I wrote a blog post about my learnings there - "Engineering over enforcement":
> Enforcement philosophy is rooted in the idea that behavior can be controlled by threatening punishments. Engineering philosophy believes that infrastructure can be designed to incentivize desired behavior. When Oslo sought to reduce pedestrian deaths, it turned to engineers.
> [ . . .] Intersections are one small example where philosophies can diverge. But, as I learned in Oslo, engineers have a whole toolkit of methods to make cities safer. Bumping out a curb slows down turning speeds and protects pedestrians. Bike lanes can be safer by being raised above the street instead of relying on a painted barrier. Limiting how far cars can see ahead of them slows them down. Behavior can be designed rather than just enforced, and in aggregate these small changes can make a city safer.
Some of the speed bumps-like techniques here in Sweden will do more than just be a bump, it will severely damage the tires if you don't slow down. Curbs that require the driver to make very tight turns for example can be made from fairly sharp stone with an clear edge. A SUV/pickup truck can speed over it, but the trip to the repair shop will make it less fun.
They added some square-like flower pots in the middle of a lovely road next to where I live in order to force drivers to make a double S turn. Those are made from sharp rust-painted steel, and most of the corners are now painted with other peoples car paint. The only way to make it through is to drive at walking speed, which basically everyone do.
That’s not how speed bumps work. You can drive over a speed bump in a sports car. It’s just uncomfortable and potentially damaging to do so at speed.
Most SUVs ride poorly compared to cars due to solid axles and huge unsprung weight. If you took a speed bump fast you would be very shaken up and possibly launch into the air or tip.
TLDR. Speed bumps aren’t “invisible” to SUVs unless you are in a competition pre-runner or a monster truck.
the SUV/pickup culture is bad enough here in the South but they place speedbumps aggressively all over the place here.
Like 4" tall ones with no curve so that it absolutely slams the shit out of your small car if you're doing anything over 3mph. And they place them like every 8 feet. If you're in the lifted trucks most people drive here you can't even tell.
But if you imported a lifted truck, or another daft US vehicle like the Cybertruck into another country it would probably not be roadworthy and the traffic and speed calming measures are more appropriate.
Bullbars used to be a trend in the UK, for example, until they were band in the late 90s/early 00s because they were fatal to pedestrians.
Since it started in 2015, accidents are down 50%, but deaths up 90%. This analysis leaves a lot to be desired. I didn't see per-capita stats (Seattle had massive growth during a lot of those years), and we don't really enforce traffic laws at all anyway, so IDK what to think without digging in further.
You're asking the wrong question. The answer is 10%
The interesting question is power-to-weight, which was (apparently) a direct result of EPA regulations that were enacted in 1975. The below article, which I found from a search engine copying your question and looking at a few results, is an interesting read.
Ignoring all that, the actual question would be: how have car sizes and weights changed _in this region_ during this period of time. Sizes and weights of cars in brasil have little bearing to accidents in the PNW, for example.
> Ignoring all that, the actual question would be: how have car sizes and weights changed _in this region_ during this period of time. Sizes and weights of cars in brasil have little bearing to accidents in the PNW, for example.
Sorry that I wasn't clear, that's exactly what I meant. I'm curious because it makes absolutely no sense that a safer urban design with separation of grades for cyclists, lowering speeds through design and engineering rather than just updating speed limit signs, would see an increase in deaths. Nowhere else in the world where those were implemented has had that effect, the Netherlands being the prime benchmark for it.
So there's something else at play, average car sizes in the USA are much larger than Europe (and most of the rest of the world), the urban road design is not changed that much: perhaps stroads just got new speed limits and were left at that, instead of narrowing them, adding trees and other obstacles that naturally makes driving slower and more cautious, so on and so forth.
There's also the added issue that American driving standards for a licence are incredibly low since it's kinda required for you to have a driver's licence to exist and have a life in the majority of the country.
> There's also the added issue that American driving standards for a licence are incredibly low since it's kinda required for you to have a driver's licence to exist and have a life in the majority of the country.
First, each state has their own drivers test, lumping “the US driving test” into a single unit displays a clear lack of knowledge on the subject matter.
Second, actually trying to verify if you were right or not, you’re not. Germany, for example, has driving tests similar to the state of maryland in the US.
You are, unfortunately, incorrect and ignoring research/critical thinking skills.
it’s hard to isolate the effect size of policy, covid happened, car weights changed, policing may have decreased, US drivers may have driven differently, population size, etc.
The numbers seem a bit alarmist on the fatality front, seems like it would make more sense to account for fatalities as a proportion of accidents overall. In absolute numbers, we're talking tens of deaths and thousands of accidents.
