4 ms·

I want to let my kids walk wherever they want to. It’s great for them. My 5 year old bikes to school, accompanied by an adult. It’s a bit more than half a mil

I want to let my kids walk wherever they want to. It’s great for them. My 5 year old bikes to school, accompanied by an adult. It’s a bit more than half a mile away from the house. I’d like to tell him he can do this on his own next year, but there’s a single intersection he has to cross that makes this difficult. I’m not worried about him getting lost, abducted by a stranger or any host of movie plot scenarios. I’m worried about vehicles. Specifically pickup trucks and SUVs. 40 years ago a 5 or 6 year old mostly had to contend with sedans with hoods lower than 30 inches. Today there are large numbers of vehicles twice that high, where even an adult can’t look the driver in the eye at close distances. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says: Vehicles with hood heights of more than 40 inches and blunt front ends angled at greater than 65 degrees were 44 percent more likely to cause fatalities. https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/vehicles-with-higher-more-vertical-front-ends-pose-greater-risk-to-pedestrians https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/vehicles-with-higher-more-v... I’ll probably let him bike alone anyway. But it’s a different equation because of the cars.

iamalizard 4mo ago
I'm almost 2 meters tall and was crossing a street at a crosswalk with my bike yesterday, walking and pushing it at normal walking speeds, like the law requires. There was a car about to turn left from the lanes going left. There was a car from the lanes going right (the closest lanes to me) that slowed down as I started crossing the street. I assumed they saw me and that's why they were slowing down. Nope - they almost hit me but managed to hit the brakes very hard at the last possible second. Apparently they slowed down to make sure the car that would turn left would wait for them. If I was as tall as a 5 year old, maybe the car that almost hit me wouldn't have even seen me. If I got hit, I'd take it better than a 5 year old due to physics - my mass is bigger and the point where it would've hit me would've been my thighs instead of my torso. That car wasn't even with a tall hood or anything obstructing its view, just a regular car. In another comment a few days ago I reminisced about how I was let running alone for hours on end when I was very young, and how that was normal. It's a bit hard to reconcile both events now. I gained a lot of independence and had real unrestricted fun, but in hindsight I might've died a few times. My idea, even if it might be traumatic, is to show the kid a few clips of people being hit by a car and getting mangled, with all the gore visible. Especially people following the laws and being careful. I miss /r/watchpeopledie as it was actually very educational.
- jszymborski 4mo ago
  I don't really understand how being scared/traumatized by videos of bike accidents will increase that child's visibility. The onus here is on municipal and federal governments to make roads and cars safer.
  - iamalizard 4mo ago
    It won't increase their visibility, obviously. It will make them think twice before going on that crosswalk. Maybe they'll wait for a car that slows down after they've taken only 1 step on the crosswalk, maybe they'll wait for their eyes to meet the driver's or to see the driver making a "go, go" sign with their hand. Governments should make roads safer but until they do, we should care for ourselves. Imagine a sidewalk where the ground is crooked, full of holes and parts of the pavement sticking up. Should we blindly go on the sidewalk saying "the government should make it better" or should we exercise caution not to trip and fall? The same logic applies to most dangerous things. Should the government make sure the food and supplements that are imported is safe? Of course. Does that mean you should order food and supplements from any shady site from a random 3rd world country with no reviews? Absolutely not.
    - paulryanrogers 4mo ago
      > Should we blindly go on the sidewalk saying "the government should make it better" or should we exercise caution not to trip and fall? The answer isn't binary. It's both. Governments are us, and we use that tool to manage collective resources like roads and sidewalks. Obviously we do what we can in the moment. That doesn't mean those given power are free to neglect our collective property, or even sell out to the interests of those who would profit from pedestrian hostile "solutions".
      - iamalizard 4mo ago
