Key missing component: CAFE needs a rewrite. US emissions laws have a cutout so that larger vehicles have less stringent emissions requirements. The problem is that this is no longer a gap it's a chasm. Slight hyperbole but a Japanese kei car many Americans would love town own muat do closer to 50mpg, while a monster pickup can do 15mpg. It ends up that a small car can cost $15,000 and the giant pickup costs... $15,000. Many consumers compare the two and wonder if the econobox is really a good choice.
The bright shining hope: Most Americans do not want these big cars. Legislation is making small vehicles less competitive, when it should be the other way.
AKA - we have good, cheap(ish) electric trucks now. Legislation doesn't need to worry about farmers who can't afford electric anymore.
People keep repeating this but isn’t the case. The smallest cars from budget automakers are their cheapest cars and they’ve almost all been discontinued for lack of sales. I know, I drive one. And people look at it as a joke, they’d never buy one, and they think it’s hilarious I do. I’d buy another for my commute vehicle when this one diesbecause I do like it but Honda discontinued it for miserable sales numbers.
Americans by and large want SUVs at a minimum the size of CRV or RAV4, or else a pickup. At any rate with hybrid vehicles getting 40mpg is very attainable. I have a three row SUV that gets this. And I bought it because I really wanted a much more comfortable vehicle I could fit more humans and stuff in.
Other comments addressed this, but it’s also absolutely bananas to claim trucks are as cheap as small cars in the US. Even the F-150 quoted in the comments which is already more than 10k more than the car is quoted as the base model that basically doesn’t exist outside of work fleets. You’d be lucky to find a truck with 100k miles for 15k.
Honda Civic is $24,000. Ford F-150 is $36,000. These are representative prices for popular budget choices. And that baseline F-150 isn't a behemoth. It's 209" long and 76" tall. That's just 10" longer and taller than, say, Tesla Model X.
I think the emission standards are dumb, but this narrative around customer choice is really getting distorted in weird ways. The bottom line is that people in the US want to drive pickups. Maybe for good reasons, maybe for bad reasons, but they go out of their way to do this. And the average pickup is probably shrinking right now, not growing - for example, there are fewer and fewer models with 8" beds, and 5.5" is the new standard (instead of 6").
Yes, a newspaper can always post a photo of a lifted 2024 RAM 3500 next to a 1975 Chevy C10 pickup to get some internet outrage points, but if you post an apples-to-apples comparison, the changes aren't really all that dramatic.
> And the average pickup is probably shrinking right now, not growing - for example, there are fewer and fewer models with 8" beds, and 5.5" is the new standard (instead of 6").
For non-Americans: While literally writing truck bed lengths being 8 inches (8") and 5.5 inches (5.5"), the text means 8 feet (8', 2.44m) and 5.5 feet (5.5', 1.68m). Americans don't always remember which of the " and ' is which, so they use these interchangeably (and according to the movie This is Spinal Tap, so do the English).
That’s more a function of crew cabs and using a pickup as a family vehicle. The bed has to shorten as the cab lengthens, else the truck gets unmanageablely long.
The F-150 is +1216mm (48") longer, +228mm wider, +546mm taller than a Civic.
> It's 209" long and 76" tall. That's just 10" longer and taller than, say, Tesla Model X.
What is the front-end height of all of these vehicles?
> Pedestrian deaths in the US have risen in recent years. Concurrently, US vehicles have increased in size, which may pose a safety risk for pedestrians. In particular, the increased height of vehicle front-ends may present a danger for pedestrians in a crash, as the point of vehicle contact is more likely to occur at the pedestrian’s chest or head. I merge US crash data with a public data set on vehicle dimensions to test for the impact of vehicle height on the likelihood that a struck pedestrian dies. After controlling for crash characteristics, I estimate a 10 cm increase in the vehicle’s front-end height is associated with a 22% increase in fatality risk. I estimate that a cap on front-end vehicle heights of 1.25 m would reduce annual US pedestrian deaths by 509.
> Honda Civic is $24,000. Ford F-150 is $36,000. These are representative prices for popular budget choices. And that baseline F-150 isn't a behemoth. It's 209" long and 76" tall. That's just 10" longer and taller than, say, Tesla Model X.
