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Why Cars Will Kill 30,000 Americans This Year

166 points by ssprang 13y ago

ansimionescu 13y ago
In Romanian 'car crash' is called literally 'accident' [0]. Something that's always baffled me is how friggin' thin the metal plates that make up the car are. Why the fuck does a whole industry consider this normal?! [1] Edit: thanks for the info (and for the downvotes <3) 0: http://translate.google.com/#en/ro/car%20crash http://translate.google.com/#en/ro/car%20crash 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhCXFsQ6kKQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhCXFsQ6kKQ
- TylerE 13y ago
  Because you WANT it to deform. A stiff structure would increase deceleration on the occupants - in addition to being more likely to get in accident in the first place - additional weight will cause the vehicle to brake less rapidly, be more likely to roll over, etc, in addition to reducing efficiency.
  - abstractbill 13y ago
    I've often wondered about this. Instead of just having a single thin metal skin that deforms, wouldn't it be even better to have multiple skins sandwiching a kind of honeycomb structure? That way you have even more stuff to deform and absorb the impact.
    - kiba 13y ago
      If there's a way to increase safety, I am sure that they had thought of it.
      - jstanley 13y ago
        So you're saying we're at the theoretical optimum of car safety and that there are no possible improvements?
      - bdamm 13y ago
        High performance aircraft and cars already do this. They thought of it - and it's expensive.
    - bagels 13y ago
      Right now, you have multiple skins sandwiching air.
    - AnimalMuppet 13y ago
      You know how the original Volkswagen Bugs had that empty front hood, because the engine was in the rear? My dad advocated filling the front hood with bags full of empty aluminum cans.
    - Retric 13y ago
      The only stuff that actually matters is keeping people from being squashed and the occupant's deceleration profile which you can already customize by changing how the car deforms. To really make a difference vs a high end car we could mandate 3 point seat-belts and helmets like you have in racing world. Still a 70MPH a head on collision is already fairly safe assuming people are belted the real killers are unbelted passengers, collision debris, and rolling. Edit: Head on collisions still kill a lot of people but they tend to be higher speeds accidents and often involve unbelted individuals. Also we are slightly below 1 death per 2 million hours in a car we just spend a lot of time in our cars. PS: Worldwide it was estimated that 1.2 million people were killed and 50 million more were injured in motor vehicle collisions in 2004. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_motor_vehicle_collisions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_motor_vehicle_c...
      - bagels 13y ago
        Nearly every form of motorsport racing requires the following: 5, 6 or 7 mounting point harnesses Head and Neck restraints Helmets
    - rdl 13y ago
      They do this; for front (especially) and rear impact, you have the entire crumple zone, with lots of cross-hatched struts and other components to take away energy in deformation. There are various side impact technologies to try to 1) prevent ultimate penetration and 2) absorb energy. The problem is the doors need to be relatively thin, relatively light, and contain a bunch of other components, as well as function as doors. Multiple layers is one. The best right now seems to be use the door to prevent penetration, and use a side curtain airbag to reduce peak acceleration on passenger (along with seat design and seat belts). I personally picked used cars no earlier than ABS and side curtain airbags whenever friends asked for cheap used car options.
    - rgbrenner 13y ago
      Yes, you're right.. that's why it's more than just the skin of the car.. it's called the crumple zone: http://auto.howstuffworks.com/car-driving-safety/safety-regulatory-devices/crumple-zone.htm http://auto.howstuffworks.com/car-driving-safety/safety-regu... The idea is that the entire front of the car is a crumple zone (to absorb the impact), and there's a rigid frame around the passenger compartment.
    - sp332 13y ago
      In a frontal collision, the engine is directed down underneath the drive and passenger. That design alone gives you a few extra feet.
    - megablast 13y ago
      You have often thought of this, but never did any research into what they currently do?
      - abstractbill 13y ago
        What they currently do is crumple zones. That's not what I was talking about (the entire skin of the car being a honeycomb sandwich).
    - arg01 13y ago
      Honeycombs are a difficult structure to manufacture. They often get mentioned in relation to 3d printing as one of the useful application. They're actually a very strong structure for the amount of material used and were even hand pieced together from wood for some aircraft during world war 2 rather than using more easily manufactured materials due to this advantage.
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    Indeed. You can drive some older cars right into a brick wall at 50mph and only need to replace the bumper. But that's less good for the occupants who would be killed during a crash like that. Modern car design sacrifices the vehicle for the sake of protecting the occupants.
- wyager 13y ago
  Modern lightweight cars are significantly safer than old, heavy cars. Thick steel is good for protecting you from explosions, not collisions.
  - a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
    Equivalent car classes are much heavier now than they were 20+ years ago. It's because of the weight of airbags and safety features.
    - barrkel 13y ago
      Car class distribution has changed in the past 20+ years.
    - jcromartie 13y ago
      Airbags and ABS and crumple zones don't weigh much. The cars are just bigger.
      - a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
        Are you sure about that? I read about people stripping all the airbags out of new Civics and getting dramatically better gas mileage.
        gambiting 13y ago
        What? Seriously? Why don't they strip out the seat belts and headrests while they are at it. In fact, they should strip everything out, so the car is rally-style: nothing but seats, steering wheel and gear stick inside. They would get absolutely AWESOME milage then. Fuck the safety then, eh?
        jcromartie 13y ago
        An airbag weighs 10 lbs max, usually 5-8 lbs. Anybody who removes this for "performance" or "fuel savings" is a blithering idiot who should not be allowed near a motor vehicle.
- pugz 13y ago
  Modern car design saves lives. Cars in the 1950's had stiff, thick plates and it didn't do them much good. Have a look at the excellent 2009 vs 1959 car crash test video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U
- Crito 13y ago
  Car crashes are often called "accidents" in America too. I found it interesting and insightful when my driving instructor back in highschool spent a good 10 minutes ranting about there not being any such thing as a car 'accident' (students mentioning the word "accident" later in the course were scolded, to drive home the point). Obviously you can dream up scenarios that you might be able to really call an accident, but the point was that even when legal blame or liability cannot be found, nearly all car crashes could have been prevented by both drivers driving more defensively and being more alert. Edit ""You can do things to reduce your risk of accidents" is a vital message, using words in an atypical way can be a pedagogical tool to drive it home" That was the instructors intent. He wasn't trying to propose a new way for insurance companies or the courts to look at liability, but rather trying to combat thought terminating cliches like "shit happens" (by arguably introducing his own).
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    This is silly. Nearly all accidents car or not can be avoided by being more defensive and alert. I dropped a glass - if I'd taken more care in handling it and been more aware of my surroundings, I probably wouldn't have. I said something dumb and accidentally hurt your feelings? Jeeze, if I'd only taken more care, been more aware of what I was saying. I accidentally deleted that file? Shoot, should have been more careful and considered better what folder I was in. "You can do things to reduce your risk of accidents" is a vital message, using words in an atypical way can be a pedagogical tool to drive it home, but insisting that there's some deep sense in which that's genuinely the case is silly.
  - cek 13y ago
    In firearms circles there's a saying "There is no such thing as a firearms accident. There are only negligent acts." SOMEONE is always responsible, and should be held accountable.
    - Crito 13y ago
      Similarly "the gun is always loaded". On it's face, it is a silly thing to say because obviously a gun can be unloaded. The point however is to drive home a respectful attitude towards guns, for the sake of safety.
- parfe 13y ago
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g Frontal offset crash test between a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air vs 2009 Chevrolet Malibu. I know which car I would rather ride in.
AnimalMuppet 13y ago
"Murder Machines"? Come on. Not all deaths are murder. We Americans have this idea that nothing bad should ever happen, that we should find a way to prevent it. It's a goal to shoot for, certainly. But calling it murder if you don't reach that goal? No. Can we climb down from the overheated rhetoric? It smells like propaganda.
- bunderbunder 13y ago
  Murder? No. Negligent homicide? Yes.
  - AnimalMuppet 13y ago
    Agreed.
  - sukuriant 13y ago
