theHRguyU.S. Pedestrian Deaths Up 77% Since 2009 & The Auto Industry Knew It Would Happen
feels like the tone of this title is forgetting about the shareholders, which I do not take kindly to
ZakThe article doesn’t talk about the fact that the increase is far greater in dark conditions, which is not readily explained by the changes to car design the article discusses.
This article talks more about that, and the linked report suggests population trends have contributed to more people walking at night along arterial roads with poor pedestrian infrastructure.
To be clear, daytime fatalities are up by about 40% in the interval shown, which is much more than the increase in population. Increasing vehicle size and hood height are real problems too, but don’t seem to be the biggest factor.
There are sidewalks on both sides of the street in my neighborhood. People are walking 2 abreast in the street at night and joggers are commonly running about 4 feet into the street from the curb.
Regardless of the article’s findings, some people are just oblivious.
WiddershinsWhat is the condition of your sidewalks? My sidewalks are uneven and a neighborhood grandma who I walk with still prefers the street even though my street is not well lit. Uneven sidewalks are a tripping hazard that can be avoided by walking in the street. Her vision isn’t great so a paved stretch of road is just easier to walk with a flashlight.
Mine are pristine, I use them all the time and they are equal or better than the road. The idiots around me walk on the fucking road like chickens. Fuck em.
Top tip: don’t hit them.
Could this relate to homeless people living right next to streets? At which rate did homeless population grow?
Alaknár
Ex Nummis40% decrease from 2013 to 2023
Digit
BallShapedManMy wife is a medical coder for the ED, for more than a dozen hospitals and says the overwhelming area for vehicle fatalities she codes is intersections crossing in front of traffic. Particularly trying to make the yellow. The plural of anecdote isn’t data mind you, but she’s been at this for 15+ years and has a pretty good sense of it.
My similar anecdote is people taking a right on red without stopping (or apparently looking), and would probably be included in those statistics
I used to be a proponent of right on red, because who wants to be stuck at a dead intersection? If you only consider cars, it’s a nice efficiency gain. But now non-car users like pedestrians and cyclists don’t have a safe time to cross the intersection. And it’s so much worse now that people turning right on red seem to have forgotten the parts about “after coming to a complete stop” and “yielding to other traffic”
For sure! When driving downtown this is what freaks me out most while driving around. Last thing I want to do is hit someone.
When in NYC and Makati it shocked me to see how flagrant people are with just crossing the street wherever. Two places I’ll never drive, I’m not a good enough driver to not hit people in places like that.
At least in Manhattan, traffic is usually slow enough that pedestrians are at least as fast. Also they tend to go as a crowd. I’ll usually wait for the light but when hundreds of other pedestrians swarm into the street I figure we’re fairly visible and safe.
I would never drive in Manhattan simply because it’s the slowest and most frustrating way to get around. I used to drive around queens when I had a girlfriend there but we’d always take a train around the city, and I’m sure traffic has only gotten worse. It’s just not worth it
This is an accepted part of the economy. Our leaders have decided us dying for private profit is acceptable. Now add up all the accepted deaths per year from every product and service and see how many of us are sacrificed for profit.
We need to switch to EVs to protect the environment
But also no efforts to keep vehicles from getting bigger and heavier, which not only uses more resources (in construction and during use) but also increases danger to pedestrians and cyclists.
We need simple laws restricting vehicle weights. The hummer EV is 10000 lbs and wastes most of it charge just carrying around a stupidly large 3000lb battery pack. In a rear end collision, the car in front, and the car in front of that are all dead.
What kind of EVs?
The Aptera?
Peter Perkins’ Solar Powered Van?
If we switch to painting the entire bodywork in cheap recyclable low-light efficient photovoltaic paint made from carbon buckyballs and nanotubules, and photovoltaic dyes in the windows… and hemp sourced graphene capacitor bank batteries, EVs could help protect the environment, yup.
… And likely help protect pedestrians and cyclists too… certainly far more than the high-mass high-inertia high-hood high-glare low-visibility SUV tanks going around.
The Aptera?
I hear the Easter Bunny drives one of these. Aptera deliveries have been imminent since 2009 but you have to believe in elves and fairies if you think that small area of solar cells will charge that motorcycle (it’s not a car).
FellIn Japan, there is tax benefits if your car fits certain dimensions. That’s why there are so many small boxy cars in Japan. I don’t understand why this isn’t a thing anywhere else. It has so many benefits: Fuel economy, parking space, pedestrian safety, …
But no, “I can see better if I sit higher” is still the #1 killer argument for these urban tanks.
JohnEdwaIn Finland, car sales tax and yearly tax are based on the Co2 output, and it worked quite well to keep most cars small, light and efficient. Until hybrid and electric cars arrived on the market, that is…
Canada had a carbon tax. Pickup sales soared, people will eat dog food before giving up their $200 fill-up trucks.
qevlarrThere really does seem to be a kind of social cohesiveness in other countries. In America it’s dog eat dog and fuck everyone else as long as I get mine.
Very much true in my specific limited experience.
I live in a nice little town here in the US, and I’m a well educated middle aged white guy. It’s safe to say that I get to see a pretty nice version of America even as horrible shit is happening all over the place.
I’ve gotten to spend a few weeks in Sweden of all places over the past few years. Plus I got to see the insides of some airports in other places luke Belgium and Germany.