Disingenuous as heck. I've literally never seen a modern non-commercial regular cab, standard bed F-150. Far more likely the people in question are driving massive SuperCrew cabs. And those SuperCrews start at $43,000 which means more like $50,000 for a realistic spec.
> And the average pickup is probably shrinking right now, not growing - for example, there are fewer and fewer models with 8" beds, and 5.5" is the new standard (instead of 6").
Nope, as you can see above bed may be shrinking, cab growing and growing.
A big problem with the idea that “people don’t want small cars” is that that sort of statement comes from the car manufacturer looking at new car sales. People who want large trucks and SUVs are willing to buy new. People who want a small car have the option to buy a new 2024 Honda Civic, or they could spend significantly less to get a used Honda Civic (in normal economic conditions). Since the manufacturer only profits of of new cars, they have little incentive to sell any cheap or small cars since they compete so heavily against last year’s model at the used car lot.
I get so tired of people mindlessly citing CAFE laws.
A lot of people like bigger vehicles. For ages, big cars drove poorly, absolutely guzzled gas, and lacked features. Over the past 20 years, auto makers basically solved all of these issues.
A lot of big vehicles drive much better for what most people do - straight driving on highway. Fuel economy is “good enough”. Large trucks and SUVs have great feature sets. On top of all of that, large vehicles seat more, hold more, and generally still fit in most parking spaces and garages.
Based on what? Anecdotal I know, but my biggest frustration is I can't convince friends and family they should buy a small car instead of an SUV because they always say "I might need to move a couch/dresser/friends/etc one day". I'm convinced they would come out way ahead buying a small car and renting a truck the once or twice a year they need it but again, I've yet to convince anyone that's the case
Because the small car is the same cost as an SUV but worse utility wise. I actually go the other way, I bet the back row of an SUV (or tall hatchback like the Honda Fit) gets more use carrying people or large items than the back row of your average sedan. During growing season I'm constantly schlepping dirt and mulch home. I can fit 5 humans and all our camping supplies no problem. Fit a whole assembled grill in the back we got from FB marketplace.
You get the utility of a truck and van with the MPG of a car, I see why they took over the world. If it weren't for pickup trucks being a cultural icon they would probably have replaced the "workman" vehicle too.
We had a small cheap sedan that was rear-ended and pushed into oncoming traffic while waiting to turn when my wife was driving. Since she's been hit thrice in sedans and not once in our minivan, she's come to the conclusion that she needs a bigger vehicle just to be seen. It's not an argument I buy, but I understand how she has reached that conclusion.
Americans "want" big SUVs because they're cheaper than mid-sized sedans. Unfortunately, they pollute more and they're less safe.
The SUV protectionism of import tariffs, safety exclusions, and pollution carve-outs must end because they're killing us on the roads, killing our health through more pollution, and killing the planet.
Beyond personal needs people want what others have, what they see in films, and what they see marketing for. The price and general availability impacts all of those things. Car companies will push what makes most economic sense and consumers will to, which helps create trends people hop on to.
I think electric trucks/SUVs are a major reason changing CAFE standards won't actually solve the problem though since they are at least just as big and dangerous to other road users as gas powered vehicles and are often much faster and heavier. Changing the CAFE standards 20 years ago would have helped avoid the trend of increasing vehicle size, but here on the cusp of widespread electric vehicles I'm not sure it would have the same impact.
What we really need and would never do is to put a pedestrian collision rating in NCAP, which Euro-NCAP already does. (NCAP is the system used to give safety ratings to cars.)
Right now the NCAP has pedestrian avoidance but nothing on impact. It would be fairly trivial to test the impact of hitting a crash dummy at 30mph.
Unless it's a total stripper meant for something like a highway maintenance department fleet vehicle, a "giant pickup" will cost 3 or 4 times that amount.
They'll just move to EV trucks. We need taxes for car sizes (wider lanes needed = money, bigger parking spots needed = money, etc), pedestrian/cyclist safety ratings (more dangerous to pedestrians/cyclists, higher taxes), noise levels and weight (more road wear and tear plus particulate production).
The solution is to stop classifying cars as trucks by invoking a more stringent definition of a truck. The PT Cruiser should never have been a truck. None of the XUVs should be trucks.