        > The answer isn't binary. It's both. Governments are us, and we use that tool to manage collective resources like roads and sidewalks. Definitely, that was my point, too. We should strive for change but accept when change hasn't happened yet.
nine_k 4mo ago
I wonder why all these trucks (with the size, these are not cars) don't have forward-looking cameras mounted somewhere near headlights and feeding a screen on the dashboard, which would offer a "window" through the motor compartment. It should be trivially simple to produce, and most vehicles already have a screen for the camera on the back. Its presence would likely lower the insurance premium significantly, due to a much lower chance of hitting someone right ahead of the vehicle.
- mitthrowaway2 4mo ago
  That would be a good start. Also they should put screens on the outside of the vehicle, so that the kids can see past the giant hood.
- coryrc 4mo ago
  They need to just be banned on public roads. Require what Europe requires for pedestrian safety and visibility. They still have trucks.
  - Thlom 4mo ago
    We have trucks, but almost no one has a truck as a family car because they are expensive and inconvenient.
    - coryrc 4mo ago
      They are here too... we just have this epidemic of abject stupidity.
- lmm 4mo ago
  > Its presence would likely lower the insurance premium significantly, due to a much lower chance of hitting someone right ahead of the vehicle. Why? It's not like drivers have to pay up when they hit someone, as long as they weren't drunk. And in the unlikely event that a driver does get made to pay the big risk is medical bills, so the incentive is to make sure the car is set up to always kill anyone they hit.
- 4mo ago
helterskelter 4mo ago
As far as visibility is concerned, the only problems I've encountered in a big truck are to do with the driver-side A-pillar obscuring pedestrians about to cross the street on the other side of an intersection. It's the perfect width, and in just the right spot that I've had to stop in the middle of an intersection a few times now because I didn't see somebody as they just started to cross. I'm building the habit of moving my head around at intersections, but I'd spent decades before they changed regulations not having to do this (and it doesn't actually seem that big, but it really obscures a big chunk of arc, especially at "other side of the intersection" distances and greater). In practice, if somebody is right in front of my grill where I can't see them, they were close enough for me to notice them before they got there without me having to be on high alert for people. I'm not putting this here as a truck-vs-car thing or whatever, I'm just trying to people a realistic idea of where the blind spits are that actually cause trouble in my experience.
- rootusrootus 4mo ago
  Agreed. I have a model 3 and a Lightning, and I’ve had more visibility issues on the model 3. Height is never the issue, it’s the ginormous A-pillars modern cars have.
  - lb1lf 4mo ago
    Of course, they do serve a purpose, in that there's more often than not airbags in them, plus they provide structural integrity often lacking in older cars - so making the car safer for its occupants at the cost of anyone outside the car. Say, I have a Range Rover Classic (1972, 3.5l V8) I mostly use for fun and games during weekends in the summer months. Its A-pillars look like strands of spaghetti, making for excellent situational awareness from the driver's seat. It is effectively like driving around in a moving greenhouse. (Doubly so in summer, seeing as the A/C is of dubious efficacy, to put it mildly.) If I ever roll the thing, I'll be done for, though.
snapplebobapple 4mo ago
Thats the ubfortunate side effect of cafe standards. They have had to make what people want bigger each year to keep it exempted
boredinstapanda 4mo ago
You might see if he would be OK with a flag on a stick attached to the back wheel.
stackghost 4mo ago
> Specifically pickup trucks and SUVs This is a big one for me. Not that long ago I just about got into a fistfight with some asswipe who drove his Ram through a crosswalk in a school zone, while children were crossing. With a crossing guard. And somehow he thought I was the jerk for flipping him the bird as he went through.
- CalRobert 4mo ago
  Most popular vehicle for DUIs incidentally.
  - stackghost 4mo ago
    Unsurprising. Where I live, the Dodge Ram is the answer to the question "how can I signal to everyone else that I'm a piece of shit?" All the tradies around here are mostly driving Fords and Tacomas.
LocalH 4mo ago