As a visitor (periodically throughout the whole timespan) it's seemed to me like there's massive growth in population in the metro area and more densification inside the Seattle downtown area. Tough to tell what geography this exactly captures. Assuming the numbers are valid, I do wonder if there's a significant demographic or exurb shift, where older drivers became a higher proportion of all drivers where they already lived, and a bunch of others either stopped entirely or moved outside the city boundaries.
If memory serves, I feel like there's also a tendency to accidentally end up committed to a toll bridge crossing by getting stuck on an exit/on ramp off one of the highways, which might make people panic and bail at the last second erratically, but that idea seems a bit farfetched
I live in Seattle and anecdotally I have seen the number of people running red lights absolutely explode in the last two years. Literally from seeing once or twice pre-COVID to at least one a day. This is not an exaggeration, there's a particular light on my commute that I see at least one driver run per day. My theory is that in an effort to make the intersection safer they adjusted the lights so now there's a period where cars all have a red light while pedestrians are crossing. Meanwhile a certain segment of the population sees all cars in the intersection stopped and decides to slam it. It's a recipe for disaster given there's a middle school down the road from that light...
Traffic behavior, in general in the PNW, has gotten way worse. When I say worse I mean selfish. I think since COVID people are just more selfish.
I don't just mean assholes who do what they want. People just don't give a crap about others on the road at all anymore. A lot of folks who probably think they're driving "safe" are just driving selfishly slow and not following the law(super late blinkers, failing to move predictably with traffic, braking in traffic long before entering a turn lane).
It's definitely worse nowadays. I can think of plenty of reasons why. But really I think our society, generally, has started to reward selfish behavior. Or at least not punish it nearly enough to deter it's spread.
I don't have an explanation for these increases, and there are no good papers that explore this in depth. I need to write a meta-research paper: "On the lack of research on urbanism-related policy failures".
I'm confused: what didn't work in Seattle/SF/Portland?
Enforcement didn't work because people won't follow the law anyway or engineering didn't work because people tried to drive through the obstacles or approach them with the same speed and smashed/smooshed more?
SF tried a multi-front approach called "Vision Zero". I think initially deaths went down for a couple years but then ticked back up. No, people aren't (usually) driving through obstacles.
As someone living in SF since before it was implemented, getting the causality right and excluding cofounders seems VERY hard. Things have changed so much here since the early 00s.
We're not talking about 2003 or something. The Zero Vision-related programs started getting serious around 2016. Deep into the iPhone era.
And there are also other facts that point out to Zero Vision being the case. Cities that did not go all-in on this program seem not to have experienced the rise in deaths. I have not researched this in detail, because quantifying the level of road sabotage is tricky. But it definitely _looks_ like it's the case just based on subjective observations.
Chroma is the open-source search database for AI applications. It supports dense vector, sparse vector, regex, and full-text search. We support local, single-node, and cloud hosting.
We're a team of 14, all engineers today. We work in Rust, Python, Typescript, and Go.
My understanding is that Warren gave up his seat as CEO but is still the chairman, and is still at least peripherally involved in investment decisions at Berkshire
Chroma is the open-source search database for AI applications. It supports dense vector, sparse vector, regex, and full-text search. We support local, single-node, and cloud hosting.
We're a team of 14, all engineers today. We work in Rust, Python, Typescript, and Go.
I was curious what the break-even is where the insurance discount covers the $99/mo FSD subscription. I got a Lemonade quote around $240/mo (12k mi/yr lease on a Model 3), so 50% off would save ~$120/mo - i.e. it would cover FSD and still leave ~$21/mo net. Or, "free FSD is you use it".
I believe, at the end of the day, insurance companies will be the ones driving FSD adoption. The media will sensationalize the outlier issues of FSD software, but insurance companies will set the incentives for humans to stop driving.
I don't have a car so I don't know what is normal. i just went through the lemonade quote process. (I have a license and my record is clean, though - so there shouldn't be any high-risk flags.)
Yep, also people who will spend thousands of dollars to get a tiny scratch repaired because for some reaosn in the US everyone expects cars to be utterly perfect.
Yep - the way to get adoption, whilst the bar is too high for self-driving cars, the bar should be safer than the average person. An old greying socialist - saying that capitalism drive the right outcomes. Same with low-carbon, insurance will help with climate change mitigation.
How many people are stuck in the middle, having less extreme beliefs reinforced by a sycophantic AI?
I've started to hear whispers among friends that there are many founders stuck in loops of "planning" with AI, reinforcing banal beliefs and creating schizophrenia-like symptoms.
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