Nader covers a number of topics, including auto safety. Among the key points he makes is that (as of 1968), the contribution of the automobile itself to accidents was simply not legible, in the James C. Scott sense (Seeing Like a State), to the point that police accident report forms had no options for noting the contribution of the vehicle to the accident.
Built environment and highway design are another factor, of course, but the Nader interview came immediately to mind. I've listened to it several times, and it bears a few more listens as well.
(The Studs Terkel Archive itself is a true gem and recommended for those who enjoy podcasts.)
I had never heard of this, but I've read his Working, which was an impressive tome. I'll be checking it out.
Unusually enough, I found out about it while reading a book I had bought at City Lights Bookstore (Sabotage in the American Workplace: Anecdotes of Dissatisfaction, Mischief and Revenge), which cited it as a major inspiration.
The interview archive is immense and diverse. It spans 45 years, from 1952--1997, ran 1 hour each weekday, and the interview guests range from the highly famous to street and school interviews. I've hit on a few gems in particular.
The AWS back-end could be browsed or downloaded directly via AWS tools a ways back, and was about 600 GB last I'd checked. You'll have to sort out your own directory of content, however. Much of what's in there still isn't included in the official directory, again, at last check, though that includes numerous fragments and partial-tape interviews.
> Yet notably, speeding as a behavior surprisingly did not show any effect on fault outcomes in our models. The only effects related to driver behavior to decrease the likelihood of a pedestrian being found at fault were driver distraction and vehicle turning.
In other words: speeding by drivers is normalized to the extent that it doesn't appear to factor into the likelihood of being found at fault for an accident.
This is a distressing finding, but not a surprising one given the urban environment surveyed (pictures in Figure 2): wide, straight streets with ample spacing between lights mean that drivers drive at an "intuitive safe" speed, not the speed that is actually marked (much less the speed that is actually safe for pedestrians moving through crosswalks).
I’ve observed time and again how street width affects walkability and safety.
You’d think a wider street means more leeway to notice a pedestrian, but it also works the other way: drivers assume that pedestrians will see them earlier, and assume priority. (Compare to narrow streets in a dense city, where busy pedestrian can suddenly quickly cross from around a corner, requiring awareness.)
More often, though, stroads with many lanes that take a while to cross get traffic lights, and intuitively drivers consider traffic lights “enough”, so unless there is a speed camera & automated ticketing then between traffic lights anything goes speed-wise, especially on lanes further away from the sidewalk, and on straight roads that “anything” is sometimes a drag race, and once you’re going fast it’s so frustrating to stop so red lights are being violated frequently, etc.
It’s amazing how a strategic mess of narrower, often one-way streets can result in similar overall throughput to support denser population, require less car traffic due to better use of public transport and foot traffic, while being more safe and satisfying to navigate.
I have two additional thoughts. The first is blindspots. Car manufacturers must be held responsible for blindspots built into cars that keep drivers from seeing pedestrians, and cities must be held accountable for not creating crosswalks with enough clear sightlines appropriate to the vehicle speed of that road. The faster the road, the more space is required around the crosswalk.
My second thought is lighting. Nighttime lighting can create blindspots via veiling glare. It is frightening when a pedestrian pops into view as they move out of a glare spot or a glare-induced shadow. Some of the worst offenders of glare are unregulated "security" lighting.
I know I'm an unusual driver, but I'll take being accused of driving like an old man and avoiding cities over putting others at risk.
the simpler explanation is that speeding just isn’t as dangerous to pedestrians as distracted driving and sketchy intersections are, which certainly tracks with my experience as a pedestrian.
cars traveling in a straight line at any speed are pretty safe as long as they stop when they are supposed to.
edit: my second paragraph above is sort of stupid and makes the wrong point. my point, which i think is in line with this paper, is that it’s important to differentiate between “speeding” and “speed”. drivers are responsible for the former, DOTs are responsible for the latter, and the latter has more of an impact on pedestrian safety.
In Hungary, almost all of serious accidents are caused by speeding on some level. But you can’t see this in official statistics, because the national statistics office gathers data after one month of the accidents, at which time it usually isn’t decided officially the cause, so it defaults to “speeding is not involved”.
Another interesting info is that almost 100% of fatalities of car passengers are people who don’t use seatbelts. There were years when all of the fatalities were cases just like that.
> In other words: speeding by drivers is normalized to the extent that it doesn't appear to factor into the likelihood of being found at fault for an accident.