    That's not entirely fair. Maybe in some of the cases; but, I've seen people do some really, really, REALLY unwise things as pedestrians that they're lucky someone was paying a huge amount of attention so they weren't hit. The most pressing example in my mind is a woman cross the street in the middle of a rain shower, within 15 yards, probably much less (my mind's eye paints the memory as 'the edge of my car was here and the lady was RIGHT THERE!!!'), of me and crossing several lanes of traffic with her umbrella all out like she owned the place. She wasn't at a crosswalk, she was crossing the road a 100ish yards after a major turn, and I don't remember if I was the first car in a long line of cars or there were several cars passing and then she elected to walk in front of mine, but I'm very glad I was hyper-attentive so that I could brake in time and that my brakes were 100% up to spec, and my tires had enough tred on them. She intentionally put herself into harms way and any number of minor failures, including me looking to where I needed to be, because it was RIGHT AFTER A TURN (think of where your eyes go when you're taking a turn, it's not to the far corner ahead, it's to where your wheel-edge is and where your lane is placed, so you don't hit someone more likely to be hit, like the car that's attempting the exact same manuever beside you), or having just that little bit less attention because I was adjusting a radio dial to not have her thumped up onto my roof. It's not always the driver's fault. Some pedestrians need to realize that we, focused drivers, are still rocketing a couple tons of steel in a direction.
kiba 13y ago
It's such a shame. The automobile is built as a requirement to live in society rather than something that complement and argumented our lifestyle.
- bdcravens 13y ago
  The same could be said of telephones and the Internet.
  - the_cat_kittles 13y ago
    which dont kill people in quite the same way
    - bdcravens 13y ago
      The lethality of cars had nothing to do with the point I was responding to.
      - Gracana 13y ago
        It didn't? What were they calling a shame, then?
        Dylan16807 13y ago
        "The automobile is built as a requirement to live in society rather than something that complement and argumented our lifestyle."
        lmm 13y ago
        Which is a problem precisely because cars are so dangerous.
        Dylan16807 13y ago
        Even if they weren't dangerous, it's a shame that cars are so forced and that it's so hard to walk around in many areas.
tokenadult 13y ago
The death rate per miles driven in the United States has fallen dramatically in my lifetime, and I can remember when the annual number of deaths was much higher.[1] That said, the article makes a very interesting claim about attitudes that we should all follow to the end of the article for further discussion here: "There’s an open secret in America: If you want to kill someone, do it with a car. As long as you’re sober, chances are you’ll never be charged with any crime, much less manslaughter." My wife bike-commutes year-round (yes, even in Minnesota), and as I mention this among Facebook friends, other friends who are also bike commuters point out that car drivers can basically kill bicyclists in the United States with no legal penalty at all. That's not a good social environment for getting more people out for exercise and energy conservation by substituting bicycling for driving cars. The history reported in this article is very interesting. There are a lot of contemporary photographs of changing American cities. The quotations from experts provide perspective on the visuals: "'If a kid is hit in a street in 2014, I think our first reaction would be to ask, "What parent is so neglectful that they let their child play in the street?,"' says Norton. "'In 1914, it was pretty much the opposite. It was more like, "What evil bastard would drive their speeding car where a kid might be playing?" That tells us how much our outlook on the public street has changed." Indeed. Are we really thinking carefully about how to spread the risk around, when so much of our living space is dominated by cars? AFTER EDIT: The video link shared by pugz[2] in a reply comment elsewhere in this thread is not to be missed. Car safety standards have improved enormously in my lifetime, but those protect the occupants of cars better than they protect pedestrians and bicyclists who are hit by cars. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year#Motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U
- happyscrappy 13y ago
  Pretending kids were better protected in any context in 1914 is absurd.
  - pyrocat 13y ago
    That quote was specifically about attitudes towards cars, not statistics for mortality rates.
trothamel 13y ago
In 2004, 42,836 Americans were killed in motor vehicle accidents. So this number actually represents a huge improvement. Something to realize is that potential replacements to cars are not that much safer. Highway travel is responsible for 7.7 deaths per billion passenger-miles. Mass transit is responsible for 5.4 deaths per billion passenger-miles. Given the less-direct routings used by transit, it's not totally clear this is a meaningful difference. All of this sucks - but it's the price we pay for being able to move a long distance quickly, something that seems to be a net benefit to society. (How many lives are saved by ambulances each year? How about by being able to easily visit a doctor?) These are all statistics for the US in 2011. Sources are: http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_40.html http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub... http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_02_17.html http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub... http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_02_32.html http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...
- _delirium 13y ago
  I agree that having exactly the same urban design but just replacing the transit modality is likely to produce only a minimal improvement (not to mention being difficult to do, since transit modality and urban layout are interlinked). I think the bigger wins come from shifts in commute patterns. People who take transit typically also take it for fewer miles, making the annual per-person death rates of transit riders considerably lower than the smaller per-mile gap would imply. I think having an urban layout where transit could even work is the big change. But those are pretty deeply tied, e.g. people won't move into denser "transit-oriented development" if there's no good transit to it. That's the main factor impacting the total number, also. Americans are about 2-3x more likely to die each year while commuting than Germans are, but mostly because they have longer commutes, not because the per-mile safety is worse (though it is slightly worse).
- mikeash 13y ago
  I'd really like to see that broken down by type of transit, as well as deaths for transit passengers versus people killed in e.g. private cars involved in accidents with busses. My guess, and this is very much a guess, is that buses will be disproportionately dangerous, and a fair number of those killed by busses are in cars that collide with them. For one random example, the DC metro has seen 9 deaths in the past five years and appears to run at about 1.8 billion passenger-miles per year, for a fatality rate of around 0.1 deaths per 100 million passenger-miles (or 1 per billion). This is very rough as deaths are spiky (those nine deaths happened all at once almost five years ago) and the long-term average is tough to judge.
dxbydt 13y ago
What happened to those concept cars that were encased in rubber/(or some other bouncy material) so when they bumped against each other, they would harmlessly bounce off ? I distinctly remember reading about them in Wired some years back.
- quahaug 13y ago
  Yeah, wired runs lots of stories about stuff that quite simply never happens. I used to keep a lot of back issues of wired, which I saved because I thought they had some cool stories. Surprisingly, many are packed with examples of very obvious vapor ware, and have aged really poorly. A small handful, however, still read like notes from an exciting future, and I find myself returning to them, when searching for inspiration.
- gambiting 13y ago
  Any amount of rubber would only work up to a certain speed. And all modern cars are designed to provide 100% safety to passangers up to 30mph - crumple zones, multiple airbags, engine block sliding underneath the body of the vehicle, early collision warning, automatic breaking and so on. Encasing cars in rubber would not improve anything above 30mph, while I am fairly certain would increase the weight of the vehicle - making it consume more fuel and also heavier vehicles take longer to stop,so the benefit might actually be null.
sologoub 13y ago
The dedicated bike lane is surely a great invention, but the implementation is often luck-luster and I think causes more harm than good. Santa Monica probably has more good bike lanes than most other US cities, but I am terrified to even try the new on 28th leading from Ocean Park to Pico and beyond to Olympic. They basically took a narrow street and tried to leave space for parking and add a bike lane on top of that. As a result, most SUVs or wider cars don't fit into the designated lanes. As the result, they either try to leave room for bicycles and drive slightly over the center or in the bike lane. If they try the former, they end up swerving violently into the bike lane to avoid on-coming traffic, so I don't know which is worse. If the bike lanes were actually well implemented the entire way to the office, I would leave my car parked most days... as it stands now, that's not happening any time soon.
- _delirium 13y ago
  As a result of issues with those kinds of lanes, Copenhagen changed direction a bit ago and now puts in only bike lanes physically separated by a curb from the car lanes, at least where possible (excluding some narrow streets). If there's street parking, the lane is also typically on the other side of the parked cars (the sidewalk side), making it even more impossible for someone to swerve from the car lanes into the bike lane. Also reduces "door" incidents, since the lane isn't on the driver-door side of parked cars. In addition to being much safer for cyclists, it also helps reduce drivers' need to watch out for the other direction, cyclists unexpectedly swerving into the auto lanes, e.g. to pass another cyclist. That part becomes particularly important if getting people to bike is actually successful: if you have a major route with a steady stream of >10 cyclists/minute, you really want that stream managed in its own space, segregated from both the cars and pedestrians. I believe some of these kinds of "really separated" bike lanes exist in the U.S., but not many. The last statistics I saw were that the U.S. (in total) has about 200 miles of physically protected bike lanes (including bike-only routes), while Greater Copenhagen alone has 600 miles of them. edit: some photos of various configurations, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Physically_separated_bikeways https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Physically_separ...
  - sologoub 13y ago
owenversteeg 13y ago
I really like the design on some of the posters from the article: http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/AAA-posters-1024x434.jpg http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/...