There’s just something different in the air over there, in a good way. I thought of it as a kind of dignity that came from respect for others as well as oneself, but I like how you call it social cohesiveness.
I think some of the details around food and drink showed it best, and they make good examples because they apply to a mix of the general public.
The food itself is obviously much better over there. Even things like the hotel breakfast or the cafeteria at a workplace had a huge variety of fresh, real foods as opposed to ultraprocessed manufactured branded products.
But the dishes and utensils were some of the most interesting to me as an american. In places like an office cafe at work, or a local restaurant, or I think even an airport, they would have actual GLASSES, plates, and silverware. And on top of that, you would often return your dishes to the kitchen or even put them directly on to the dish washer rack waiting for you.
This breaks my american mind. Fragile non-disposable cups in a public place? Other than coffee mugs on people’s desks or restaurant glasses being dropped off and picked up with at your table, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that within these borders. If you could use glasses and silverware in public places here, I can’t decide what would happen first: somebody would get cut on one of the immediately broken glasses, or so much of the stuff would get stolen that they’d close it down.
I like to call out their bathrooms too. The way we do it over here is big men’s and women’s restrooms with next to no privacy (it’s one big room with flimsy floating dividers forming the toilet stalls) and stupid culture wars about who should and should not get their genitals inspected or whatever. Over there it’s just several individual doors, each with a small bathroom. Much better privacy, no fodder for the bigots, and much better utilization of the resources.
I feel like if I were in USA, confronted by that wall of
ultraprocessed manufactured branded products
and I asked for real food; ingredients to cook a meal from,
it’d be like asking for water in Idiocracy.
Idiocracy: Water? You Mean Like In The Toilet?
Yeah there is a real trend in conservative culture (at least where I grew up) that fits right in with the rest of the anti-intellectualism. And it’s not taught explicitly but it permeates social interactions.
I’m trying to decide how to describe it… Basically, you look down on people who are trying to improve themselves.
It’s a cost thing, you can get fresh ingredients to make anything and lots of people do. But it comes down to price in terms of dollars and more importantly time. We gotta work 40 hours a week and usually an extra 5 to 10 unpaid commuting in cars we have to pay insurance on (liability in case we have an accident and hurt someone or their property, and if your car is nice liability in case someone hits it and doesn’t have insurance) and fuel.
And when so much of your time and resources are taken this way it’s really easy to take the cheap processed route. Lots of times it’s hard not to
During the time I was most impoverished, I survived (certainly not thrived) on eating mostly moong dal (mung bean kernels and rice ~ combined, they create a complete protien ~ or could use just hempseed/kernels (which would be cheap if we all grew it prolifically like we did a century ago before Bernays, Anslinger and Hearst messed us up)). About 10x cheaper than processed food. Moong dal was not ideal for my constitution and ailments, but 100x to infinitely healthier than replacing food with junk. There be cheap ways to eat healthy food. Just takes a little more thought and strategizing than just taking the cheap plastic wrapped junk. Sympathies for suffering the system that robs us of time and that little cognitive capacity to so strategize better. Every little effort to cease succumbing to it, the better.
Yeah lots of folks do what you did and I think there’s a kind of rugged individual thinking in that. Which is really favored in America but lots of people just do what the people around then do to. So if everyone eats chicken nuggies and tater tots and cheeseburgers then that’s what you eat. Have you made kitchari? It’s really hearty and good rice and dal. I just made a rice and dal and mirepoix lamb stew the other day. I was winging it though and it did come out super tasty, I kinda messed up the salt ratio I think. But it was hearty af, just kinda bland
kitchari
Thanks. The very word for it. I forgot that. Thanks. Yeah.
A little ghee, and a scrimp of meat and veg in with it, and it can go far, for cheap.
Ayurveda has a lot of savvy for how to make things (very) tasty, satiating, and healthy. A balance of all six tastes, tweaked for dosha. Good stuff.
Hell yeah
Not to mention readily available and clean pay toilets. When I was first there I was shocked to learn I had to pay to pee, but now that I’m a gig worker finding a toilet is a pain in the butt
𝓒𝓪𝓷𝓭𝓲𝓬𝓮 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓮𝓵𝓮𝓹𝓱𝓪𝓷𝓽My freedoms>your kids life
-Americans
its to stroke the egos of soccer moms, and overcompensating men.
And their relationship with reality. It always reminds me of that graph that shows a modern tank is less likely to hit a child in the road than a GMC Sierra.
Yeah, for sure. There’s an element of failing to grasp basic concepts of physics here, intertwined with a psychology of not wanting to feel small I suppose.
I tried to explain to my sister that you don’t actually see more of the road when you sit higher up, it’s just that the road takes up a larger portion of your field of view. You actually see less of the road because the part directly around your car (the most important part) is obscured. She thought I was twisting words and got angry. If we lived in the USA her 150 cm ass would be driving an F-150.
If the other vehicles around you are blocking your view, she is technically right, and you are technically wrong.
And so many vehicles now have [what I would assume to be factory standard but still illegally] overtinted windows, you can’t even reliably see through the vehicle in front of you
It’s at least partially the American emission standards, which loosen the emissions requirements as the size of the vehicle grows.
By 2030, they will be stand up driving like speedboats.
But I need a massive truck to carry groceries and 2 kids.