve perfection and roads are very safe already. The road diets made under that unrealistic goal are simply making everyone’s lives worse by causing us to spend more time on the roads in traffic.
  • davidw 2y ago
    Traffic deaths are quite literally one of the two leading causes of death of children in the United States, so in this case, yeah, actually thinking of the children makes some sense.
    • m463 2y ago
      Note the way to do this is to follow engineering rules. Take the 85th percentile rule. If you take a neighborhood road and change it from 40mph to 25mph in an attempt to "save the children", you can easily make it more dangerous. The 85th percentile rule figures how fast people go on a road, and sets an appropriate speed limit that people naturally follow. Attempting to set a speed limit too low or too high leads to a wide speed variance, which makes the road more dangerous.
      • davidw 2y ago
        Or we could actually build slower, safer streets that are that way by design, rather than relying on signs. And where roads need to be fast and move a lot of cars, separate them out from other uses.
        • m463 2y ago
          and set speed limit 5-10 mph below design speed for maximum safety.
• dhosek 2y ago
  We have what are called “stroads” in North America, which are very much what you’re describing. I remember when I was a kid, they took Pershing Road on the Stickney-Berwyn (Illinois) border and changed the commercial parking from diagonal to parallel and increased the traffic flow from two lanes to four. I have no firm data, but I’m pretty sure that this increased accidents on the street as well as effectively killed the Stickney CBD on Pershing Road (I would guess at least a third of the storefronts are currently vacant and that’s ignoring buildings that were demolished and never replaced). And I’m not entirely sure what traffic benefit came out of increasing the flow along the street as it’s not really a good connector of anything in that stretch.
  • newZWhoDis 2y ago
    No we don’t. That idiotic “word” was coined by a fanatical YouTuber, not anyone that should be taken seriously. I dare you to say “stroad” outside of your online echo chamber.
    • lolinder 2y ago
      I don't particularly like the word myself, partially because I use 'street' and 'road' interchangeably and so I'm never clear what it's supposed to be a hybrid of, but the word was coined by Charles Marohn, founder of the nonprofit Strong Towns [0]. I don't know about any YouTube channel associated with him, but I have heard of the nonprofit and I'm not exactly a passionate follower of that niche. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_Towns https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_Towns
  • ufocia 2y ago
    The fragrance of the water reclamation plant more likely killed the business in Stickney (or Stinky as some people refer to it lovingly).
  • tengbretson 2y ago
    What you're describing sounds a lot more like a stroulevard. Not a stroad.
• newZWhoDis 2y ago
  >Looks like where I live, deaths are more closely associated with big, wide, fast roads. This is sort of like saying “most child p*rn is transported by undersea fiber optic cables!”
• bkjelden 2y ago
  Speed kills. A road where traffic moves at 30mph can be poorly designed and lead to lots of accidents, but so long as those accidents are not a vehicle hitting a pedestrian they're unlikely to be fatal. A road where traffic moves at 70mph is another story.
  • naniwaduni 2y ago
    More people also just die where there are more people...
    • ajuc 2y ago
      USA has 12.9 traffic deaths per 100 000 people yearly with 330 million people. Europe as a whole has 7.4 with 746.4 million people, and developed EU countries are around or under 5. Surface area is actually quite similar 9.3 million vs 10 million km2. There are countries with population densities higher and lower than US in there, and ALL BUT ONE OF THEM have less traffic deaths than US. It's Bosnia and Herzegovina by the way. And it's at 13.5. USA is crazy unsafe for a developed country, and it barely matters if you compare with sparsely populated Canada (5.2) or Sweden (2.0), or densely populated Germany (3.7) or Japan (2.1). It's not about population nor population density. It's not about wealth. It's not about population distribution. It's about car-centrism and insane design. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
      • andrepd 2y ago
        It's a crazy comparison because Germany for example is still an incredibly car-centric country.
      • blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
        12.9 still seems very low to me. What makes the lower number better? I wouldn’t want the difference between 12.9 and 7.4 if it means I need to give up on driving cars and take slow inconvenient public transit or be limited to where public transit takes me. Cars are freedom. I would also argue the US is more successful than literally every other country in part because of fast road infrastructure. So maybe they’re all just making the wrong tradeoff.
• cperciva 2y ago
  Speed kills, but slowness eats lives in another way. Which is worse, having a 1% chance of dying in a car accident, or spending an extra hour/day stuck in traffic? I think I might take the first option; it delivers a higher expected number of hours of life not stuck in traffic.
  • Underphil 2y ago
    I'm sure there's a fancy name for the fallacy you're presenting here but there are more than two choices. The third choice is stop building in such a way that these wide and fast roads are needed.
    • dr_kiszonka 2y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
    • hashmush 2y ago
      The fancy name is "false dichotomy", and you're completely right.
    • HPsquared 2y ago
      That also has a cost. Needing to uproot your entire life and move everything around.
    • maxerickson 2y ago
      It's not even a realistic representation of the commute choice. In the US, with a heavily car centric culture and ~stupid housing policy, we still have an average daily commute of about 55 minutes. Aren't gonna save an hour on that.
    • blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
      …by increasing the time to a destination and reducing access? By forcing people to live mandated lives in a 15 minute radius? By making everyone crowd into unsafe and dirty public transit? All of these and any other options you might name will hurt people’s lives as well. I can’t imagine an alternative that doesn’t confirm GP’s point.
• ocschwar 2y ago
  One of the big ironies of all this is car insurance. If you keep getting your car dinged on narrow roads, your insurance payouts will be larger than if you run over someone. Dings add up to a lot, but hitting a pedestrian maxes out the payout before the guy makes it out of the emergency room. This is why Massachusetts drivers have a bad rep. Lots and lots of minor accidents in dense traffic. But MA itself it one of the safest places in the US
• bigbacaloa 2y ago
  [dead]
• gcanyon 2y ago
  You might be interested in Not Just Bikes. In particular, their take on what they call "stroads": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
• screye 2y ago
  Traffic calming measures like lane narrowing have successfully been used in Europe for safety. Drivers don't follow traffic rules. They follow the rules that appear to make sense for the scenario they're in. No matter how many 15 mph speedlight signs you put up on a wide street, the driver will subconsciously speed through a wide street because the brain is stupid like that. Want drivers to stop before the footpath, raise it up. It'll make them feel like they're off-the-road and they'll slow down. Everything about cars is associated with perceptions. Families buy heavy cars for the perception of safety, but instead have a vehicle that is harder to turn and is more likely to end up in a ditch. They buy taller vehicles to feel safe but have instead purchased a massive blindspot notorious for trampling over your own children. Unprotected bike lanes look like shoulder lanes you can serve into, and that's how drivers treat them. You're absolutely correct about the feeling of discomfort when driving through narrow lanes. The biggest lie we tell is that cars are safe. No, you're wielding the most lethal murder weapon in the country, with almost zero training and 1 mistake is all it takes to get a prison sentence. They should feel uncomfortable.
  • andrepd 2y ago
    Outstanding comment, you're absolutely correct about everything. Except this: > 1 mistake is all it takes to get a prison sentence On the contrary, on top of everything you've pointed out, if you do kill someone (or multiple someones) at the wheel of a car you're unlikely to get more than a few months in prison AT MOST.
    • screye 2y ago
      unfortunate, but true. At this point, having a child that's escaped scott-free from a hit-n-run is part of billionaire-bingo.
    • pavel_lishin 2y ago
      Statistically speaking, if you want to murder someone, a car is the best possible murder weapon.
  • fragmede 2y ago
    A question when seeking psychiatric help is "do you own a gun?". Why isn't it "do you own a car?"