kristianp 13y ago
No mention of present and future automation options that increase the safety of cars? On hacker news? Reversing sensors Automatic braking at low speed to prevent collisions Driverless cars. For me, these features can't come fast enough. They should be phased into being mandatory too.
- LanceH 13y ago
  Making them mandatory also has the effect of making sure they never again improve.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    Like how seat belts and air bags stopped improving when they were made mandatory?
grellas 13y ago
As the article points out, "auto safety" itself has had a huge push from consumer advocates at least since Ralph Nader highlighted the risks of car design defects in the 1960s. That said, a few points about the law and auto safety: 1. U.S. law is tied to individual responsibility for conduct that is wrongful. As the auto industry developed over the past century, that meant that those who sought to drive by what the law declared to be the rules of the road were deemed to have done something wrong only if they failed to meet a reasonable standard of care in driving - that is, if they were negligent, careless, inexcusably inattentive, or otherwise failed to exercise a sufficient degree of caution that they created safety risks to others owing to their manner of driving. Breaking rules (e.g., speeding, driving the wrong way on a one-way street, and like items) constituted one such failure to exercise proper caution. In such cases, the law developed so as to hold such drivers responsible for damages in civil proceedings for the what the law called the "tort" of negligence. A tort is a civil wrong by which the actor committing the tort ("tortfeasor") is responsible to pay in damages for all harm caused by his tortious activity. In layman's terms involving cars, this generally means careless conduct. If the degree of wrongdoing is more egregious than mere carelessness, as for example when teenagers in the 1950s used to drag race through city streets in a way that constituted reckless conduct (that is, conduct by which the wrongdoer deliberately does things that have a high risk of endangering public safety), the consequence of this to the wrongdoer is also a civil wrong for which damages will lie but it is also (usually) defined as a criminal act by which the person can be prosecuted, fined, or jailed as a consequence of such actions. As the intent to harm increases even further, such as an act by which someone deliberately seeks to inflict harm on another while using a car as an instrument of harm, this can constitute a serious crime such as murder (for example, when someone deliberately drives at high speed into a crowd of people and does so with intent to harm or kill others). 2. Underlying the system of law that has developed around accountability for auto-related collisions, fatalities, etc. is a social policy judgment that sees automobiles as a positive good for society. The article notes that such social policy judgments were made over the years more and more in favor of promoting more expansive use of the automobile at the expense of pedestrians and mass transit riders who might also use the roads, especially in urban environments. This undoubtedly happened, though it is a dubious assertion to say that some sort of sinister forces ("Motordom" is the term used in the article) made this happen in some way that somehow overrode the will of ordinary people. I am old enough to remember as a kid how people perceived automobiles in, say, the late 1950s, and there is no doubt from my personal recollection that average people rejoiced and celebrated ever-increasing uses of the high-speed automobile, cheered on the National Highway Act by which old two-lane state roads were sent into relative disuse through the creation of a vast network of interstate freeways, and, as a matter of culture, broadly celebrated what was called the "car culture." Even dissidents of the time, such as Jack Kerouac, though a counter-culture figure of his time, broadly promoted the idea of freedom in driving the open road. If anyone in that era would have suggested that cars be shut down or limited in favor of bikes, they would have been laughed at by the average person. Such ideas were basically considered crank ideas and had no form of popular support whatever. Therefore, it did not take a secret plot by General Motors (or whomever) to get people to push widespread auto use. People wanted to get away from cities generally, wanted to live in the suburbs that were growing rapidly at the time, and wanted the freedom to use cars to get around whenever and wherever they wanted with limited restrictions other than having to obey the rules of the road. Yes, individual cities deployed mass transit with varying degrees of widespread use but these were limited to a few highly localized areas. People generally wanted cars, and mainly cars, to get around. 3. So, coming to the themes of this piece, "auto safety" is one such theme and the idea of the automobile being inherently "murderous" certainly tries to highlight this theme. Yet I would say the broader theme is actually more one of saying that the rules of the road should be rewritten to strike a different social policy judgment about how roads are used. It is nowhere stated in the article, but is strongly implied, that perhaps drivers of automobiles should be subjected to stronger legal consequences than those currently existing in the event they collide with others in using a road. Given that we are here in the realm of social policy, and not existing law, this could mean almost anything. For example, it could mean strict liability for damages if you hit someone using a car, no matter what the circumstances and regardless of what the law now calls "fault." This is what happened to the law in other areas over recent decades, most notably with the expansion of strict product liability law by which manufactures (who at one time could be held liable for injuries resulting from use of their products only if the injured party could show that the manufacturer was negligent or otherwise at "fault" in making the product) had their liabilities dramatically broadened if injuries resulted from use of their products. As the law evolved in that area, the courts and legislatures eventually determined that manufacturers should be held liable regardless of fault if their products could be shown to have inherent "defects" (broadly defined). This led to a huge expansion of liability for manufacturing such products and, for example, pretty much decimated certain industries such as manufacturers of small aircraft. As a matter of social policy, the same could be done with the idea of driving an automobile. Courts and legislatures could determine that it is socially desirable that drivers be held strictly liable regardless of fault because this would promote greater driver safety and would also strike a balance in shared road usage that favors pedestrians and others more than drivers. They could also define as a crime any collision by which a motorist acts carelessly in a way that results in death or injury. They could impose strict penalties, such as losing the right to drive upon the occurrence of even one such event. This sort of change - or any other like it - would have huge social consequences for the vast majority of primarily suburban drivers who do in fact continue to value having the ability to drive freely about as their primary means of transportation. Young people flocking to cities in favor of "upscale urban lifestyles" (and others who have a particular viewpoint, in the case of such young people in favor of mass transit over cars) may see the issue differently. But the law ultimately is driven by the average people who elect politicians, etc. and I would suspect will be slow to change in this respect. 4. The article also expresses concern about high speeds and about drivers themselves being at risk of death or serious injury in driving the so-called murderous machines. While it is true that high speeds clearly enlarge such risks, it is a bit disingenuous to claim this as a primary concern while simultaneously forcing cars to be made smaller and smaller out of concern for increasing car mileage per gallon and promoting environmental goals. In modern public policy making, the same people who try to flog the auto companies for endangering drivers for this or that reason are often the first to decree that cars be made smaller and smaller even though this might create increasing safety risks to drivers who wind up in accidents. Again, this is a matter of social policy, and there are lots of arguments for why smaller cars promote broader social goals, but I rarely hear the people insisting on smaller cars acknowledge that an inherent by-product of this is to increase safety risks in case of collision (perhaps I am wrong on this point but I am going from memory in saying that this is indeed a known consequence of shrinking the car size). The real battle here is over a strong push to have the law conform to the modern urban trends favoring bike riders, transit riders, and pedestrians over automobiles. That issue should be addressed head on by assessing not only the potential benefits of limiting auto use but also the social costs (which I believe could be substantial). The article does not do that and is flawed because of this, notwithstanding its (many) interesting points made along the way.
MattHeard 13y ago
"99% Invisible" by Roman Mars did a very good, 24-minute radio show on this: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern-moloch/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern-...
datalus 13y ago
Still lower than suicide, sadly. Not many articles about that except the ones about statistics. No real op-ed pieces? Not as newsworthy or good for business?
- Houshalter 13y ago
  Suicides are voluntary. You can die in an accident through no choice of your own.
moron4hire 13y ago
jeez, they make it sound like every driver on the road is probably going to kill someone at some point.
jwatte 13y ago
I've always seen this as "30,000 deaths and 120,000 permanent disabilities is the price we pay for allowing the sale of cars that can go faster than 25 mph."
pdonis 13y ago