I hope you live in an area without nosy neighbors. The main issue is not that parents are willingly choosing to helicopter their kids. The main issue is that completely unrelated people are seeing kids in public alone, assuming neglect, and calling police. So, parents are helicoptering their kids under duress. No wonder kids are being made to make do with alone time on digital devices. That's all we have left (and they're trying to control that too, for good and bad reasons).
coryrc 4mo ago
I'm lobbying my city to make it safer to walk to school. But Traffic Engineers care only about the 85 percentile speed of car drivers and not equity in movement. Non-car users are not important in the United States to the only role cities have for managing road design. "Safe Routes to School" are programs in the US and there's one here in Washington; Seattle has their own partial adoption of this, and I'm hoping to lobby my suburb into adopting it as well. The school principal won't allow my son to walk home alone because of the traffic, but the traffic is only present because so many parents drive their kids to school.
- doctorpangloss 4mo ago
  > But Traffic Engineers care only about the 85 percentile speed of car drivers and not equity in movement. i don't know how true this is. residents care about the speed of cars. the trend in government is more holistic public land allocation (ie street design) in almost all growing communities.
  - coryrc 4mo ago
    Transportation land area is something like 98% for automobiles, it's not like you could trend more to cars. Here's things our traffic engineer told me: 1. It doesn't matter how fast the fastest cars are going or how many cars go by a certain point, only the 85pct is used in deciding whether to intervene "and that's the same as Shoreline, and Bothell, and Bellevue, and..." 2. A bunch of people will get pissed and raise hell if you dare take away some street parking to make it safer for people actually using the road. (I saw this around 35th Ave NE in Seattle) And they tend to get their way. 3. The whole city's budget for traffic safety is $10k. 4. In the last four years, the traffic safety program has resulted in a new stop sign. 5. Public roads are for everyone who drives and the people in the neighborhood get no say in it until the 85pct speed is more than 5 over the speed limit. My biggest problem with number one is obviously 250 extra cars driving past my kid walking to school is 25x more dangerous than 10 cars, but because of 5 the city will do nothing to reduce people from all across the district driving through my little neighborhood to take a shortcut. Expect they'll spend some of that $10k buying signs for our yard which say "kids live here". Wow, thanks.
parineum 4mo ago
> 40 years ago a 5 or 6 year old mostly had to contend with sedans with hoods lower than 30 inches > Vehicles with hood heights of more than 40 inches and blunt front ends angled at greater than 65 degrees were 44 percent more likely to cause fatalities. I'm not sure that height matters for a young kid and, 40 years ago, there weren't abs and sensors that will brake for you. Plus, drunk driving rates were much, much higher and the vehicles were significantly heavier. I don't have any insight on the answer but I'd be curious if the rates of kids dying as pedestrians/cyclists have gone up (per mile, which would be hard to track down and sway the numbers significantly).
- MagicMoonlight 4mo ago
  Obviously they haven’t gone up, all rates are massively down. They’re just a worrier. It’s a perfect example from the article. “I totally would let my kid leave the house, but [made up danger]”
  - alex_young 4mo ago
    Pedestrian vehicle fatalities are up over 40 years, have increased significantly recently, and are a very real problem. https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/detail/pedestrians?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
    - parineum 4mo ago
      The chart there is certainly worrying but it lacks a per 1000 column (but does include it in this quote, "The rates of pedestrian crash deaths per 100,000 people are highest for people ages 20 and over."). Population is up but less people are walking (probably). Is it more dangerous to be a pedestrian now than it was at some point in the past? That chart doesn't have that information.
      - alex_young 4mo ago
        You would also need vehicle miles traveled and pedestrian miles traveled. The overall numbers are up, and there is ample evidence that US cities are both less walkable and more dangerous to walk in than our counterparts in Europe. Just because people don’t let their kids walk places doesn’t indicate that vehicles don’t hit kids.
