Its incredible how little society cares about road accidents. Its not just the deaths. Also the injuries and the massive amount of property damage and other costs.
Somehow this hasn't been identified as systematic issue and the only solution anybody seems to come up with is 'cars are just gone drive themselves and they are going to be perfect'.
The solution are so simple and low tech, so much incredible low hanging fruit. If only people actually thought about it in those terms.
People just aren't good at understanding risk. If we do it every day we get numb to it.
I actually use cars as a personal risk metric. Most people drive regularly so it is clearly a risk we 'accept' but we also admit it is risky and require training, inspections, vehicle and road standards, dedicated police/fire/ambulance/etc etc etc. Basically, driving is my cut-line. If I am doing an activity that is statistically as dangerous/near the danger of driving I will consider extra precautions or consider avoiding it all together. If it is less dangerous I generally just accept the default safety included with the activity. If it is more dangerous I seriously consider not doing it.
It contains a huge ton of boring not that dangerous highway miles. Highways are a separated environment that solves most of the issue with US infrastructure planning.
Second, this also doesn't take into account speed reduction because of concession. So basically, the infrastructure is terrible designed but because there is just to many cars, that often masks the potential issues.
Third, this also doesn't take into account the effect, that this was partly achieved by simply removing pedestrians. The US has way less walking.
If you talk a more narrow look situation where there is mixed use of space, the US comes of much worse.
Also this ends before the pandemic, the pandemic partly showed what US infrastructure leads to when your remove some of the congestion.
This stat also doesn't show things like property damage, its funny how much car driving into buildings is a thing in US media.
But the US traffic death rate is more than double the average rate in other industrialized countries. There’s probably a point at which we can’t improve these rates given the cars we drive and the way we design streets and the lack of alternatives to driving, generally.
Yeah! I am -very- glad to see this trend. I am guilty of posting deaths per year when other normalized stats are far better. Thanks for pointing that out.
Regular people being familiar with it has an effect, but most people don't actually influence the relevant regulations. Personally, I generally avoid driving whenever possible but I live in a city in Switerland it very easy for me. And of course driving here is safer.
The plane manufactures are a small group of companies and a slightly larger group of airlines, but even there, its basically a small group of major airlines. Most safety related things can be regulated federally and regular has the ability to learn from incidents, and then cycle that knowlage into regulation. Each incident is big enough that it contains some learning.
With road safety non of that exists. You have countless 'small' accidents, and non directly influence regulations. You then have an agency looking at car safety, but they don't look at safety holistically, they car about the people in the car during an accidents, and not much beyond. There is in theory somebody responsible for designing safe infrastructure, but infrastructure standards evolve very slowly and not primarily because of safety. And lets be real, many of those standards haven't been updated since the 60s. There is basically no feedback cycle that connects road safety and road infrastructure. Then there are other people who are responsible for rules about drinking, seat belts and so on.
There are plenty of roads where multiple people died in virtually the same place. But there simply is no feedback mechanism.
Luckily 'some' forward thinking regulators in Europe have adopted a more areospace like system. Each accidents has learning, each on creates a number of short term recommendations, and longer term recommendations. The short terms ones are actually done. And the long term recommendation are planned for the next overhaul. Other similar places are identified and potentially also upgraded. And then you also take the learning's from those accidents that directly influences the next edition of the infrastructure standard that are regularly updated.
Not all societies care so little, in the Nordics, Germany, the Netherlands, etc. there has been a constant effort through the last decades to make roads safer.
Norway (and I believe Sweden as well) have their own programs aiming for zero road fatalities, it's a dream but there's an aim and concerted effort has made traffic accidents less fatal to all road participants (pedestrians, bikes, and drivers).
The technical solutions are low tech: slower speed limits for traffic in denser populated areas, removing space for cars in cities to make drivers more attentive, roundabouts instead of crossings. The issue for the USA is the willingness of the average Joe driving their car to have their privileges taken away, that's not a technical issue but a political/social one.
Check out my other comment in response. I did wrote a lot on that.
> The issue for the USA is the willingness of the average Joe driving their car to have their privileges taken away, that's not a technical issue but a political/social one.