The article quotes the 30,000 per year number, but it only really talks about fatalities or injuries to pedestrians by cars. The 30,000 number includes fatalities or injuries to people in cars as well. So a lot of relevant data is being left out. Wikipedia has a link to NHTSA figures that give more detail. The link is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year#cite_note-NHTSA10-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in... From the 2010 data: * 32,885 total fatalities * 23,303 (70.8 percent) of those were vehicle occupants * 4,502 (13.7 percent) were on motorcycles (drivers or passengers) * 4,280 (13.0 percent) were pedestrians * 618 (1.9 percent) were cyclists * 182 (0.6 percent) were "other/unknown non-occupants" So the article is focusing in on something that's, at most, only 15 percent or so (counting pedestrians and cyclists, since the article talks about both) of the problem. I say "at most" because of other interesting statistics from the NHTSA report: * 31 percent of fatalities were in incidents involving alcohol-impaired drivers. * 47 percent of the crashes that resulted in pedestrian fatalities had alcohol use reported by either the driver or the pedestrian or both. Interestingly, 33 percent of the pedestrians involved in these crashes were alcohol impaired, but only 14 percent of the drivers involved were; in 6 percent of the crashes, both the driver and the pedestrian were alcohol impaired. * 32 percent of fatalities were in incidents where the driver was speeding. (42 percent of the drivers who were speeding were alcohol-impaired.) * 42 percent of motorcycle drivers, and 51 percent of motorcycle passengers, who were fatally injured were not wearing helmets. * 51 percent of vehicle occupants killed were not restrained (not wearing seat belts, or not in child seats/restraints). * 11 percent of fatalities involved large trucks (gross vehicle weight over 10,000 pounds); of those, 76 percent were occupants of other vehicles, 14 percent were occupants of the trucks, and 10 percent were pedestrians. Taking all this into consideration, I see a very different picture from "vehicles are murder machines". It looks to me like the major factors causing fatalities are individual choices made by people that put them at higher risk. And it's not like those choices are difficult, or about things that most people don't know. How hard is it to wear a seat belt? To put a helmet on if you're on a motorcycle? To not drink and drive?
- bruce511 13y ago
  There seems to be some serious low-hanging fruit here with regard to improving these numbers. Imagine if you took the billions currently spent by the TSA and applied it to road safety? Given what the rest of world does with airport security, it's possible to maintain airport security while at the same time freeing up massive resources which could be channeled into education (seriously, no seatbelts in 2014? ), policing of drunk driving, zero tolerance for speeding and so on. Of course this won't happen. Regardless of the fact it is waay more dangerous to drive to the airport than it is to fly on a plane - it's easy to do a big song and dance at the airport to "make flying safer" (hint: it's exactly as safe as it is everywhere else where they don't succumb to the TSA rhetoric). Americans don't care about the TSA at airports precisely because most Americans don't fly. So politically it costs no votes, (and with enough rhetoric some Americans even believe it's making things safer) whereas if you started creating or enforcing speed restrictions or drunk driving there'd be endless Libertarian arguments about the perils of big government, and the "freedom" of motor cyclists to not wear a helmet if they so choose. There actually could be a really useful agency with the words Trasportation and Safety in the name, but it isn't the one that currently exists.
tim333 13y ago
The article says a lot about the politics and legal aspects of car deaths but the way forward is through engineering. With existing technology you can make a big difference by segregating fast traffic from pedestrian areas. Slow the traffic in towns and residential areas by speed bumps, closed streets, 20mph limits and the like and build multilane pedestrian free roads for people to get from A to B. In the future self driving cars and similar safety systems are the way forward and probably the only practical way to drop the death toll from 30,000 to below 10,000.
socrates1998 13y ago
I have always felt one of the saddest things about our society is that we accept these very preventable deaths. When I was a teacher, about once a year a student would die in an accident. It just seemed so unnecessary, a 17 year healthy kid dead because we can't make cars safe. I can't imagine cars without seat belts, but most Americans didn't bother with them before Nader came along. It's definitely a black eye on our whole society when we can't be bothered to keep a basic right of transportation safe. Maybe driverless cars are the answer, I don't know.
clienthunter 13y ago
> In contrast, traffic fatalities in countries like the United Kingdom, where drivers are uniformly viewed as the greatest danger on streets, are about a third of U.S. rates. Britain here. This is absolutely false. We uniformly view cyclists as the greatest danger on the streets. No joke, ask around. I would suggest the reason for our better stats is down to a) a bloody difficult driving test; b) the thing inside a lot of us that makes the nervous/apologetic stereotype actually be true also makes a lot of us quite risk averse and cautious; c) drink driving is a big no-no with very practical consequences near 100% of the time; d) education of how to cross a road starts at a very young age, the result being no jaywalking laws required and watching people cross busy, fast moving roads in cities looks like doing the same in some developing country except we're proper pro at it; e) the speedbump pandemic, an enormous pain in the arse to have them every 3 ft in residential areas but probably highly effective; f) many, many (most?) pedestrian-accessible roads predate almost all vehicles and are twisty, narrow, and generally difficult to navigate; f) motorways/dual carriageways (70mph) were designed in such a way that they are not at all accessible on foot; g) B-roads (60mph usually, narrow) join 2 interesting places through vast expanses of farmland, there's rarely a reason to be on foot near them. Lots of reasons, none are fear.
- mikeash 13y ago
  > a bloody difficult driving test I think this is key. I'm always amazed at how easy the US "driving test" is. I put it in quotes because it's barely more than a check to see whether or not you're capable of writing your own name. You can pass the practical test without ever exceeding 25MPH. Worse, you never re-test. I haven't had anyone check my driving in almost two decades. License renewals come in the mail by magic. For all they know, I could have gone blind and senile, but here I am, legal to drive a car. I have to prove my ability to fly a plane every two years to keep doing it legally, but the car is far more dangerous to others when mishandled. I think we would benefit enormously in the US if we enacted a real driving test that requires actual skill and knowledge, and required re-testing every couple of years. Unfortunately it will never happen. While the American public doesn't really care if their government wastes trillions and invades countries for no reason and spies on everybody and tortures people, try to get between them and their cars and you will see politicians' heads on pikes on the National Mall.
spikels 13y ago
Some Context: in 2010 the 121,000 annual US accidental deaths are roughly evenly split between vehicles (35,000), unintentional poisoning (33,000), falls (26,000) and other causes. Collectively accidents are the 5th leading cause of death after heart attack, cancer, respiratory disease and stroke. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_04.pdf http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_04.pdf
michaelochurch 13y ago
First, our attitude toward speed in the U.S. is self-contradictory and bizarre. It's far worse to drive 35 mph on a city street in Manhattan than 90 mph (assuming no or low traffic) on the highway. The first is "only 5 over" (the NYC speed limit is 30, which is way too high) and might get you a small fine; the second can put you in jail, in some states. The issue with cars is that the vehicle that is best for highways (capable of speeds up to at least 80 mph) is not great for city driving. Automatic transmissions make it even worse, because there are now idiots who have no idea how fast they're driving (yeah, I'm a stick snob). Second, the car did a great job of something in the 1950s. It was a rent/house-price control mechanism that actually worked-- without causing a shortage. It scaled back the power of landlords by allowing development of low-value land. Suburbia turned into something ugly-- racist, detached, gluttonous, environmentally harmful, and ultimately (paradoxically?) expensive-- for a variety of reasons, including increased specialization in the economy (more driving, more scaling problems with traffic) and a Parkinson's Law effect of consumer capitalism. Isolated people turned out to be more needy, confused, and liable to overspend, making a market for gigantic houses, ridiculous cars, and tons of low-quality consumer dreck (bought on credit) that no one really needed. Slowly, the tyranny of the landlords crept back in, and things people actually needed (healthcare, education, and finally housing) became again expensive, then extortionate. That's where we are now. The car is actually a huge money-hole for most working families, and auto loans a "gateway drug" to yet more unnecessary consumer debt. The car was supposed to liberate them from landlords. Now, it's a white elephant they can only afford because they have no choice: the jobs are all 10-50 miles away, public transportation is expensive and emasculated in most places-- even Amtrak is unaffordable for most; and the roads are unsafe to bike or walk (highways and ghettos, both products of suburbanization). So people drop hundreds of dollars per month on car payments, fuel, insurance, parking, tolls, and repairs (plus the involuntary payment through taxes, but that could be argued to be a win for most; if you eat, you use the roads). For people out of cities, the car has become the new landlord. In the 1930s to '50s, however, no one saw all these unintended consequences. Now, it's an open question whether the benefits of widespread automobile usage merit the risk to public safety and the slashing of public spaces. I'd say "no". On the other hand, if you were a working-class person in the 1940s and this new invention had the promise of liberating you from the landlord so you could send your kids to school and actually retire, you might think differently. They didn't have the foresight to see all the negative unintended consequences or car-reliance.