Yeah whenever I'm in an SUV I try to compare mileage. They'll get ~30% worse mpg than me in the same situation and I'm just a gas sedan, not even a hybrid
Something that makes this even more insidious, is that trying to change roads to be safer often triggers many studies about the impact of those changes. These range from studies on traffic congestion, to safety itself, local business impact, etc. What makes this so hypocritical is that hardly any of those studies were done when the roads were put in, or subsequently widened. There were no studies on how wide, fast roads would negatively impact neighborhoods. How they would make it dangerous just to walk around, or increase the local pollution (air and particulates ending up in streams). They didn’t study how these widened roads might negatively impact downtowns, etc. All of this car investment happened as though it was for the greater good, and many people still believe this.
> hardly any of those studies were done when the roads were put in, or subsequently widened
Where do you get this idea? NIMBY works every bit as well on new or expanded roads, and it gets used constantly. Hell, we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars just trying to decide if we can build a new bridge, and that doesn't even involve actual planning. It's amazing we get any infrastructure projects done now given that every single person can stall them indefinitely.
This might be true now, but it wasn't when all these massive highways, roads and stroads were built. US cities weren't destroyed because the people that lived there voted on it. For the most part you had a bureaucratic elite come in over the top and simply create laws and change the regulation.
> Something that makes this even more insidious, is that trying to change roads to be safer often triggers many studies about the impact of those changes. These range from studies on traffic congestion, to safety itself, local business impact, etc.
I thought you were going to say they spend all their effort on studies to appease every special interest group instead of actually fixing things.
Studies like this always seem to me to be a formality.
The conclusions are what the person paying for the study wants them to be.
If a local municipality is anti-car, they will run a study justifying adding bike lanes everywhere, even though once they are built you never see bicycles in them, and they create more difficulty for cars by narrowing or taking away lanes.
Or they'll install "traffic calming" speed bumps, chicanes, or curb-extension bottlenecks on neighborhood roads when (almost) nobody in the neighborhood wanted them.
On the other hand, if they are pro-development, their studies will show that a new or widened road will lead to more business development, more jobs, more tax revenue.
At least in my city, devices were installed in many bike lanes in order to count the number of userd. They show that people do use them.
As for traffic calming, curb extensions, etc.: the city only started adding those modifications after pedestrian fatalities started going up and people started demanding them because they got tired of hearing about deaths all of the time.
None of this is because the city is pro/anti-development since most of the projects could be construed either way. In a lot of cases it was simply to see which measures were effective because we often lack the data to know what will be effective.
Your car bias is showing here. The reason bike lanes and traffic calming measures get installed is because people are literally dying due to poor road design that prioritizes car speed over everything else.
You might not want traffic calming, but everyone else who has to deal with your driving does.
We did a study in my neighborhood after two pedestrian deaths. The deaths definitely were the motivator for the community action and studies.
You know why the idiot traffic engineers made the streets so wide in the area where these oversized cars killed two people? “The average commute on the road would be extended by 1 minute.”
"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."
It sounds like the problem we have here is that each individual incident is analyzed and catalogued as an incident, so we never get to 'enemy action'. The most urgent issue to resolve is whose insurance is going to pay for it, which requires assigning blame, and in each case it's usually clear where the blame lies. This is all the system working entirely as expected and we can't really skip this step.
What ought to happen next is that the incidents get compiled, trends turn up, and we change our designs according to those trends.
The article is pretty light on details about the extent to which this isn't happening among traffic engineers. Requiring smaller vehicles or banning touchscreens has to come from Congress, so it's outside the control of any city's engineers. Anecdotally, the engineers in my own city seem pretty determined to consider the possibility that any given accident had a bad design as the root cause, and regularly fix and improve intersections and road markings according to what is happening. They're not perfect, but I don't get the sense that they're resting easy on the assurance that it's all user error either.
There's data that suggests that the increases in vehicle/pedestrian collision is mostly due to the in car displays that require you to take your eyes off of the road to do anything. Most excess collisions since around 2010 collisions have been at night, when peripheral vision is less likely to catch movement, and when the screens will mess up your night vision.
Also, smartphones being used while driving are a massive hazard that people aren't really talking about. The number of people that I, or my passenger, has seen texting while driving is really shocking. I'd wager it's a bigger problem than drunk driving ever was.