How much does it affect the likelihood of there being an accident?
I suggest that the likelihood of accidents is connected to the ability to see hazards hidden by blind spots caused by obstructed sight lines and nighttime lighting glare.
After several near death experiences in daylight crossing with a green light in a crosswalk from left turning cars and a city bus across four lane arterial roads, I now have a high intensity blinking flashlight that I aim at the driver.
I suspect that these drivers are NOT looking across the entire crosswalk and are focusing their attention on oncoming traffic.
In the case of North American city buses, the low mounted side mirrors block view of pedestrians and pedestrian fatalities are frequent because of this. In Europe the side mirrors are mounted from the roof allowing visibility of pedestrians.
> The conclusion argues that the designation of individual responsibility for crashes preempts collective responsibility, preventing wider adoption of design interventions as well as systemic changes to the processes that determine the built environment of US roadways.
I don't quite understand (based only on the abstract): Are they suggesting that we alter the data (re: who is responsible) to achieve a certain outcome? Do they want to 'prevent wider adoption of design interventions'?
I expect the answer to those questions is 'no', of course, but I don't understand their argument or conclusion.
@luu: as submitter, what did you see in this paper?
If the situation is that a car skidded down an icy hill and killed a pedestrian at the bottom, what are the contributing factors?
- the driver's skill
- the driver's decision to go out in that weather
- the driver's sobriety
- the car's maintenance state
- the car's tire traction on ice
- the weather conditions (normal? extreme? unexpected?)
- public notice about the weather conditions
- the treatment of the road surface by public works to increase traction
- the maintenance of the road surface (neglected or perfect)
- the decision of the city to build a road on that hill
- the general design of the city that requires people to have and use cars
- the pedestrian's decision to cross the road at that time
- the pedestrian's decision to be outside that day
- the design and availability of public transport encouraging the pedestrian to cross that road
and so on and so forth. If you ignore all of that in order to apportion blame in some percentage between only the driver and the pedestrian, you are not gathering evidence on all of the other factors.
Fixing the other factors would be "design interventions" and "systemic changes to the built environment".
Here’s how I read it: in pedestrian conflicts with cars, we tend to over-assign responsibility to the individual pedestrian (“they should have been more careful”) and under-weight larger-scale cultural issues, like building unwalkable suburbs.
For the history in the US of how streets when from being 'mixed use' pre-automobiles to being basically only about automobiles see Fighting Traffic by Peter D. Norton:
> Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers." In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.Peter D. Norton is Assistant Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia.
What’s disheartening is how ingrained car prioritization has become in the U.S. Our communities are largely un walkable and consist of large underused concrete parking lots. Everything is spread out. It is abnormal to see kids playing in the streets now and most people seem to be O.K. with this. We’ve become a people who rarely go outside other than to drive from one building to another. And when we do go outside we end having to drive to a place where one can be in a location away from cars.
I stayed at a place in the US a few years ago where I should have been able to walk the half mile to the grocery store but there was no path through the neighborhood to the strip mall where it was located, and there was no sidewalk on my side of the highway that was the other option.
>Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large.
This is not true and there are numerous counter-examples.
City streets have always been dangerous for pedestrians and notable illustrations of this are the separate gates at city entrances for vehicles (pulled by beasts of burden of course) and pedestrians and the construction of sidewalks and crosswalks one example of which I've seen in person is the civil engineering of Pompeii where pedestrians were segregated from road traffic over two thousand years ago. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pedestrian_crossing_...
In various paintings and engravings of city scenes from the 1600s and 1700s a common theme emerges: every area that could afford them built sidewalks and pedestrians were segregated from road traffic. Raucous examples of people teeming in the streets in similar works seem to be trying to depict scenes of anarchy or poor slums.
Another is the fact that numerous Roman emperors banned carriages from city streets during daylight (both for safety and noise pollution reasons) with varying degrees of success. That was much easier when you had an army of slaves to carry goods into the city.
One glaring expression of the dangers of pre-automobile urban streets is the fact that in New York City fatalities due to horse-pedestrian collisions greatly surpass the rate of fatalities of automobile collisions. In both "Herald Square, 1896" and "A Trip Down Market Street, 1906" you can see pedestrians travelling with the road along sidewalks and crossing the road at any point. This indeed used to be common, before the invention of traffic signals and crosswalk and is the primary reason for the increase in fatality rates due to collisions.