seanmcdirmid 4mo ago
Our local school is right across the street from a busy arterial and we lost our only crossing guard a few years ago (he retired, as a retiree already, and no one wanted the min wage job). I still let him cross alone because he is 9 now (8 when he started walking alone) and there are lots of kids and adults around when school starts and ends, and we aren’t known for lots of SUVs (although delivery and work trucks aren’t uncommon). It still puts me on nerve a bit. It’s too bad the district no longer lets middle school or high school students do crossing guard jobs anymore.
- erremerre 4mo ago
  Would not make more sense to install a traffic light with a button, press button, goes red for cars, kids cross. They could also have the button deactivated at school hours and work with a time counter.
  - defrost 4mo ago
    It's important to have good sound engineering along with the lights. * https://old.reddit.com/r/bluey/comments/1qc7iz1/listen_closely_i_love_how_the_team_used_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/bluey/comments/1qc7iz1/listen_close... * https://www.youtube.com/shorts/smSqEI3aG38 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/smSqEI3aG38
  - seanmcdirmid 4mo ago
    They have cross walks that have lights when pressed, but not traffic lights, just the warning orange ones.
  - steveklabnik 4mo ago
    See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAWK_beacon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAWK_beacon as one possibility here (and these are not without their own drawbacks, to be clear)
basilikum 4mo ago
Americans and their cars are simply insane. Most cars here in Europe are, well, cars. Still dangerous tons of fast moving metal bullets, but in the US cars are essentially designed to efficiently kill children. The hood of many cars is so high that you ensure to hit the kid's head in an accident. And people drive these huge tanks in the city where there is zero need for them and they are just impractical in every way because you compete for limited space.
- theultdev 4mo ago
  if any car hits a child it's probably going to kill them. they aren't tall enough to roll over the top, even a smaller sedan. being defensive around stupid people is a lesson, teach the child to always be aware when near a road.
  - basilikum 4mo ago
    > if any car hits a child it's probably going to kill them. That's not true. Obviously if you hit a child on the highway with 100km/h that child is gonna be dead. But when you're going 30 in a residential area and suddenly there is a child in front of you car, so you hit the break slowing down to 15km/h it makes a huge difference how your car is build. > being defensive around stupid people is a lesson, teach the child to always be aware when near a road. Safety doesn't work by just teaching the weakest part to protect themselves while allowing everyone else to build more and more deadly machines. This car centricity that puts the blame on pedestrians for daring to walk in the sacred car reserved area that separates everything from each other is exactly the problem. These huge trucks are dangerous for absolutely no reason and they also take away insane amounts of space for no reason. They make everyone unsafe, destroy the planet and make cities shittier.
    - theultdev 4mo ago
      You don't know what people use their trucks for. They have utility and getting rid of trucks in the name of safety is really stupid. How are you going to stock food, how are you going to transport goods? There's safety, then there's regression. Might as well put everyone in a bubble suit.
throw0101c 4mo ago
> Vehicles with hood heights of more than 40 inches and blunt front ends angled at greater than 65 degrees were 44 percent more likely to cause fatalities. It's a bit of a meme/trope to observe that an M1 Abrams tank has better forward visibility than many pickup trucks: * https://old.reddit.com/r/TankPorn/comments/13r0q8n https://old.reddit.com/r/TankPorn/comments/13r0q8n
ajmurmann 4mo ago
One of my pet peeves is that in the US vehicle safety regulation is all about the passengers of the vehicle and ignores safety of people around the vehicle. The passengers are in control of what vehicle they use and already have incentive to pick a safe vehicle. So passenger safety is less critical to regulate. The same incentive structure does not exist for pedestrian safety. They have no control over what cars are on the road and carry the negative externality. Vehicle safety regulation should focus on pedestrian safety and safety of other cars impacted by the vehicle. It's bizarre the US has this so backwards.