166 points by ssprang 13y ago

In Romanian 'car crash' is called literally 'accident' [0]. Something that's always baffled me is how friggin' thin the metal plates that make up the car are. Why the fuck does a whole industry consider this normal?! [1] Edit: thanks for the info (and for the downvotes <3) 0: http://translate.google.com/#en/ro/car%20crash http://translate.google.com/#en/ro/car%20crash 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhCXFsQ6kKQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhCXFsQ6kKQ

TylerE 13y ago
Because you WANT it to deform. A stiff structure would increase deceleration on the occupants - in addition to being more likely to get in accident in the first place - additional weight will cause the vehicle to brake less rapidly, be more likely to roll over, etc, in addition to reducing efficiency.
- abstractbill 13y ago
  I've often wondered about this. Instead of just having a single thin metal skin that deforms, wouldn't it be even better to have multiple skins sandwiching a kind of honeycomb structure? That way you have even more stuff to deform and absorb the impact.
  - kiba 13y ago
    If there's a way to increase safety, I am sure that they had thought of it.
    - jstanley 13y ago
      So you're saying we're at the theoretical optimum of car safety and that there are no possible improvements?
    - bdamm 13y ago
      High performance aircraft and cars already do this. They thought of it - and it's expensive.
  - bagels 13y ago
    Right now, you have multiple skins sandwiching air.
  - AnimalMuppet 13y ago
    You know how the original Volkswagen Bugs had that empty front hood, because the engine was in the rear? My dad advocated filling the front hood with bags full of empty aluminum cans.
  - Retric 13y ago
    The only stuff that actually matters is keeping people from being squashed and the occupant's deceleration profile which you can already customize by changing how the car deforms. To really make a difference vs a high end car we could mandate 3 point seat-belts and helmets like you have in racing world. Still a 70MPH a head on collision is already fairly safe assuming people are belted the real killers are unbelted passengers, collision debris, and rolling. Edit: Head on collisions still kill a lot of people but they tend to be higher speeds accidents and often involve unbelted individuals. Also we are slightly below 1 death per 2 million hours in a car we just spend a lot of time in our cars. PS: Worldwide it was estimated that 1.2 million people were killed and 50 million more were injured in motor vehicle collisions in 2004. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_motor_vehicle_collisions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_motor_vehicle_c...
    - bagels 13y ago
      Nearly every form of motorsport racing requires the following: 5, 6 or 7 mounting point harnesses Head and Neck restraints Helmets
  - rdl 13y ago
    They do this; for front (especially) and rear impact, you have the entire crumple zone, with lots of cross-hatched struts and other components to take away energy in deformation. There are various side impact technologies to try to 1) prevent ultimate penetration and 2) absorb energy. The problem is the doors need to be relatively thin, relatively light, and contain a bunch of other components, as well as function as doors. Multiple layers is one. The best right now seems to be use the door to prevent penetration, and use a side curtain airbag to reduce peak acceleration on passenger (along with seat design and seat belts). I personally picked used cars no earlier than ABS and side curtain airbags whenever friends asked for cheap used car options.
  - rgbrenner 13y ago
    Yes, you're right.. that's why it's more than just the skin of the car.. it's called the crumple zone: http://auto.howstuffworks.com/car-driving-safety/safety-regulatory-devices/crumple-zone.htm http://auto.howstuffworks.com/car-driving-safety/safety-regu... The idea is that the entire front of the car is a crumple zone (to absorb the impact), and there's a rigid frame around the passenger compartment.
  - sp332 13y ago
    In a frontal collision, the engine is directed down underneath the drive and passenger. That design alone gives you a few extra feet.
  - megablast 13y ago
    You have often thought of this, but never did any research into what they currently do?
    - abstractbill 13y ago
      What they currently do is crumple zones. That's not what I was talking about (the entire skin of the car being a honeycomb sandwich).
  - arg01 13y ago
    Honeycombs are a difficult structure to manufacture. They often get mentioned in relation to 3d printing as one of the useful application. They're actually a very strong structure for the amount of material used and were even hand pieced together from wood for some aircraft during world war 2 rather than using more easily manufactured materials due to this advantage.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Indeed. You can drive some older cars right into a brick wall at 50mph and only need to replace the bumper. But that's less good for the occupants who would be killed during a crash like that. Modern car design sacrifices the vehicle for the sake of protecting the occupants.
wyager 13y ago
Modern lightweight cars are significantly safer than old, heavy cars. Thick steel is good for protecting you from explosions, not collisions.
- a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
  Equivalent car classes are much heavier now than they were 20+ years ago. It's because of the weight of airbags and safety features.
  - barrkel 13y ago
    Car class distribution has changed in the past 20+ years.
  - jcromartie 13y ago
    Airbags and ABS and crumple zones don't weigh much. The cars are just bigger.
    - a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
      Are you sure about that? I read about people stripping all the airbags out of new Civics and getting dramatically better gas mileage.
      - gambiting 13y ago
        What? Seriously? Why don't they strip out the seat belts and headrests while they are at it. In fact, they should strip everything out, so the car is rally-style: nothing but seats, steering wheel and gear stick inside. They would get absolutely AWESOME milage then. Fuck the safety then, eh?
      - jcromartie 13y ago
        An airbag weighs 10 lbs max, usually 5-8 lbs. Anybody who removes this for "performance" or "fuel savings" is a blithering idiot who should not be allowed near a motor vehicle.
pugz 13y ago
Modern car design saves lives. Cars in the 1950's had stiff, thick plates and it didn't do them much good. Have a look at the excellent 2009 vs 1959 car crash test video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U
Crito 13y ago
Car crashes are often called "accidents" in America too. I found it interesting and insightful when my driving instructor back in highschool spent a good 10 minutes ranting about there not being any such thing as a car 'accident' (students mentioning the word "accident" later in the course were scolded, to drive home the point). Obviously you can dream up scenarios that you might be able to really call an accident, but the point was that even when legal blame or liability cannot be found, nearly all car crashes could have been prevented by both drivers driving more defensively and being more alert. Edit ""You can do things to reduce your risk of accidents" is a vital message, using words in an atypical way can be a pedagogical tool to drive it home" That was the instructors intent. He wasn't trying to propose a new way for insurance companies or the courts to look at liability, but rather trying to combat thought terminating cliches like "shit happens" (by arguably introducing his own).
- dllthomas 13y ago
  This is silly. Nearly all accidents car or not can be avoided by being more defensive and alert. I dropped a glass - if I'd taken more care in handling it and been more aware of my surroundings, I probably wouldn't have. I said something dumb and accidentally hurt your feelings? Jeeze, if I'd only taken more care, been more aware of what I was saying. I accidentally deleted that file? Shoot, should have been more careful and considered better what folder I was in. "You can do things to reduce your risk of accidents" is a vital message, using words in an atypical way can be a pedagogical tool to drive it home, but insisting that there's some deep sense in which that's genuinely the case is silly.
- cek 13y ago
  In firearms circles there's a saying "There is no such thing as a firearms accident. There are only negligent acts." SOMEONE is always responsible, and should be held accountable.
  - Crito 13y ago
    Similarly "the gun is always loaded". On it's face, it is a silly thing to say because obviously a gun can be unloaded. The point however is to drive home a respectful attitude towards guns, for the sake of safety.
parfe 13y ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g Frontal offset crash test between a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air vs 2009 Chevrolet Malibu. I know which car I would rather ride in.