This was a huge problem in a car I rented recently. There was so much light coming off the dash I could hardly see the road, and there was no obvious way to dim it (all my older cars have a dedicated knob or wheel to control the dashboard brightness).
This is another issue that plagues a lot of modern cars. Lack of physical buttons and moving a bunch of functionality into the touchscreen which increases distractions and causes the driver to get flustered.
Mine has increase/decrease buttons but once the headlights go on it gets a lot dimmer. I like that except for when I'm going through a tunnel or something and it gets a bit distracting having so much change brightness at once
Check out 'cycling mikey' on youtube. He has all the convictions that prove you are correct.
One area where i do congratulate the british plods is they will convict using gopro footage.
Strangely unhelpful and aggressive when confronted by an auditor, though.
What you mention implies that the US government should mandate HUDs in all vehicles, so that drivers are not incentivized to take their eyes off the road to check speed or directions.
I 10000% support this and I think a good 5% of what makes Elon a bad person was him going on twitter and saying that HUDs are stupid and that teslas will never get one.
> And our reality is one where more pedestrians and bicyclists are getting killed on U.S. streets than at any time in the past 45 years – over 1,000 bicyclists and 7,500 pedestrians in 2022 alone
Yet on that very same page there is a table of pedestrian and bicyclist deaths going back to 1975, which shows that 1977-1981 all had more pedestrian deaths (7732, 7795, 8096, 8070, and 7837) than 2022 (7522). Several of those years are within the last 45 years.
For bicyclists 2022 is indeed the biggest year just edging out 1977 (1084 vs 1003).
This might be forgiven as just being a little sloppy. If he'd just have said "past 40 years" instead of "past 45 years" then it would have been accurate.
But wait...the US population was 338 million in 2022, and around 220 million in 1979. We really should look at rates.
2020 pedestrian deaths per 100k population were 2.22. They were above that every year from 1975-1991. Same for bicyclists--every year from 1975-1991 was higher than 2020.
For pedestrians the rates peaked in 1979 at 3.76 then declined fairly linearly to 1.33 in 2009, then rose again fairly linearly to 1.95 in 2020, then jumped a bit to 2.22 for 2021 and 2022. Same pattern for bicyclists.
Here's a graph of the rates by year [1]. The bicyclist rates are per 1m instead of per 100k to make them easier to read.
I just want to thank you for this effort post. It looks like the general thrust of 'pedestrian and cyclist fatalities are increasing' may be true, even if the particular examples given are not
Here's something [1]. Data on the car market makeup by year is from here [2]. I only used the data for every 5 years because it is in a stacked line chart and I had to turn it into a table by measuring the heights of the various sections and lack the patience to do it for every year [3].
I omitted pickups and vans/minivans because the pickup share hasn't varied much and vans/minivans have a small share and including them made the graph too hard to read. Here are the shares in table form so you can mentally add them back if you wish.
[3] Yes, I first tried ChatGPT. It was able to turn the chart into a table, but it too only did every 5th year, and some of its numbers were quite a bit off.
There is overwhelming evidence against the increase of dependency on car centric transportation. Yet people just don't get it until it impacts them personally (ie, death of loved one, loss of limbs of friends, paralysis, DUI).
I'm honestly done with trying to convince politicians, car-brains, "traffic engineers", transportation departments that they way we have been scaling our infrastructure is a tremendous waste of resources. Every talking point they have presented has a mountain evidence against it, yet they continue churning away at "wE mUsT bUiLd mOrE hIgHwAyS!!1 [at the expense of the federal/state/local budgets, environment, and communities near these projects]".
Maybe those safety rating systems should include the things SUVs are bad at. I think there's one tester who does a body roll test and most SUVs fail to swerve out of the way of something without rolling. Unsure if that's still true. But with that and like a "how likely is your child to be squished dead" rating, maybe people will think twice
The vehicle purchaser’s child will be safely in their third row seat watching the inbuilt Netflix on their personal entertainment display so why should they care?
Some time ago, I read all of the published data on the safety of traffic circles, as I had often seen them recommended as a safer alternative to traffic lights.
I was not very impressed. The confounding factors for the traffic light to circle projects were always far too large, and it always had to be coupled with the fact that it was usually poorest intersections that get rebuilt. I no longer have a high opinion of traffic safety research as a field.