iamalizard 4mo ago

I'm almost 2 meters tall and was crossing a street at a crosswalk with my bike yesterday, walking and pushing it at normal walking speeds, like the law requires. There was a car about to turn left from the lanes going left. There was a car from the lanes going right (the closest lanes to me) that slowed down as I started crossing the street. I assumed they saw me and that's why they were slowing down. Nope - they almost hit me but managed to hit the brakes very hard at the last possible second. Apparently they slowed down to make sure the car that would turn left would wait for them. If I was as tall as a 5 year old, maybe the car that almost hit me wouldn't have even seen me. If I got hit, I'd take it better than a 5 year old due to physics - my mass is bigger and the point where it would've hit me would've been my thighs instead of my torso. That car wasn't even with a tall hood or anything obstructing its view, just a regular car. In another comment a few days ago I reminisced about how I was let running alone for hours on end when I was very young, and how that was normal. It's a bit hard to reconcile both events now. I gained a lot of independence and had real unrestricted fun, but in hindsight I might've died a few times. My idea, even if it might be traumatic, is to show the kid a few clips of people being hit by a car and getting mangled, with all the gore visible. Especially people following the laws and being careful. I miss /r/watchpeopledie as it was actually very educational.

jszymborski 4mo ago
I don't really understand how being scared/traumatized by videos of bike accidents will increase that child's visibility. The onus here is on municipal and federal governments to make roads and cars safer.
- iamalizard 4mo ago
  It won't increase their visibility, obviously. It will make them think twice before going on that crosswalk. Maybe they'll wait for a car that slows down after they've taken only 1 step on the crosswalk, maybe they'll wait for their eyes to meet the driver's or to see the driver making a "go, go" sign with their hand. Governments should make roads safer but until they do, we should care for ourselves. Imagine a sidewalk where the ground is crooked, full of holes and parts of the pavement sticking up. Should we blindly go on the sidewalk saying "the government should make it better" or should we exercise caution not to trip and fall? The same logic applies to most dangerous things. Should the government make sure the food and supplements that are imported is safe? Of course. Does that mean you should order food and supplements from any shady site from a random 3rd world country with no reviews? Absolutely not.
  - paulryanrogers 4mo ago
    > Should we blindly go on the sidewalk saying "the government should make it better" or should we exercise caution not to trip and fall? The answer isn't binary. It's both. Governments are us, and we use that tool to manage collective resources like roads and sidewalks. Obviously we do what we can in the moment. That doesn't mean those given power are free to neglect our collective property, or even sell out to the interests of those who would profit from pedestrian hostile "solutions".
    - iamalizard 4mo ago
      > The answer isn't binary. It's both. Governments are us, and we use that tool to manage collective resources like roads and sidewalks. Definitely, that was my point, too. We should strive for change but accept when change hasn't happened yet.

nine_k 4mo ago

I wonder why all these trucks (with the size, these are not cars) don't have forward-looking cameras mounted somewhere near headlights and feeding a screen on the dashboard, which would offer a "window" through the motor compartment. It should be trivially simple to produce, and most vehicles already have a screen for the camera on the back. Its presence would likely lower the insurance premium significantly, due to a much lower chance of hitting someone right ahead of the vehicle.

mitthrowaway2 4mo ago
That would be a good start. Also they should put screens on the outside of the vehicle, so that the kids can see past the giant hood.
coryrc 4mo ago
They need to just be banned on public roads. Require what Europe requires for pedestrian safety and visibility. They still have trucks.
- Thlom 4mo ago
  We have trucks, but almost no one has a truck as a family car because they are expensive and inconvenient.
  - coryrc 4mo ago
    They are here too... we just have this epidemic of abject stupidity.
lmm 4mo ago
> Its presence would likely lower the insurance premium significantly, due to a much lower chance of hitting someone right ahead of the vehicle. Why? It's not like drivers have to pay up when they hit someone, as long as they weren't drunk. And in the unlikely event that a driver does get made to pay the big risk is medical bills, so the incentive is to make sure the car is set up to always kill anyone they hit.
4mo ago

helterskelter 4mo ago

As far as visibility is concerned, the only problems I've encountered in a big truck are to do with the driver-side A-pillar obscuring pedestrians about to cross the street on the other side of an intersection. It's the perfect width, and in just the right spot that I've had to stop in the middle of an intersection a few times now because I didn't see somebody as they just started to cross. I'm building the habit of moving my head around at intersections, but I'd spent decades before they changed regulations not having to do this (and it doesn't actually seem that big, but it really obscures a big chunk of arc, especially at "other side of the intersection" distances and greater). In practice, if somebody is right in front of my grill where I can't see them, they were close enough for me to notice them before they got there without me having to be on high alert for people. I'm not putting this here as a truck-vs-car thing or whatever, I'm just trying to people a realistic idea of where the blind spits are that actually cause trouble in my experience.

rootusrootus 4mo ago
Agreed. I have a model 3 and a Lightning, and I’ve had more visibility issues on the model 3. Height is never the issue, it’s the ginormous A-pillars modern cars have.
- lb1lf 4mo ago
  Of course, they do serve a purpose, in that there's more often than not airbags in them, plus they provide structural integrity often lacking in older cars - so making the car safer for its occupants at the cost of anyone outside the car. Say, I have a Range Rover Classic (1972, 3.5l V8) I mostly use for fun and games during weekends in the summer months. Its A-pillars look like strands of spaghetti, making for excellent situational awareness from the driver's seat. It is effectively like driving around in a moving greenhouse. (Doubly so in summer, seeing as the A/C is of dubious efficacy, to put it mildly.) If I ever roll the thing, I'll be done for, though.

snapplebobapple 4mo ago

Thats the ubfortunate side effect of cafe standards. They have had to make what people want bigger each year to keep it exempted

boredinstapanda 4mo ago

You might see if he would be OK with a flag on a stick attached to the back wheel.

stackghost 4mo ago

> Specifically pickup trucks and SUVs This is a big one for me. Not that long ago I just about got into a fistfight with some asswipe who drove his Ram through a crosswalk in a school zone, while children were crossing. With a crossing guard. And somehow he thought I was the jerk for flipping him the bird as he went through.