AnimalMuppet 13y ago

"Murder Machines"? Come on. Not all deaths are murder. We Americans have this idea that nothing bad should ever happen, that we should find a way to prevent it. It's a goal to shoot for, certainly. But calling it murder if you don't reach that goal? No. Can we climb down from the overheated rhetoric? It smells like propaganda.

bunderbunder 13y ago
Murder? No. Negligent homicide? Yes.
- AnimalMuppet 13y ago
  Agreed.
- sukuriant 13y ago
  That's not entirely fair. Maybe in some of the cases; but, I've seen people do some really, really, REALLY unwise things as pedestrians that they're lucky someone was paying a huge amount of attention so they weren't hit. The most pressing example in my mind is a woman cross the street in the middle of a rain shower, within 15 yards, probably much less (my mind's eye paints the memory as 'the edge of my car was here and the lady was RIGHT THERE!!!'), of me and crossing several lanes of traffic with her umbrella all out like she owned the place. She wasn't at a crosswalk, she was crossing the road a 100ish yards after a major turn, and I don't remember if I was the first car in a long line of cars or there were several cars passing and then she elected to walk in front of mine, but I'm very glad I was hyper-attentive so that I could brake in time and that my brakes were 100% up to spec, and my tires had enough tred on them. She intentionally put herself into harms way and any number of minor failures, including me looking to where I needed to be, because it was RIGHT AFTER A TURN (think of where your eyes go when you're taking a turn, it's not to the far corner ahead, it's to where your wheel-edge is and where your lane is placed, so you don't hit someone more likely to be hit, like the car that's attempting the exact same manuever beside you), or having just that little bit less attention because I was adjusting a radio dial to not have her thumped up onto my roof. It's not always the driver's fault. Some pedestrians need to realize that we, focused drivers, are still rocketing a couple tons of steel in a direction.

kiba 13y ago

It's such a shame. The automobile is built as a requirement to live in society rather than something that complement and argumented our lifestyle.

bdcravens 13y ago
The same could be said of telephones and the Internet.
- the_cat_kittles 13y ago
  which dont kill people in quite the same way
  - bdcravens 13y ago
    The lethality of cars had nothing to do with the point I was responding to.
    - Gracana 13y ago
      It didn't? What were they calling a shame, then?
      - Dylan16807 13y ago
        "The automobile is built as a requirement to live in society rather than something that complement and argumented our lifestyle."
        lmm 13y ago
        Which is a problem precisely because cars are so dangerous.
        Dylan16807 13y ago
        Even if they weren't dangerous, it's a shame that cars are so forced and that it's so hard to walk around in many areas.

tokenadult 13y ago

The death rate per miles driven in the United States has fallen dramatically in my lifetime, and I can remember when the annual number of deaths was much higher.[1] That said, the article makes a very interesting claim about attitudes that we should all follow to the end of the article for further discussion here: "There’s an open secret in America: If you want to kill someone, do it with a car. As long as you’re sober, chances are you’ll never be charged with any crime, much less manslaughter." My wife bike-commutes year-round (yes, even in Minnesota), and as I mention this among Facebook friends, other friends who are also bike commuters point out that car drivers can basically kill bicyclists in the United States with no legal penalty at all. That's not a good social environment for getting more people out for exercise and energy conservation by substituting bicycling for driving cars. The history reported in this article is very interesting. There are a lot of contemporary photographs of changing American cities. The quotations from experts provide perspective on the visuals: "'If a kid is hit in a street in 2014, I think our first reaction would be to ask, "What parent is so neglectful that they let their child play in the street?,"' says Norton. "'In 1914, it was pretty much the opposite. It was more like, "What evil bastard would drive their speeding car where a kid might be playing?" That tells us how much our outlook on the public street has changed." Indeed. Are we really thinking carefully about how to spread the risk around, when so much of our living space is dominated by cars? AFTER EDIT: The video link shared by pugz[2] in a reply comment elsewhere in this thread is not to be missed. Car safety standards have improved enormously in my lifetime, but those protect the occupants of cars better than they protect pedestrians and bicyclists who are hit by cars. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year#Motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U

happyscrappy 13y ago
Pretending kids were better protected in any context in 1914 is absurd.
- pyrocat 13y ago
  That quote was specifically about attitudes towards cars, not statistics for mortality rates.

trothamel 13y ago

In 2004, 42,836 Americans were killed in motor vehicle accidents. So this number actually represents a huge improvement. Something to realize is that potential replacements to cars are not that much safer. Highway travel is responsible for 7.7 deaths per billion passenger-miles. Mass transit is responsible for 5.4 deaths per billion passenger-miles. Given the less-direct routings used by transit, it's not totally clear this is a meaningful difference. All of this sucks - but it's the price we pay for being able to move a long distance quickly, something that seems to be a net benefit to society. (How many lives are saved by ambulances each year? How about by being able to easily visit a doctor?) These are all statistics for the US in 2011. Sources are: http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_40.html http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub... http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_02_17.html http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub... http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_02_32.html http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...

_delirium 13y ago
I agree that having exactly the same urban design but just replacing the transit modality is likely to produce only a minimal improvement (not to mention being difficult to do, since transit modality and urban layout are interlinked). I think the bigger wins come from shifts in commute patterns. People who take transit typically also take it for fewer miles, making the annual per-person death rates of transit riders considerably lower than the smaller per-mile gap would imply. I think having an urban layout where transit could even work is the big change. But those are pretty deeply tied, e.g. people won't move into denser "transit-oriented development" if there's no good transit to it. That's the main factor impacting the total number, also. Americans are about 2-3x more likely to die each year while commuting than Germans are, but mostly because they have longer commutes, not because the per-mile safety is worse (though it is slightly worse).
mikeash 13y ago
I'd really like to see that broken down by type of transit, as well as deaths for transit passengers versus people killed in e.g. private cars involved in accidents with busses. My guess, and this is very much a guess, is that buses will be disproportionately dangerous, and a fair number of those killed by busses are in cars that collide with them. For one random example, the DC metro has seen 9 deaths in the past five years and appears to run at about 1.8 billion passenger-miles per year, for a fatality rate of around 0.1 deaths per 100 million passenger-miles (or 1 per billion). This is very rough as deaths are spiky (those nine deaths happened all at once almost five years ago) and the long-term average is tough to judge.

dxbydt 13y ago

What happened to those concept cars that were encased in rubber/(or some other bouncy material) so when they bumped against each other, they would harmlessly bounce off ? I distinctly remember reading about them in Wired some years back.

quahaug 13y ago
Yeah, wired runs lots of stories about stuff that quite simply never happens. I used to keep a lot of back issues of wired, which I saved because I thought they had some cool stories. Surprisingly, many are packed with examples of very obvious vapor ware, and have aged really poorly. A small handful, however, still read like notes from an exciting future, and I find myself returning to them, when searching for inspiration.
gambiting 13y ago
Any amount of rubber would only work up to a certain speed. And all modern cars are designed to provide 100% safety to passangers up to 30mph - crumple zones, multiple airbags, engine block sliding underneath the body of the vehicle, early collision warning, automatic breaking and so on. Encasing cars in rubber would not improve anything above 30mph, while I am fairly certain would increase the weight of the vehicle - making it consume more fuel and also heavier vehicles take longer to stop,so the benefit might actually be null.

sologoub 13y ago

The dedicated bike lane is surely a great invention, but the implementation is often luck-luster and I think causes more harm than good. Santa Monica probably has more good bike lanes than most other US cities, but I am terrified to even try the new on 28th leading from Ocean Park to Pico and beyond to Olympic. They basically took a narrow street and tried to leave space for parking and add a bike lane on top of that. As a result, most SUVs or wider cars don't fit into the designated lanes. As the result, they either try to leave room for bicycles and drive slightly over the center or in the bike lane. If they try the former, they end up swerving violently into the bike lane to avoid on-coming traffic, so I don't know which is worse. If the bike lanes were actually well implemented the entire way to the office, I would leave my car parked most days... as it stands now, that's not happening any time soon.

_delirium 13y ago
As a result of issues with those kinds of lanes, Copenhagen changed direction a bit ago and now puts in only bike lanes physically separated by a curb from the car lanes, at least where possible (excluding some narrow streets). If there's street parking, the lane is also typically on the other side of the parked cars (the sidewalk side), making it even more impossible for someone to swerve from the car lanes into the bike lane. Also reduces "door" incidents, since the lane isn't on the driver-door side of parked cars. In addition to being much safer for cyclists, it also helps reduce drivers' need to watch out for the other direction, cyclists unexpectedly swerving into the auto lanes, e.g. to pass another cyclist. That part becomes particularly important if getting people to bike is actually successful: if you have a major route with a steady stream of >10 cyclists/minute, you really want that stream managed in its own space, segregated from both the cars and pedestrians. I believe some of these kinds of "really separated" bike lanes exist in the U.S., but not many. The last statistics I saw were that the U.S. (in total) has about 200 miles of physically protected bike lanes (including bike-only routes), while Greater Copenhagen alone has 600 miles of them. edit: some photos of various configurations, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Physically_separated_bikeways https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Physically_separ...
- sologoub 13y ago

owenversteeg 13y ago

I really like the design on some of the posters from the article: http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/AAA-posters-1024x434.jpg http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/...

kristianp 13y ago

No mention of present and future automation options that increase the safety of cars? On hacker news? Reversing sensors Automatic braking at low speed to prevent collisions Driverless cars. For me, these features can't come fast enough. They should be phased into being mandatory too.