The fatality rate for deaths due to horses in Chicago was seven times the present rate of pedestrian fatalities and in New York City is was double.
Children didn't play in city streets because it was a death sentence.
Pedestrians DID cross from sidewalk to sidewalk at any location because crosswalks didn't exist (in most places) yet.
Regardless of all of that, in positive news more and more cities all over the US and the world are pedestrianizing their streets. Not because "users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large" but because mixing pedestrians and ANY vehicle to include pre-automobile vehicles is dangerous and pedestrians should either stay out of the street or have it dedicated solely to their use.
Also anything with different speed will have a bad time sharing any road. Even for bikes it'll be better for them to be segregated from any crowded pedestrian road. Non segregated road can only work if we want to bring all people to crawling speed, which actually already happens in any rural roads I know.
Could you make an article in a blog somewhere about this? I'd like to cite this everytime someone say something like that again.
Sorry, but “ Children didn't play in city streets because it was a death sentence.” is just wrong. Perhaps not on the major downtown arterials you describe, but there’s ample historical record of kids playing stickball and similar games on urban streets.
I was waiting for Chinese food and watched as a Left-Turn light went green for cars at the same time the Pedestrian crossing light turned "OK to cross".
The waiting car sped up, made it's left turn right into the crossing pedestrian. Pedestrian died in the hospital and I never ate my Chinese food.
How can that sequence of traffic lights even happen? For the pedestrian to get the OK, she must have hit the crossing button - system knows a person is there, why give cars the OK to turn right into her, leaving the responsibility on the driver to see and yield?
That is extremely common at city intersections. The pedestrian has priority but the car also has a green light for a turn. I don't know about the exact timing of the sequence but there are many intersections where the pedestrian has a right to cross and a car has a right to turn (but must yield).
The same city (like many places) also has pedestrian crosswalks that aren't light controlled at all.
The cars need to watch for pedestrians. Lights don't necessarily means that cars obeying the lights never ever have to watch for pedestrians also crossing with the lights.
The problem is that people tend to interpret a green light to mean "you can go" rather than "this specific light isn't telling you to stop". Hence all those signs that say something to the effect "turning cars yield to oncoming traffic on green" as a reminder. And the effect is likely worse for a green arrow, which implies having the right of way.
In my city, the signal controller registers when a pedestrian pushes a button for the walk signal on a crossing that conflicts with a protected left turn. If it is fully protected, with a green arrow followed by red ball, then pedestrians are not given walk signals during that turning phase but prior during the through phase in their direction. If it is protected-permissive, when motorists see a green arrow followed by a green ball, then the pedestrian gets their walk signal ahead of the turning traffic, so they can clear before the left turning vehicles intersect their crosswalk. The collision you saw is the same issue that happens with right turn on red. The pedestrian has a walk, the car behind them turns into the pedestrian, even though they have a better view than a left turning vehicle of the nearby person. One alternative is to give separate phases to each traffic movement, such as the pedestrian scramble where all directions of pedestrians go with all vehicles stopped. The issue with delaying the left turn while the pedestrians go first is it increases cycle time or gives a greater percentage of cycle time to lower volume side road traffic, which tends to reduce the service level for most motorists waiting at conflicting red signals for these movements to complete. Lower service levels lead to more complaints, especially when there are thousands of vehicles per day vs. 100 pedestrian crossings, but Traffic Engineers have to fight for those pedestrians using what is often a difficult compromise.
With a left turn arrow, that should never be green when the turn conflicts with a pedestrian crossing that's on Walk. An arrow is an indicationn of a protected turn, where there should not be any conflicts.
But many intersections allow for an unprotected left turn, if safe, on a green ball in the forward direction. Sometimes there's a green and yellow arrow next to a green and yellow ball, with red on top in the middle of the two: you can usually make an unprotected left, if safe, if the green ball is showing, and if you have a green arrow, it's a protected left. I've also seen similar with a flashing yellow arrow indicating an unprotected left is permitted, if safe.
Of course, it's possible that the intersection was miswired or misconfigured. If the direction with the green arrow also had a green ball for forward, it may have been that the right side of that direction was supposed to have a Walk, but the signals were tragically misconfigured. I have experienced a case where wires were mixed up, but in the case I'm aware of, a bike button was configured as a left turn occupancy detector for another approach; inconvenient, but not dangerous.