CalRobert 4mo ago
Most popular vehicle for DUIs incidentally.
- stackghost 4mo ago
  Unsurprising. Where I live, the Dodge Ram is the answer to the question "how can I signal to everyone else that I'm a piece of shit?" All the tradies around here are mostly driving Fords and Tacomas.

LocalH 4mo ago

I hope you live in an area without nosy neighbors. The main issue is not that parents are willingly choosing to helicopter their kids. The main issue is that completely unrelated people are seeing kids in public alone, assuming neglect, and calling police. So, parents are helicoptering their kids under duress. No wonder kids are being made to make do with alone time on digital devices. That's all we have left (and they're trying to control that too, for good and bad reasons).

coryrc 4mo ago

I'm lobbying my city to make it safer to walk to school. But Traffic Engineers care only about the 85 percentile speed of car drivers and not equity in movement. Non-car users are not important in the United States to the only role cities have for managing road design. "Safe Routes to School" are programs in the US and there's one here in Washington; Seattle has their own partial adoption of this, and I'm hoping to lobby my suburb into adopting it as well. The school principal won't allow my son to walk home alone because of the traffic, but the traffic is only present because so many parents drive their kids to school.

doctorpangloss 4mo ago
> But Traffic Engineers care only about the 85 percentile speed of car drivers and not equity in movement. i don't know how true this is. residents care about the speed of cars. the trend in government is more holistic public land allocation (ie street design) in almost all growing communities.
- coryrc 4mo ago
  Transportation land area is something like 98% for automobiles, it's not like you could trend more to cars. Here's things our traffic engineer told me: 1. It doesn't matter how fast the fastest cars are going or how many cars go by a certain point, only the 85pct is used in deciding whether to intervene "and that's the same as Shoreline, and Bothell, and Bellevue, and..." 2. A bunch of people will get pissed and raise hell if you dare take away some street parking to make it safer for people actually using the road. (I saw this around 35th Ave NE in Seattle) And they tend to get their way. 3. The whole city's budget for traffic safety is $10k. 4. In the last four years, the traffic safety program has resulted in a new stop sign. 5. Public roads are for everyone who drives and the people in the neighborhood get no say in it until the 85pct speed is more than 5 over the speed limit. My biggest problem with number one is obviously 250 extra cars driving past my kid walking to school is 25x more dangerous than 10 cars, but because of 5 the city will do nothing to reduce people from all across the district driving through my little neighborhood to take a shortcut. Expect they'll spend some of that $10k buying signs for our yard which say "kids live here". Wow, thanks.

parineum 4mo ago

> 40 years ago a 5 or 6 year old mostly had to contend with sedans with hoods lower than 30 inches > Vehicles with hood heights of more than 40 inches and blunt front ends angled at greater than 65 degrees were 44 percent more likely to cause fatalities. I'm not sure that height matters for a young kid and, 40 years ago, there weren't abs and sensors that will brake for you. Plus, drunk driving rates were much, much higher and the vehicles were significantly heavier. I don't have any insight on the answer but I'd be curious if the rates of kids dying as pedestrians/cyclists have gone up (per mile, which would be hard to track down and sway the numbers significantly).