Regarding this article's claims in particular, traffic fatalities went up a certain amount after 2020, and I doubt that road design changes were a primary driver. (Policing trends are one possible candidate.)
Regardless, in the last six months or so, my Tesla's autodrive went from "expensive joke" to "safer driver than me". IMO, leveraging existing technology could cut traffic deaths to a small fraction of what they are now over 3-5 years, were we to pursue aggressive conversion of the existing vehicle fleet.
The city replaced a 4 way stop with a traffic circle and ever since there’s been a car-totaling collision at least every other month. One leg of the circle is fed from a highway off-ramp, with a good portion of folks entering the circle at 150% of the legal limit. Another leg is from a 4 lane road that feeds the highway on-ramp, and those folks are getting amped for highway driving. I’m always nervous in the circle as I can’t count the times I’ve had to quickly brake to avoid being t-boned by some moron who doesn’t understand what a yield sign means.
Traffic circles really need a critical mass of drivers that know how to use them academically before they get installed all over town.
I'm curious how you get car totaling crashes in a traffic circle. Generally the traffic circles that have been installed around me are all relatively small and greatly cut down on speed going through the intersection. I could absolutely see an increase in fender bender style accidents here, because for some reason how to operate a traffic circle is an impossible mystery to Iowa drivers. But how are cars being totaled?
I remember when driving in SoCal, there was a massive traffic circle that I could see people maintaining fairly high speeds through and could see major accidents happening. But everything I see locally would be low speed collisions.
> Traffic circles really need a critical mass of drivers that know how to use them academically before they get installed all over town.
This is why proper driver's licensing & training is so important - in my city & country (Wellington, New Zealand) roundabouts (as well call them) are so common that in some tight intersections they are nothing more than a circle painted on the ground. Everyone knows how to use them, and they end up being very effective.
Readit News
The bright shining hope: Most Americans do not want these big cars. Legislation is making small vehicles less competitive, when it should be the other way.
AKA - we have good, cheap(ish) electric trucks now. Legislation doesn't need to worry about farmers who can't afford electric anymore.
Americans by and large want SUVs at a minimum the size of CRV or RAV4, or else a pickup. At any rate with hybrid vehicles getting 40mpg is very attainable. I have a three row SUV that gets this. And I bought it because I really wanted a much more comfortable vehicle I could fit more humans and stuff in.
Other comments addressed this, but it’s also absolutely bananas to claim trucks are as cheap as small cars in the US. Even the F-150 quoted in the comments which is already more than 10k more than the car is quoted as the base model that basically doesn’t exist outside of work fleets. You’d be lucky to find a truck with 100k miles for 15k.
I think the emission standards are dumb, but this narrative around customer choice is really getting distorted in weird ways. The bottom line is that people in the US want to drive pickups. Maybe for good reasons, maybe for bad reasons, but they go out of their way to do this. And the average pickup is probably shrinking right now, not growing - for example, there are fewer and fewer models with 8" beds, and 5.5" is the new standard (instead of 6").
Yes, a newspaper can always post a photo of a lifted 2024 RAM 3500 next to a 1975 Chevy C10 pickup to get some internet outrage points, but if you post an apples-to-apples comparison, the changes aren't really all that dramatic.
For non-Americans: While literally writing truck bed lengths being 8 inches (8") and 5.5 inches (5.5"), the text means 8 feet (8', 2.44m) and 5.5 feet (5.5', 1.68m). Americans don't always remember which of the " and ' is which, so they use these interchangeably (and according to the movie This is Spinal Tap, so do the English).
Which could also reasonably be called a pretty big car.
That’s more a function of crew cabs and using a pickup as a family vehicle. The bed has to shorten as the cab lengthens, else the truck gets unmanageablely long.
Yeah…
* https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/honda-civic-2021-se...
The F-150 is +1216mm (48") longer, +228mm wider, +546mm taller than a Civic.
> It's 209" long and 76" tall. That's just 10" longer and taller than, say, Tesla Model X.
What is the front-end height of all of these vehicles?