Yeah, left turn on green always scares me as I have twice come close to hitting pedestrians that I just didn't see (at first) because my line of sight to them was blocked by the driver side pillar. Notably, both of these streets were three or more lanes in each direction, not sure if that adds a risk factor.
Huh? I've never seen this. If the drivers get a green turn arrow the pedestrians get a don't-walk. However, I see (and have been one) pedestrians who understand the light going anyway across the part of the road that's facing a red, treating it as two separate crossings. While this is not a problem I have also seen pedestrians going the other way start to cross when the oncoming pedestrians start--and they may be crossing against the green arrow. Same as you sometimes see drivers go because the lane next to them went but it was actually on a different traffic control.
As for the pedestrian hitting the button--I have never seen the button alter the sequence of the lights. The button does two things: Cause the light to cycle (in case it's sensor controlled and won't cycle if nobody comes along) and ensuring the cycle time is long enough for a pedestrian to cross. I've also seen hitting the button causing the button to indicate the status of the light (for the blind.)
Private automobiles do not belong in cities. They are guests there. But they've invited themselves in and taken over the place.
It's disturbing how common it is for people's default assumption to be that it's the pedestrian/person on the bike/scooter/what have you 's fault that they got hit by a car. Rarely the driver's fault, and NEVER the urban designer's fault.
Most crashes are fundamentally caused by designs that encourage them.
We know drivers speed, we know they text while driving, we know signs and even enforcement doesn't work etc etc. The ONLY conclusion is it's the built environment that must disallow crashes and people being hit by cars from being possible in the first place.
Narrower, more winding streets, cobblestone, speed humps and other calming surfaces, more vegetation, raised crosswalks, dedicated and physically segregated (by bollards, concrete blocks etc) spaces for pedestrians, people on bikes etc etc.
Agreed; my thought is that it greatly reduces variables for drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists.
More specifically, I'd specify road width rather number of lanes. Roads where drivers feel they have room to squeeze by pedestrians and cyclists seem to increase risk.
Cities are welcome to erect whatever barriers they like to private cars. But don't think there wouldn't be economic impact if far fewer people commute in, come in for the evening, or decide to move out because visiting the suburbs or the mountains is too much hassle. But maybe it's a worthwhile experiment.
On the contrary, building cities to be nicer places to be a pedestrian in means you can design them more around people without cars. Look up statistics on how much land we dedicate to parking. You end up with far more effective use of land, higher overall productivity, and a larger tax base which helps support the infrastructure investment in a virtuous cycle.
Park and rides in suburbs so commuters don't have to take up disproportionate space in the more valuable city environment are just a part of this, but the root of the issue is providing viable alternatives to driving. Housing policy and public transit policy are deeply linked with this.
The misunderstanding here is that cars are the primary way people commute into the city. This might be true in some places, but for most cities PT and residents make up the bulk of commercial traffic in a city - it makes sense when you consider that most roads only let a few dozen cars a minute through, vs a few hundred people per train (and way more during peak hours).
However, you look at the built environment in a city and the pedestrians often only get 20% of the road area between buildings, while cars get 80%.
> Cities are welcome to erect whatever barriers they like to private cars.
This is inaccurate - for liability purposes, most road design in the US conforms to the MUTCD (and other design standards), which have very car-centric requirements. For example, the minimum lane width it allows is 11 feet (3.3m). If you design and install a 10 foot lane, you're not supported by that standard, and will likely get sued for damages if someone sideswipes someone, etc. The same applies for many other features that can improve pedestrian safety. It's one of the fundamental reasons north American built environment looks so much different (even compared with a car-centric design in other countries)
"The real problem is that we couldn’t build another place like this if we wanted to. It’s not allowed. It’s literally illegal in Canada, to build something like this today."
> But don't think there wouldn't be economic impact if far fewer people commute in, come in for the evening, or decide to move out because visiting the suburbs or the mountains is too much hassle.
Maybe more people would commute in, parking outside the city and taking public transit, and enjoying all the benefits of a low-traffic, pedestrian city: No parking problems or costs, no traffic, no fuel costs, highly available transit, things built for pedestrian and transit travel. Maybe they'd move in.
> Private automobiles do not belong in cities. They are guests there. But they've invited themselves in and taken over the place.
You seem to be ignoring what actually happened. A huge number of the people in those cities wanted automobiles. That's why governments taxed people to pay for the roads for those cars.