MagicMoonlight 4mo ago
Obviously they haven’t gone up, all rates are massively down. They’re just a worrier. It’s a perfect example from the article. “I totally would let my kid leave the house, but [made up danger]”
- alex_young 4mo ago
  Pedestrian vehicle fatalities are up over 40 years, have increased significantly recently, and are a very real problem. https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/detail/pedestrians?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
  - parineum 4mo ago
    The chart there is certainly worrying but it lacks a per 1000 column (but does include it in this quote, "The rates of pedestrian crash deaths per 100,000 people are highest for people ages 20 and over."). Population is up but less people are walking (probably). Is it more dangerous to be a pedestrian now than it was at some point in the past? That chart doesn't have that information.
    - alex_young 4mo ago
      You would also need vehicle miles traveled and pedestrian miles traveled. The overall numbers are up, and there is ample evidence that US cities are both less walkable and more dangerous to walk in than our counterparts in Europe. Just because people don’t let their kids walk places doesn’t indicate that vehicles don’t hit kids.

seanmcdirmid 4mo ago

Our local school is right across the street from a busy arterial and we lost our only crossing guard a few years ago (he retired, as a retiree already, and no one wanted the min wage job). I still let him cross alone because he is 9 now (8 when he started walking alone) and there are lots of kids and adults around when school starts and ends, and we aren’t known for lots of SUVs (although delivery and work trucks aren’t uncommon). It still puts me on nerve a bit. It’s too bad the district no longer lets middle school or high school students do crossing guard jobs anymore.

erremerre 4mo ago
Would not make more sense to install a traffic light with a button, press button, goes red for cars, kids cross. They could also have the button deactivated at school hours and work with a time counter.
- defrost 4mo ago
  It's important to have good sound engineering along with the lights. * https://old.reddit.com/r/bluey/comments/1qc7iz1/listen_closely_i_love_how_the_team_used_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/bluey/comments/1qc7iz1/listen_close... * https://www.youtube.com/shorts/smSqEI3aG38 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/smSqEI3aG38
- seanmcdirmid 4mo ago
  They have cross walks that have lights when pressed, but not traffic lights, just the warning orange ones.
- steveklabnik 4mo ago
  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAWK_beacon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAWK_beacon as one possibility here (and these are not without their own drawbacks, to be clear)

basilikum 4mo ago

Americans and their cars are simply insane. Most cars here in Europe are, well, cars. Still dangerous tons of fast moving metal bullets, but in the US cars are essentially designed to efficiently kill children. The hood of many cars is so high that you ensure to hit the kid's head in an accident. And people drive these huge tanks in the city where there is zero need for them and they are just impractical in every way because you compete for limited space.

theultdev 4mo ago
if any car hits a child it's probably going to kill them. they aren't tall enough to roll over the top, even a smaller sedan. being defensive around stupid people is a lesson, teach the child to always be aware when near a road.
- basilikum 4mo ago
  > if any car hits a child it's probably going to kill them. That's not true. Obviously if you hit a child on the highway with 100km/h that child is gonna be dead. But when you're going 30 in a residential area and suddenly there is a child in front of you car, so you hit the break slowing down to 15km/h it makes a huge difference how your car is build. > being defensive around stupid people is a lesson, teach the child to always be aware when near a road. Safety doesn't work by just teaching the weakest part to protect themselves while allowing everyone else to build more and more deadly machines. This car centricity that puts the blame on pedestrians for daring to walk in the sacred car reserved area that separates everything from each other is exactly the problem. These huge trucks are dangerous for absolutely no reason and they also take away insane amounts of space for no reason. They make everyone unsafe, destroy the planet and make cities shittier.
  - theultdev 4mo ago
    You don't know what people use their trucks for. They have utility and getting rid of trucks in the name of safety is really stupid. How are you going to stock food, how are you going to transport goods? There's safety, then there's regression. Might as well put everyone in a bubble suit.

throw0101c 4mo ago

> Vehicles with hood heights of more than 40 inches and blunt front ends angled at greater than 65 degrees were 44 percent more likely to cause fatalities. It's a bit of a meme/trope to observe that an M1 Abrams tank has better forward visibility than many pickup trucks: * https://old.reddit.com/r/TankPorn/comments/13r0q8n https://old.reddit.com/r/TankPorn/comments/13r0q8n

ajmurmann 4mo ago

One of my pet peeves is that in the US vehicle safety regulation is all about the passengers of the vehicle and ignores safety of people around the vehicle. The passengers are in control of what vehicle they use and already have incentive to pick a safe vehicle. So passenger safety is less critical to regulate. The same incentive structure does not exist for pedestrian safety. They have no control over what cars are on the road and carry the negative externality. Vehicle safety regulation should focus on pedestrian safety and safety of other cars impacted by the vehicle. It's bizarre the US has this so backwards.