That isn't really true. Many of the changes don't actually take away any privileges. In fact, many of those changes can be done improving both safety and threwput.
Most people don't really have input. There are road design standards, and US engineers mostly just implement by the standard. Those standard could and should be changed.
Yes there is a deep political issue to really improve everything. But there is a absolutely huge amount of low hanging fruit that would be massively better. And in fact, people in the US, like people everywhere else do actually generally support changes that improve safety.
There is just a totally dysfunctional and broken engineering culture supported by a completely incompetent government.
I truly believe its not individual people and their privilege driving this.
Once you get past much of the easy changes, there might be things that cause some pushback, but a lot of it doesn't.
Look at the backlash the change to maximum speed limits in NYC has gotten, even here on HN where people should be a bit more well educated than the average. Every single change to roads that drivers perceive as detrimental will be met with huge backlash, even in the cases where it will help throughput.
Drivers do not care about throughput, they care about what they perceive will benefit themselves to make their journeys in a shorter time. Lowering speed limits doesn't give them that impression (but it does increase safety and throughput), reducing car lanes to make space for exclusive bus lanes has the same effect, shared modality streets (like trams + busses + cars) also help to increase throughput but drivers don't see that way, they only think they will be slowed down by the other traffic.
It's a big political change, the car-centric culture of the USA does not allow for much progress in this since it will require a multi-decade concerted effort to actually tackle the problem. If a mayor changes the standards for roads (or governor, or whomever is responsible for it) there will be backlash and a potential political weapon to run against them next election, the next incumbent will have to deliver on the promise of giving cars more space since a reduction for just 2-4 years will create issues that require many other infrastructure projects to compensate for, and you end up at the same spot after a few cycles of this.
It's not rational, it's dysfunctional, but it's the culture that the USA created, to change it will require a lot of political capital to be burnt and many administrations in a row implementing projects that move the needle of this culture to something else.
As I pointed out, I was not suggesting changes like changing car lanes to bus lanes.
And the 'lets just change top level highly visible regulation' without actually addressing the underlying infrastructure are what I am talking about.
> Drivers do not care about throughput
There are places where they removed red lights and put stop signs. People complained. Then the reversed it, guess what, people complained even more so they revered it again.
People don't know what they want, they will simply complain about changes if you actually ask them.
So, the solution just do systematic infrastructure changes bit by bit, without any grand top level political retric. Instead of top level 'all speed limits are now different' you go road by road, reducing it where it makes the most sense with the least amount of resistance. If anybody complains, just reverse it. This intersection is no longer with a red light. That's much harder to organize against. Most places will not organize a political revolution because one local intersection is different, and then 1 year later another one, and so on.
Again there is so much low hanging fruit. Like putting red lights on the sides, where pedestrians are rather then on top. There is not gone be a political movement against that, but it improves safety for pedestrians quite a bit.
In places where you have cycling gutters, and parking you can swap them, moving cycling inside the parking. Again, no removing car lanes.
You can turn 4-lane roads into a 3-lane with turn lane. Same threwput. You can even claim you are doing this to increase the amount of parking. They managed to do this even in Oklahoma maybe the most unsafe and pro car city in the US.
You can narrow lanes and turn parallel parking into angled parking, again this isn't an 'anti-car' move. More parking, and no more parallel parking. What a win for car owners.
The list goes on, those are low hanging fruit that not gone cause a political revolution.
Again, my point here is that even if you are pro-car, US is terrible in both safety, threwput and cost. Even by their own currently existing requirements they are doing a terrible job. Often there isn't a need to even change any political rules, simply the road department has to do a better job.
> multi-decade concerted effort to actually tackle the problem.
You can do much of that by slightly changing the standards and doing it bit by bit when re-stripping roads and doing other work.
If you want to change the big stuff, yes, that's going to be more political.
> Also the injuries and the massive amount of property damage and other costs.
I'd put the well documented, utterly massive cost to health and wellness, short and long term, due to pollution, up there too. Pretty much every single case of asthema for a start.
Somehow this hasn't been identified as systematic issue and the only solution anybody seems to come up with is 'cars are just gone drive themselves and they are going to be perfect'.
The solution are so simple and low tech, so much incredible low hanging fruit. If only people actually thought about it in those terms.