Akshully it’s you who need to read up on first thing about the history of the invasion of cities by the automobile. Complete, total regulatory capture of the government by the automobile and oil industry, purchase of transit only to rip it to shreds etc etc.
The funny thing is, traffic in general and life for ardent motorists in particular would be better the better alternatives to driving are. Instead, they shoot themselves in the foot by shutting down anything other than adding more and more traffic, making things worse and worse for themselves.
That is not how it works. What people want is a function of the choices available.
When the government builds a ton of car roads, people want cars. When they build great rail, bike lanes and walkable streets, people want cars much less.
> A huge number of the people in those cities wanted automobiles. That's why governments taxed people to pay for the roads for those cars.
What is the basis of that? Perhaps, having the option of roads; and being led, to a degree by leaders' belief in roads, they wanted cars. Seeing public transit and seeing leaders' belief it it, they might have used that.
> A huge number of the people in those cities wanted automobiles.
No. A huge number of people wanted an easy way to get from point A to B. Many people don't really care about cars, but when you design a city to accommodate only them with no viable alternatives, they will flock to the automobile. Case in point: Tokyo has a car ownership rate of 0.32 cars per household. Why? Because you can take the subway/bus/bike to anywhere in the city, it's clean, it's safe, it's invested in.
> But they've invited themselves in and taken over the place.
Cars are material objects. People take them where they want them. People want them in the cities. There was no great propaganda wave that "tricked" people into doing this. Cars were better. People went with what was better for them, personally.
> Most crashes are fundamentally caused by designs that encourage them.
Most fatalities involve alcohol or drugs. Perhaps we just shouldn't allow the sale of alcohol in cities? At least to me, that would be very welcome, and is a necessary part of any honest "vision zero."
> We know drivers speed, we know they text while driving, we know signs and even enforcement doesn't work etc etc.
Yet we know they can also drive millions of miles this way before causing a single incident.
> that must disallow crashes and people being hit by cars from being possible in the first place.
You can have that. You're just going to have to sacrifice nearly every other modern convenience that people move into cities to experience in the first place.
> Narrower, more winding streets, cobblestone, speed humps and other calming surfaces, more vegetation, raised crosswalks, dedicated and physically segregated (by bollards, concrete blocks etc) spaces for pedestrians, people on bikes etc etc.
And that's the end of your federal road money. As long as your community can afford all of this on it's own, you can do it, if you can't, you must find a compromise.
This idea that the compromise _must_ be thrown away because a few people can't see any other way forward is ridiculous. Particularly on "hacker news."
"And that's the end of your federal road money." - actually "Narrower, more winding streets, cobblestone, speed humps and other calming surfaces" are cheaper longterm(sometimes shortterm) for federal money, esp combined with the fact that in pedestrian friendly streets there are more businesses and more customers and as result more taxed money.
cars shouldn't be banned in cities, but env should be heavily redesigned to change priorities, like: pedestrian>bike>pub transp>taxis>personal cars. This is the compromise that works - cars are not banned, just less convenient compared to other methods and because of that car trips are faster compared to car priority, bc there are less cars on the road and less congestion, so ppl that actually need and can afford cars(and all related taxes) will have a more pleasant drive
Readit News
<https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/ralph-nader-discusses-...> (Audio, 32:31).
Direct audio link: <https://s3.amazonaws.com/wfmt-studs-terkel/published/11364.m...> (MP3).
Nader covers a number of topics, including auto safety. Among the key points he makes is that (as of 1968), the contribution of the automobile itself to accidents was simply not legible, in the James C. Scott sense (Seeing Like a State), to the point that police accident report forms had no options for noting the contribution of the vehicle to the accident.
Built environment and highway design are another factor, of course, but the Nader interview came immediately to mind. I've listened to it several times, and it bears a few more listens as well.
(The Studs Terkel Archive itself is a true gem and recommended for those who enjoy podcasts.)
I had never heard of this, but I've read his Working, which was an impressive tome. I'll be checking it out.
Unusually enough, I found out about it while reading a book I had bought at City Lights Bookstore (Sabotage in the American Workplace: Anecdotes of Dissatisfaction, Mischief and Revenge), which cited it as a major inspiration.
The AWS back-end could be browsed or downloaded directly via AWS tools a ways back, and was about 600 GB last I'd checked. You'll have to sort out your own directory of content, however. Much of what's in there still isn't included in the official directory, again, at last check, though that includes numerous fragments and partial-tape interviews.