> Pedestrian deaths in the US have risen in recent years. Concurrently, US vehicles have increased in size, which may pose a safety risk for pedestrians. In particular, the increased height of vehicle front-ends may present a danger for pedestrians in a crash, as the point of vehicle contact is more likely to occur at the pedestrian’s chest or head. I merge US crash data with a public data set on vehicle dimensions to test for the impact of vehicle height on the likelihood that a struck pedestrian dies. After controlling for crash characteristics, I estimate a 10 cm increase in the vehicle’s front-end height is associated with a 22% increase in fatality risk. I estimate that a cap on front-end vehicle heights of 1.25 m would reduce annual US pedestrian deaths by 509.
* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221201222...
Disingenuous as heck. I've literally never seen a modern non-commercial regular cab, standard bed F-150. Far more likely the people in question are driving massive SuperCrew cabs. And those SuperCrews start at $43,000 which means more like $50,000 for a realistic spec.
> And the average pickup is probably shrinking right now, not growing - for example, there are fewer and fewer models with 8" beds, and 5.5" is the new standard (instead of 6").Nope, as you can see above bed may be shrinking, cab growing and growing.
A lot of people like bigger vehicles. For ages, big cars drove poorly, absolutely guzzled gas, and lacked features. Over the past 20 years, auto makers basically solved all of these issues.
A lot of big vehicles drive much better for what most people do - straight driving on highway. Fuel economy is “good enough”. Large trucks and SUVs have great feature sets. On top of all of that, large vehicles seat more, hold more, and generally still fit in most parking spaces and garages.
People just want big cars
Based on what? Anecdotal I know, but my biggest frustration is I can't convince friends and family they should buy a small car instead of an SUV because they always say "I might need to move a couch/dresser/friends/etc one day". I'm convinced they would come out way ahead buying a small car and renting a truck the once or twice a year they need it but again, I've yet to convince anyone that's the case
You get the utility of a truck and van with the MPG of a car, I see why they took over the world. If it weren't for pickup trucks being a cultural icon they would probably have replaced the "workman" vehicle too.
Makes a pretty convincing case.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo
The SUV protectionism of import tariffs, safety exclusions, and pollution carve-outs must end because they're killing us on the roads, killing our health through more pollution, and killing the planet.
Right now the NCAP has pedestrian avoidance but nothing on impact. It would be fairly trivial to test the impact of hitting a crash dummy at 30mph.
That's patently false.
We are trully living in the future. :) I heard that cars are getting smarter but you are the first i have the pleasure to chat with.
Joking asside, i don’t know if I have ever seen a more succint example of how people identify with their cars.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Where do you get this idea? NIMBY works every bit as well on new or expanded roads, and it gets used constantly. Hell, we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars just trying to decide if we can build a new bridge, and that doesn't even involve actual planning. It's amazing we get any infrastructure projects done now given that every single person can stall them indefinitely.
I thought you were going to say they spend all their effort on studies to appease every special interest group instead of actually fixing things.
The conclusions are what the person paying for the study wants them to be.
If a local municipality is anti-car, they will run a study justifying adding bike lanes everywhere, even though once they are built you never see bicycles in them, and they create more difficulty for cars by narrowing or taking away lanes.
Or they'll install "traffic calming" speed bumps, chicanes, or curb-extension bottlenecks on neighborhood roads when (almost) nobody in the neighborhood wanted them.
On the other hand, if they are pro-development, their studies will show that a new or widened road will lead to more business development, more jobs, more tax revenue.
As for traffic calming, curb extensions, etc.: the city only started adding those modifications after pedestrian fatalities started going up and people started demanding them because they got tired of hearing about deaths all of the time.
None of this is because the city is pro/anti-development since most of the projects could be construed either way. In a lot of cases it was simply to see which measures were effective because we often lack the data to know what will be effective.
You might not want traffic calming, but everyone else who has to deal with your driving does.
You know why the idiot traffic engineers made the streets so wide in the area where these oversized cars killed two people? “The average commute on the road would be extended by 1 minute.”
It sounds like the problem we have here is that each individual incident is analyzed and catalogued as an incident, so we never get to 'enemy action'. The most urgent issue to resolve is whose insurance is going to pay for it, which requires assigning blame, and in each case it's usually clear where the blame lies. This is all the system working entirely as expected and we can't really skip this step.
What ought to happen next is that the incidents get compiled, trends turn up, and we change our designs according to those trends.