LanceH 13y ago
Making them mandatory also has the effect of making sure they never again improve.
- mikeash 13y ago
  Like how seat belts and air bags stopped improving when they were made mandatory?

grellas 13y ago

As the article points out, "auto safety" itself has had a huge push from consumer advocates at least since Ralph Nader highlighted the risks of car design defects in the 1960s. That said, a few points about the law and auto safety: 1. U.S. law is tied to individual responsibility for conduct that is wrongful. As the auto industry developed over the past century, that meant that those who sought to drive by what the law declared to be the rules of the road were deemed to have done something wrong only if they failed to meet a reasonable standard of care in driving - that is, if they were negligent, careless, inexcusably inattentive, or otherwise failed to exercise a sufficient degree of caution that they created safety risks to others owing to their manner of driving. Breaking rules (e.g., speeding, driving the wrong way on a one-way street, and like items) constituted one such failure to exercise proper caution. In such cases, the law developed so as to hold such drivers responsible for damages in civil proceedings for the what the law called the "tort" of negligence. A tort is a civil wrong by which the actor committing the tort ("tortfeasor") is responsible to pay in damages for all harm caused by his tortious activity. In layman's terms involving cars, this generally means careless conduct. If the degree of wrongdoing is more egregious than mere carelessness, as for example when teenagers in the 1950s used to drag race through city streets in a way that constituted reckless conduct (that is, conduct by which the wrongdoer deliberately does things that have a high risk of endangering public safety), the consequence of this to the wrongdoer is also a civil wrong for which damages will lie but it is also (usually) defined as a criminal act by which the person can be prosecuted, fined, or jailed as a consequence of such actions. As the intent to harm increases even further, such as an act by which someone deliberately seeks to inflict harm on another while using a car as an instrument of harm, this can constitute a serious crime such as murder (for example, when someone deliberately drives at high speed into a crowd of people and does so with intent to harm or kill others). 2. Underlying the system of law that has developed around accountability for auto-related collisions, fatalities, etc. is a social policy judgment that sees automobiles as a positive good for society. The article notes that such social policy judgments were made over the years more and more in favor of promoting more expansive use of the automobile at the expense of pedestrians and mass transit riders who might also use the roads, especially in urban environments. This undoubtedly happened, though it is a dubious assertion to say that some sort of sinister forces ("Motordom" is the term used in the article) made this happen in some way that somehow overrode the will of ordinary people. I am old enough to remember as a kid how people perceived automobiles in, say, the late 1950s, and there is no doubt from my personal recollection that average people rejoiced and celebrated ever-increasing uses of the high-speed automobile, cheered on the National Highway Act by which old two-lane state roads were sent into relative disuse through the creation of a vast network of interstate freeways, and, as a matter of culture, broadly celebrated what was called the "car culture." Even dissidents of the time, such as Jack Kerouac, though a counter-culture figure of his time, broadly promoted the idea of freedom in driving the open road. If anyone in that era would have suggested that cars be shut down or limited in favor of bikes, they would have been laughed at by the average person. Such ideas were basically considered crank ideas and had no form of popular support whatever. Therefore, it did not take a secret plot by General Motors (or whomever) to get people to push widespread auto use. People wanted to get away from cities generally, wanted to live in the suburbs that were growing rapidly at the time, and wanted the freedom to use cars to get around whenever and wherever they wanted with limited restrictions other than having to obey the rules of the road. Yes, individual cities deployed mass transit with varying degrees of widespread use but these were limited to a few highly localized areas. People generally wanted cars, and mainly cars, to get around. 3. So, coming to the themes of this piece, "auto safety" is one such theme and the idea of the automobile being inherently "murderous" certainly tries to highlight this theme. Yet I would say the broader theme is actually more one of saying that the rules of the road should be rewritten to strike a different social policy judgment about how roads are used. It is nowhere stated in the article, but is strongly implied, that perhaps drivers of automobiles should be subjected to stronger legal consequences than those currently existing in the event they collide with others in using a road. Given that we are here in the realm of social policy, and not existing law, this could mean almost anything. For example, it could mean strict liability for damages if you hit someone using a car, no matter what the circumstances and regardless of what the law now calls "fault." This is what happened to the law in other areas over recent decades, most notably with the expansion of strict product liability law by which manufactures (who at one time could be held liable for injuries resulting from use of their products only if the injured party could show that the manufacturer was negligent or otherwise at "fault" in making the product) had their liabilities dramatically broadened if injuries resulted from use of their products. As the law evolved in that area, the courts and legislatures eventually determined that manufacturers should be held liable regardless of fault if their products could be shown to have inherent "defects" (broadly defined). This led to a huge expansion of liability for manufacturing such products and, for example, pretty much decimated certain industries such as manufacturers of small aircraft. As a matter of social policy, the same could be done with the idea of driving an automobile. Courts and legislatures could determine that it is socially desirable that drivers be held strictly liable regardless of fault because this would promote greater driver safety and would also strike a balance in shared road usage that favors pedestrians and others more than drivers. They could also define as a crime any collision by which a motorist acts carelessly in a way that results in death or injury. They could impose strict penalties, such as losing the right to drive upon the occurrence of even one such event. This sort of change - or any other like it - would have huge social consequences for the vast majority of primarily suburban drivers who do in fact continue to value having the ability to drive freely about as their primary means of transportation. Young people flocking to cities in favor of "upscale urban lifestyles" (and others who have a particular viewpoint, in the case of such young people in favor of mass transit over cars) may see the issue differently. But the law ultimately is driven by the average people who elect politicians, etc. and I would suspect will be slow to change in this respect. 4. The article also expresses concern about high speeds and about drivers themselves being at risk of death or serious injury in driving the so-called murderous machines. While it is true that high speeds clearly enlarge such risks, it is a bit disingenuous to claim this as a primary concern while simultaneously forcing cars to be made smaller and smaller out of concern for increasing car mileage per gallon and promoting environmental goals. In modern public policy making, the same people who try to flog the auto companies for endangering drivers for this or that reason are often the first to decree that cars be made smaller and smaller even though this might create increasing safety risks to drivers who wind up in accidents. Again, this is a matter of social policy, and there are lots of arguments for why smaller cars promote broader social goals, but I rarely hear the people insisting on smaller cars acknowledge that an inherent by-product of this is to increase safety risks in case of collision (perhaps I am wrong on this point but I am going from memory in saying that this is indeed a known consequence of shrinking the car size). The real battle here is over a strong push to have the law conform to the modern urban trends favoring bike riders, transit riders, and pedestrians over automobiles. That issue should be addressed head on by assessing not only the potential benefits of limiting auto use but also the social costs (which I believe could be substantial). The article does not do that and is flawed because of this, notwithstanding its (many) interesting points made along the way.

MattHeard 13y ago

"99% Invisible" by Roman Mars did a very good, 24-minute radio show on this: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern-moloch/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern-...

datalus 13y ago

Still lower than suicide, sadly. Not many articles about that except the ones about statistics. No real op-ed pieces? Not as newsworthy or good for business?