<https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/>
I strongly suspect that Working leveraged Studs's interviews, though all but certainly went beyond them as well.
> Yet notably, speeding as a behavior surprisingly did not show any effect on fault outcomes in our models. The only effects related to driver behavior to decrease the likelihood of a pedestrian being found at fault were driver distraction and vehicle turning.
In other words: speeding by drivers is normalized to the extent that it doesn't appear to factor into the likelihood of being found at fault for an accident.
This is a distressing finding, but not a surprising one given the urban environment surveyed (pictures in Figure 2): wide, straight streets with ample spacing between lights mean that drivers drive at an "intuitive safe" speed, not the speed that is actually marked (much less the speed that is actually safe for pedestrians moving through crosswalks).
You’d think a wider street means more leeway to notice a pedestrian, but it also works the other way: drivers assume that pedestrians will see them earlier, and assume priority. (Compare to narrow streets in a dense city, where busy pedestrian can suddenly quickly cross from around a corner, requiring awareness.)
More often, though, stroads with many lanes that take a while to cross get traffic lights, and intuitively drivers consider traffic lights “enough”, so unless there is a speed camera & automated ticketing then between traffic lights anything goes speed-wise, especially on lanes further away from the sidewalk, and on straight roads that “anything” is sometimes a drag race, and once you’re going fast it’s so frustrating to stop so red lights are being violated frequently, etc.
It’s amazing how a strategic mess of narrower, often one-way streets can result in similar overall throughput to support denser population, require less car traffic due to better use of public transport and foot traffic, while being more safe and satisfying to navigate.
My second thought is lighting. Nighttime lighting can create blindspots via veiling glare. It is frightening when a pedestrian pops into view as they move out of a glare spot or a glare-induced shadow. Some of the worst offenders of glare are unregulated "security" lighting.
I know I'm an unusual driver, but I'll take being accused of driving like an old man and avoiding cities over putting others at risk.
cars traveling in a straight line at any speed are pretty safe as long as they stop when they are supposed to.
edit: my second paragraph above is sort of stupid and makes the wrong point. my point, which i think is in line with this paper, is that it’s important to differentiate between “speeding” and “speed”. drivers are responsible for the former, DOTs are responsible for the latter, and the latter has more of an impact on pedestrian safety.
Another interesting info is that almost 100% of fatalities of car passengers are people who don’t use seatbelts. There were years when all of the fatalities were cases just like that.
How much does it affect the likelihood of there being an accident?
I suspect that these drivers are NOT looking across the entire crosswalk and are focusing their attention on oncoming traffic.
In the case of North American city buses, the low mounted side mirrors block view of pedestrians and pedestrian fatalities are frequent because of this. In Europe the side mirrors are mounted from the roof allowing visibility of pedestrians.
I don't quite understand (based only on the abstract): Are they suggesting that we alter the data (re: who is responsible) to achieve a certain outcome? Do they want to 'prevent wider adoption of design interventions'?
I expect the answer to those questions is 'no', of course, but I don't understand their argument or conclusion.
@luu: as submitter, what did you see in this paper?
- the driver's skill
- the driver's decision to go out in that weather
- the driver's sobriety
- the car's maintenance state
- the car's tire traction on ice
- the weather conditions (normal? extreme? unexpected?)
- public notice about the weather conditions
- the treatment of the road surface by public works to increase traction
- the maintenance of the road surface (neglected or perfect)
- the decision of the city to build a road on that hill
- the general design of the city that requires people to have and use cars
- the pedestrian's decision to cross the road at that time
- the pedestrian's decision to be outside that day
- the design and availability of public transport encouraging the pedestrian to cross that road
and so on and so forth. If you ignore all of that in order to apportion blame in some percentage between only the driver and the pedestrian, you are not gathering evidence on all of the other factors.
Fixing the other factors would be "design interventions" and "systemic changes to the built environment".
It makes sense that it's the pedestrian's fault when the city is for the car, not the person.
Until the thinking changes, nothing else will.
It's working as intended.
> Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers." In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.Peter D. Norton is Assistant Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia.
* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2924825
* https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/
This is not true and there are numerous counter-examples.
City streets have always been dangerous for pedestrians and notable illustrations of this are the separate gates at city entrances for vehicles (pulled by beasts of burden of course) and pedestrians and the construction of sidewalks and crosswalks one example of which I've seen in person is the civil engineering of Pompeii where pedestrians were segregated from road traffic over two thousand years ago. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pedestrian_crossing_...