The article is pretty light on details about the extent to which this isn't happening among traffic engineers. Requiring smaller vehicles or banning touchscreens has to come from Congress, so it's outside the control of any city's engineers. Anecdotally, the engineers in my own city seem pretty determined to consider the possibility that any given accident had a bad design as the root cause, and regularly fix and improve intersections and road markings according to what is happening. They're not perfect, but I don't get the sense that they're resting easy on the assurance that it's all user error either.
Also, smartphones being used while driving are a massive hazard that people aren't really talking about. The number of people that I, or my passenger, has seen texting while driving is really shocking. I'd wager it's a bigger problem than drunk driving ever was.
This was a huge problem in a car I rented recently. There was so much light coming off the dash I could hardly see the road, and there was no obvious way to dim it (all my older cars have a dedicated knob or wheel to control the dashboard brightness).
This is another issue that plagues a lot of modern cars. Lack of physical buttons and moving a bunch of functionality into the touchscreen which increases distractions and causes the driver to get flustered.
I 10000% support this and I think a good 5% of what makes Elon a bad person was him going on twitter and saying that HUDs are stupid and that teslas will never get one.
Deleted Comment
It links to https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/yearl... for that 7500 pedestrians in 2022 figure.
Yet on that very same page there is a table of pedestrian and bicyclist deaths going back to 1975, which shows that 1977-1981 all had more pedestrian deaths (7732, 7795, 8096, 8070, and 7837) than 2022 (7522). Several of those years are within the last 45 years.
For bicyclists 2022 is indeed the biggest year just edging out 1977 (1084 vs 1003).
This might be forgiven as just being a little sloppy. If he'd just have said "past 40 years" instead of "past 45 years" then it would have been accurate.
But wait...the US population was 338 million in 2022, and around 220 million in 1979. We really should look at rates.
2020 pedestrian deaths per 100k population were 2.22. They were above that every year from 1975-1991. Same for bicyclists--every year from 1975-1991 was higher than 2020.
For pedestrians the rates peaked in 1979 at 3.76 then declined fairly linearly to 1.33 in 2009, then rose again fairly linearly to 1.95 in 2020, then jumped a bit to 2.22 for 2021 and 2022. Same pattern for bicyclists.
Here's a graph of the rates by year [1]. The bicyclist rates are per 1m instead of per 100k to make them easier to read.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/BJ2h9o9
Edit: Mmm.. Possibly correlates more with smartphone usage..
I omitted pickups and vans/minivans because the pickup share hasn't varied much and vans/minivans have a small share and including them made the graph too hard to read. Here are the shares in table form so you can mentally add them back if you wish.
[1] https://imgur.com/gallery/pedestrian-death-rates-car-market-...[2] https://www.theautopian.com/heres-the-exact-year-suv-sales-o...
[3] Yes, I first tried ChatGPT. It was able to turn the chart into a table, but it too only did every 5th year, and some of its numbers were quite a bit off.
I'm honestly done with trying to convince politicians, car-brains, "traffic engineers", transportation departments that they way we have been scaling our infrastructure is a tremendous waste of resources. Every talking point they have presented has a mountain evidence against it, yet they continue churning away at "wE mUsT bUiLd mOrE hIgHwAyS!!1 [at the expense of the federal/state/local budgets, environment, and communities near these projects]".
I was not very impressed. The confounding factors for the traffic light to circle projects were always far too large, and it always had to be coupled with the fact that it was usually poorest intersections that get rebuilt. I no longer have a high opinion of traffic safety research as a field.
Regarding this article's claims in particular, traffic fatalities went up a certain amount after 2020, and I doubt that road design changes were a primary driver. (Policing trends are one possible candidate.)
Regardless, in the last six months or so, my Tesla's autodrive went from "expensive joke" to "safer driver than me". IMO, leveraging existing technology could cut traffic deaths to a small fraction of what they are now over 3-5 years, were we to pursue aggressive conversion of the existing vehicle fleet.
Traffic circles really need a critical mass of drivers that know how to use them academically before they get installed all over town.
I remember when driving in SoCal, there was a massive traffic circle that I could see people maintaining fairly high speeds through and could see major accidents happening. But everything I see locally would be low speed collisions.
This is why proper driver's licensing & training is so important - in my city & country (Wellington, New Zealand) roundabouts (as well call them) are so common that in some tight intersections they are nothing more than a circle painted on the ground. Everyone knows how to use them, and they end up being very effective.
Dead Comment