Houshalter 13y ago
Suicides are voluntary. You can die in an accident through no choice of your own.

moron4hire 13y ago

jeez, they make it sound like every driver on the road is probably going to kill someone at some point.

jwatte 13y ago

I've always seen this as "30,000 deaths and 120,000 permanent disabilities is the price we pay for allowing the sale of cars that can go faster than 25 mph."

pdonis 13y ago

The article quotes the 30,000 per year number, but it only really talks about fatalities or injuries to pedestrians by cars. The 30,000 number includes fatalities or injuries to people in cars as well. So a lot of relevant data is being left out. Wikipedia has a link to NHTSA figures that give more detail. The link is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year#cite_note-NHTSA10-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in... From the 2010 data: * 32,885 total fatalities * 23,303 (70.8 percent) of those were vehicle occupants * 4,502 (13.7 percent) were on motorcycles (drivers or passengers) * 4,280 (13.0 percent) were pedestrians * 618 (1.9 percent) were cyclists * 182 (0.6 percent) were "other/unknown non-occupants" So the article is focusing in on something that's, at most, only 15 percent or so (counting pedestrians and cyclists, since the article talks about both) of the problem. I say "at most" because of other interesting statistics from the NHTSA report: * 31 percent of fatalities were in incidents involving alcohol-impaired drivers. * 47 percent of the crashes that resulted in pedestrian fatalities had alcohol use reported by either the driver or the pedestrian or both. Interestingly, 33 percent of the pedestrians involved in these crashes were alcohol impaired, but only 14 percent of the drivers involved were; in 6 percent of the crashes, both the driver and the pedestrian were alcohol impaired. * 32 percent of fatalities were in incidents where the driver was speeding. (42 percent of the drivers who were speeding were alcohol-impaired.) * 42 percent of motorcycle drivers, and 51 percent of motorcycle passengers, who were fatally injured were not wearing helmets. * 51 percent of vehicle occupants killed were not restrained (not wearing seat belts, or not in child seats/restraints). * 11 percent of fatalities involved large trucks (gross vehicle weight over 10,000 pounds); of those, 76 percent were occupants of other vehicles, 14 percent were occupants of the trucks, and 10 percent were pedestrians. Taking all this into consideration, I see a very different picture from "vehicles are murder machines". It looks to me like the major factors causing fatalities are individual choices made by people that put them at higher risk. And it's not like those choices are difficult, or about things that most people don't know. How hard is it to wear a seat belt? To put a helmet on if you're on a motorcycle? To not drink and drive?

bruce511 13y ago
There seems to be some serious low-hanging fruit here with regard to improving these numbers. Imagine if you took the billions currently spent by the TSA and applied it to road safety? Given what the rest of world does with airport security, it's possible to maintain airport security while at the same time freeing up massive resources which could be channeled into education (seriously, no seatbelts in 2014? ), policing of drunk driving, zero tolerance for speeding and so on. Of course this won't happen. Regardless of the fact it is waay more dangerous to drive to the airport than it is to fly on a plane - it's easy to do a big song and dance at the airport to "make flying safer" (hint: it's exactly as safe as it is everywhere else where they don't succumb to the TSA rhetoric). Americans don't care about the TSA at airports precisely because most Americans don't fly. So politically it costs no votes, (and with enough rhetoric some Americans even believe it's making things safer) whereas if you started creating or enforcing speed restrictions or drunk driving there'd be endless Libertarian arguments about the perils of big government, and the "freedom" of motor cyclists to not wear a helmet if they so choose. There actually could be a really useful agency with the words Trasportation and Safety in the name, but it isn't the one that currently exists.

tim333 13y ago

The article says a lot about the politics and legal aspects of car deaths but the way forward is through engineering. With existing technology you can make a big difference by segregating fast traffic from pedestrian areas. Slow the traffic in towns and residential areas by speed bumps, closed streets, 20mph limits and the like and build multilane pedestrian free roads for people to get from A to B. In the future self driving cars and similar safety systems are the way forward and probably the only practical way to drop the death toll from 30,000 to below 10,000.

socrates1998 13y ago

I have always felt one of the saddest things about our society is that we accept these very preventable deaths. When I was a teacher, about once a year a student would die in an accident. It just seemed so unnecessary, a 17 year healthy kid dead because we can't make cars safe. I can't imagine cars without seat belts, but most Americans didn't bother with them before Nader came along. It's definitely a black eye on our whole society when we can't be bothered to keep a basic right of transportation safe. Maybe driverless cars are the answer, I don't know.

clienthunter 13y ago

> In contrast, traffic fatalities in countries like the United Kingdom, where drivers are uniformly viewed as the greatest danger on streets, are about a third of U.S. rates. Britain here. This is absolutely false. We uniformly view cyclists as the greatest danger on the streets. No joke, ask around. I would suggest the reason for our better stats is down to a) a bloody difficult driving test; b) the thing inside a lot of us that makes the nervous/apologetic stereotype actually be true also makes a lot of us quite risk averse and cautious; c) drink driving is a big no-no with very practical consequences near 100% of the time; d) education of how to cross a road starts at a very young age, the result being no jaywalking laws required and watching people cross busy, fast moving roads in cities looks like doing the same in some developing country except we're proper pro at it; e) the speedbump pandemic, an enormous pain in the arse to have them every 3 ft in residential areas but probably highly effective; f) many, many (most?) pedestrian-accessible roads predate almost all vehicles and are twisty, narrow, and generally difficult to navigate; f) motorways/dual carriageways (70mph) were designed in such a way that they are not at all accessible on foot; g) B-roads (60mph usually, narrow) join 2 interesting places through vast expanses of farmland, there's rarely a reason to be on foot near them. Lots of reasons, none are fear.

mikeash 13y ago
> a bloody difficult driving test I think this is key. I'm always amazed at how easy the US "driving test" is. I put it in quotes because it's barely more than a check to see whether or not you're capable of writing your own name. You can pass the practical test without ever exceeding 25MPH. Worse, you never re-test. I haven't had anyone check my driving in almost two decades. License renewals come in the mail by magic. For all they know, I could have gone blind and senile, but here I am, legal to drive a car. I have to prove my ability to fly a plane every two years to keep doing it legally, but the car is far more dangerous to others when mishandled. I think we would benefit enormously in the US if we enacted a real driving test that requires actual skill and knowledge, and required re-testing every couple of years. Unfortunately it will never happen. While the American public doesn't really care if their government wastes trillions and invades countries for no reason and spies on everybody and tortures people, try to get between them and their cars and you will see politicians' heads on pikes on the National Mall.

spikels 13y ago

Some Context: in 2010 the 121,000 annual US accidental deaths are roughly evenly split between vehicles (35,000), unintentional poisoning (33,000), falls (26,000) and other causes. Collectively accidents are the 5th leading cause of death after heart attack, cancer, respiratory disease and stroke. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_04.pdf http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_04.pdf

michaelochurch 13y ago

First, our attitude toward speed in the U.S. is self-contradictory and bizarre. It's far worse to drive 35 mph on a city street in Manhattan than 90 mph (assuming no or low traffic) on the highway. The first is "only 5 over" (the NYC speed limit is 30, which is way too high) and might get you a small fine; the second can put you in jail, in some states. The issue with cars is that the vehicle that is best for highways (capable of speeds up to at least 80 mph) is not great for city driving. Automatic transmissions make it even worse, because there are now idiots who have no idea how fast they're driving (yeah, I'm a stick snob). Second, the car did a great job of something in the 1950s. It was a rent/house-price control mechanism that actually worked-- without causing a shortage. It scaled back the power of landlords by allowing development of low-value land. Suburbia turned into something ugly-- racist, detached, gluttonous, environmentally harmful, and ultimately (paradoxically?) expensive-- for a variety of reasons, including increased specialization in the economy (more driving, more scaling problems with traffic) and a Parkinson's Law effect of consumer capitalism. Isolated people turned out to be more needy, confused, and liable to overspend, making a market for gigantic houses, ridiculous cars, and tons of low-quality consumer dreck (bought on credit) that no one really needed. Slowly, the tyranny of the landlords crept back in, and things people actually needed (healthcare, education, and finally housing) became again expensive, then extortionate. That's where we are now. The car is actually a huge money-hole for most working families, and auto loans a "gateway drug" to yet more unnecessary consumer debt. The car was supposed to liberate them from landlords. Now, it's a white elephant they can only afford because they have no choice: the jobs are all 10-50 miles away, public transportation is expensive and emasculated in most places-- even Amtrak is unaffordable for most; and the roads are unsafe to bike or walk (highways and ghettos, both products of suburbanization). So people drop hundreds of dollars per month on car payments, fuel, insurance, parking, tolls, and repairs (plus the involuntary payment through taxes, but that could be argued to be a win for most; if you eat, you use the roads). For people out of cities, the car has become the new landlord. In the 1930s to '50s, however, no one saw all these unintended consequences. Now, it's an open question whether the benefits of widespread automobile usage merit the risk to public safety and the slashing of public spaces. I'd say "no". On the other hand, if you were a working-class person in the 1940s and this new invention had the promise of liberating you from the landlord so you could send your kids to school and actually retire, you might think differently. They didn't have the foresight to see all the negative unintended consequences or car-reliance.