Another example is the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris. Completed in the early 1600s it was built with wide sidewalks to keep pedestrians out of the road. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/P1140241...
Oldest photograph of London: https://londonist.com/london/art-and-photography/oldest-phot...
Amsterdam, 1891: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Old-Amsterdam_1891-stre...
What do you see? Sidewalks.
In various paintings and engravings of city scenes from the 1600s and 1700s a common theme emerges: every area that could afford them built sidewalks and pedestrians were segregated from road traffic. Raucous examples of people teeming in the streets in similar works seem to be trying to depict scenes of anarchy or poor slums.
Another is the fact that numerous Roman emperors banned carriages from city streets during daylight (both for safety and noise pollution reasons) with varying degrees of success. That was much easier when you had an army of slaves to carry goods into the city.
One glaring expression of the dangers of pre-automobile urban streets is the fact that in New York City fatalities due to horse-pedestrian collisions greatly surpass the rate of fatalities of automobile collisions. In both "Herald Square, 1896" and "A Trip Down Market Street, 1906" you can see pedestrians travelling with the road along sidewalks and crossing the road at any point. This indeed used to be common, before the invention of traffic signals and crosswalk and is the primary reason for the increase in fatality rates due to collisions.
The fatality rate for deaths due to horses in Chicago was seven times the present rate of pedestrian fatalities and in New York City is was double.
From Horse Power to Horsepower: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6sm968t2
Herald Square: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRf5z75-GbU
Market Street: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q5Nur642BU
Children didn't play in city streets because it was a death sentence.
Pedestrians DID cross from sidewalk to sidewalk at any location because crosswalks didn't exist (in most places) yet.
Regardless of all of that, in positive news more and more cities all over the US and the world are pedestrianizing their streets. Not because "users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large" but because mixing pedestrians and ANY vehicle to include pre-automobile vehicles is dangerous and pedestrians should either stay out of the street or have it dedicated solely to their use.
Could you make an article in a blog somewhere about this? I'd like to cite this everytime someone say something like that again.
The waiting car sped up, made it's left turn right into the crossing pedestrian. Pedestrian died in the hospital and I never ate my Chinese food.
How can that sequence of traffic lights even happen? For the pedestrian to get the OK, she must have hit the crossing button - system knows a person is there, why give cars the OK to turn right into her, leaving the responsibility on the driver to see and yield?
The same city (like many places) also has pedestrian crosswalks that aren't light controlled at all.
The cars need to watch for pedestrians. Lights don't necessarily means that cars obeying the lights never ever have to watch for pedestrians also crossing with the lights.
If the car has a plain green light and is turning left, then they need to watch for pedestrians and for oncoming traffic.
With a left turn arrow, that should never be green when the turn conflicts with a pedestrian crossing that's on Walk. An arrow is an indicationn of a protected turn, where there should not be any conflicts.
But many intersections allow for an unprotected left turn, if safe, on a green ball in the forward direction. Sometimes there's a green and yellow arrow next to a green and yellow ball, with red on top in the middle of the two: you can usually make an unprotected left, if safe, if the green ball is showing, and if you have a green arrow, it's a protected left. I've also seen similar with a flashing yellow arrow indicating an unprotected left is permitted, if safe.
Of course, it's possible that the intersection was miswired or misconfigured. If the direction with the green arrow also had a green ball for forward, it may have been that the right side of that direction was supposed to have a Walk, but the signals were tragically misconfigured. I have experienced a case where wires were mixed up, but in the case I'm aware of, a bike button was configured as a left turn occupancy detector for another approach; inconvenient, but not dangerous.
As for the pedestrian hitting the button--I have never seen the button alter the sequence of the lights. The button does two things: Cause the light to cycle (in case it's sensor controlled and won't cycle if nobody comes along) and ensuring the cycle time is long enough for a pedestrian to cross. I've also seen hitting the button causing the button to indicate the status of the light (for the blind.)
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It's disturbing how common it is for people's default assumption to be that it's the pedestrian/person on the bike/scooter/what have you 's fault that they got hit by a car. Rarely the driver's fault, and NEVER the urban designer's fault.
Most crashes are fundamentally caused by designs that encourage them.
We know drivers speed, we know they text while driving, we know signs and even enforcement doesn't work etc etc. The ONLY conclusion is it's the built environment that must disallow crashes and people being hit by cars from being possible in the first place.
Narrower, more winding streets, cobblestone, speed humps and other calming surfaces, more vegetation, raised crosswalks, dedicated and physically segregated (by bollards, concrete blocks etc) spaces for pedestrians, people on bikes etc etc.
More specifically, I'd specify road width rather number of lanes. Roads where drivers feel they have room to squeeze by pedestrians and cyclists seem to increase risk.
Park and rides in suburbs so commuters don't have to take up disproportionate space in the more valuable city environment are just a part of this, but the root of the issue is providing viable alternatives to driving. Housing policy and public transit policy are deeply linked with this.
However, you look at the built environment in a city and the pedestrians often only get 20% of the road area between buildings, while cars get 80%.
This is inaccurate - for liability purposes, most road design in the US conforms to the MUTCD (and other design standards), which have very car-centric requirements. For example, the minimum lane width it allows is 11 feet (3.3m). If you design and install a 10 foot lane, you're not supported by that standard, and will likely get sued for damages if someone sideswipes someone, etc. The same applies for many other features that can improve pedestrian safety. It's one of the fundamental reasons north American built environment looks so much different (even compared with a car-centric design in other countries)
https://youtu.be/VWDFgzAjr1k?si=IQbceOTAEhmJ6nmw&t=537
"The real problem is that we couldn’t build another place like this if we wanted to. It’s not allowed. It’s literally illegal in Canada, to build something like this today."
Maybe more people would commute in, parking outside the city and taking public transit, and enjoying all the benefits of a low-traffic, pedestrian city: No parking problems or costs, no traffic, no fuel costs, highly available transit, things built for pedestrian and transit travel. Maybe they'd move in.
You seem to be ignoring what actually happened. A huge number of the people in those cities wanted automobiles. That's why governments taxed people to pay for the roads for those cars.
I think I agree with the rest of your post.
The funny thing is, traffic in general and life for ardent motorists in particular would be better the better alternatives to driving are. Instead, they shoot themselves in the foot by shutting down anything other than adding more and more traffic, making things worse and worse for themselves.
When the government builds a ton of car roads, people want cars. When they build great rail, bike lanes and walkable streets, people want cars much less.
What is the basis of that? Perhaps, having the option of roads; and being led, to a degree by leaders' belief in roads, they wanted cars. Seeing public transit and seeing leaders' belief it it, they might have used that.
No. A huge number of people wanted an easy way to get from point A to B. Many people don't really care about cars, but when you design a city to accommodate only them with no viable alternatives, they will flock to the automobile. Case in point: Tokyo has a car ownership rate of 0.32 cars per household. Why? Because you can take the subway/bus/bike to anywhere in the city, it's clean, it's safe, it's invested in.
Cars are material objects. People take them where they want them. People want them in the cities. There was no great propaganda wave that "tricked" people into doing this. Cars were better. People went with what was better for them, personally.
> Most crashes are fundamentally caused by designs that encourage them.
Most fatalities involve alcohol or drugs. Perhaps we just shouldn't allow the sale of alcohol in cities? At least to me, that would be very welcome, and is a necessary part of any honest "vision zero."
> We know drivers speed, we know they text while driving, we know signs and even enforcement doesn't work etc etc.
Yet we know they can also drive millions of miles this way before causing a single incident.
> that must disallow crashes and people being hit by cars from being possible in the first place.
You can have that. You're just going to have to sacrifice nearly every other modern convenience that people move into cities to experience in the first place.
> Narrower, more winding streets, cobblestone, speed humps and other calming surfaces, more vegetation, raised crosswalks, dedicated and physically segregated (by bollards, concrete blocks etc) spaces for pedestrians, people on bikes etc etc.
And that's the end of your federal road money. As long as your community can afford all of this on it's own, you can do it, if you can't, you must find a compromise.
This idea that the compromise _must_ be thrown away because a few people can't see any other way forward is ridiculous. Particularly on "hacker news."
cars shouldn't be banned in cities, but env should be heavily redesigned to change priorities, like: pedestrian>bike>pub transp>taxis>personal cars. This is the compromise that works - cars are not banned, just less convenient compared to other methods and because of that car trips are faster compared to car priority, bc there are less cars on the road and less congestion, so ppl that actually need and can afford cars(and all related taxes) will have a more pleasant drive
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