Via Streetsblog:
Fatalities per billion kilometers driven from 1970 to 2005 for selected countries
We (the U.S.) used to lead the world in traffic safety. We’ve plateaued and others who lagged far behind are about to pass us…
Via Streetsblog:
Fatalities per billion kilometers driven from 1970 to 2005 for selected countries
We (the U.S.) used to lead the world in traffic safety. We’ve plateaued and others who lagged far behind are about to pass us…
14 responses to “Safety Progress Lagging”
Given that the average American drives a lot further than the average Japanese citizen, the numbers are actually far worse then they look when you start comparing them on a per capita basis…
There are a couple things that I think of off hand…
1) Speed limits. (Regardless of what Mel Zucker thinks,) Higher speeds are are more dangerous, and we’ve raised a lot of them recently… If you go 9% faster, (60 mph vs 55 mph), your car has to deal with 18% more energy when you crash…
2) SUVs. They may make the occupants feel safer, but if you look at the data, (here is one study, but certainly not the only one,) they aren’t, and they kill a lot of other people in the process too. (That study points out that minivans are very safe, but also says that most minivans aren’t driven by the elderly, or young males, which might have something to do with it.)
3) Poor education. When I was in elementary school, you had to take drivers education in order to graduate from high school. When I got to high school, they cut it, (along with personal finance, which I think explains a lot of problems with the US today as well,) because they didn’t have the money… So my parents taught me how to drive, (and how to balance a checkbook,) and while I personally turned out okay, imagine what would happen to the US if we did the same thing to other subjects like Chemisty or Biology. (We’d all believe that CO2 didn’t cause global warming and that evolution didn’t exist. Ohhh, wait… I think I see the problem here. See panel 3)
4) Poor enforcement. Finland gives out $100,000+ tickets for speeding (for doing 50 mph in a 25 mph zone,) here the fine is a couple hundred dollars, and they don’t even stop you until you are 10 mph over… Likewise, we ignore traffic control devices: I was counting bicycles at the intersection of N Willis and Portsmouth a few days ago: It is a 4 way stop, but 90+% of the cars (including the police cars,) didn’t perform a legal stop, and quite a few of them blew through at 10+mph…
5) We’ve stopped spending money on the problem. Most of the money is spent on maintenance, there is very little left over for upgrades. For instance, a lot of our traffic signals are from the 50s. Who else, (besides air traffic controllers,) is still using 50 year old electronic equipment? For instance, countdown signals on walk signs could save a lot of lives, but we lack the money[political will] to install them…
1) Speed limits. (Regardless of what Mel Zucker thinks,) Higher speeds are are more dangerous, and we’ve raised a lot of them recently…
Really? The last time I read the news, ODOT declined to raise most of the speed requests per the legislative request to do so. In fact, it only raised the speed limit on I-84 from I-205 to Troutdale (from 55 MPH to 60 MPH) and on I-5 through Salem city limits (again from 55 to 60 MPH).
Have fatality rates increased on either of these two roads? Nope.
Speed doesn’t kill, its the speed in relation to the highway design (and the driver’s action to the design). Driving 70 MPH on a road designed for 70 MPH is not deadly. Driving 70 MPH on SE Tacoma Street is. The speed is identical, the road isn’t. When someone runs off the road it’s easy to blame speed, but was the sole reason the physics behind the vehicle attempting to maintain a straight line at the rate of speed in relation to the pavement surface, or was it the driver not paying attention and negotiating the curve? Yeah, he was hampered by the speed, but the mere motion of the vehicle didn’t cause it; otherwise planes wouldn’t fly, freeways wouldn’t exist, and MAX (which travels at up to 55 MPH) would be nothing more than a glorified heavy Streetcar with a top speed of 25, and it’d take two hours to get to Gresham.
We started to plateaued in 1992 or so, and yes, we (the US is where the stats come from, although Oregon too,) have raised a lot of speed limits since then, (not just those two streets.)
“Have fatality rates increased on either of these two roads? Nope.”
That is a very small sample size, so that really has no bearing on anything at all. However, if you compare a more modern[safer] car to an older car in exactly the same crashes, fatality rates should be lower with the more modern car. As a result, fatality rates “not increasing” doesn’t mean that the road is just as safe, it means that we’ve erased the gains in safety that the car manufacturers spent millions of dollars to get.
“When someone runs off the road it’s easy to blame speed, but was the sole reason the physics behind the vehicle attempting to maintain a straight line at the rate of speed in relation to the pavement surface, or was it the driver not paying attention and negotiating the curve?”
That is the same thing. If the driver was paying attention, they wouldn’t have been going so fast in the first place. Almost all car accidents are “operator error,” the reason they “blame speed” for them is because they want to know what sort of operator error it was…
However, my point is that when you hit something at a faster speed, you are more likely to die. Avoiding the collision in the first place is good, don’t get me wrong, but a collision at more dangerous the faster you are going. When planes crash nose first into the ground, everyone on board dies. When parachutists crash into the ground, they rarely die. They both hit the same large immovable object, the difference is how fast they did it.
First of all, looking at the graph, its not like we’re getting much worse than other countries; it could be that everyone is reaching a limit of what can be achieved.
However, I do not think that we are doing as best as we could on safety. Education and enforcement can indeed be poor, and because this country has been built so that automobiles are often considered necessary to get around, keeping unsafe drivers off the roads is discouraged, since it can imprison them by making it very hard to get around.
“First of all, looking at the graph, its not like we’re getting much worse than other countries; it could be that everyone is reaching a limit of what can be achieved.”
Uhhg, I hope not. Between 1990 and 2000, 467 people died in traffic accidents in Portland. Compare that to murders in the same time period: 427. People don’t stand around and say “Well, we’ve got the crime rate as low as it is going to go,” so why do we treat traffic fatalities like that?
Erik Halstead Says:
Speed doesn’t kill, its the speed in relation to the highway design (and the driver’s action to the design). Driving 70 MPH on a road designed for 70 MPH is not deadly. Driving 70 MPH on SE Tacoma Street is. The speed is identical, the road isn’t. When someone runs off the road it’s easy to blame speed, but was the sole reason the physics behind the vehicle attempting to maintain a straight line at the rate of speed in relation to the pavement surface, or was it the driver not paying attention and negotiating the curve?
Thank you Eric. I now don’t have to state the obvious. I hate “speed” being blamed as the issue, it isn’t the root of the problem, but often is attacked as if it is. Then when the issue still exists people scratch their heads.
I think one of the reasons there isn’t political will to fight for “safer” auto driving etc is the simple fact that it is insanely safe as things currently exist.
Keep in mind too, most of the laws, legistlative action, cops, and all that mess hasn’t done the most work in decreasing fatalities and increasing safety. The number one reason is better engineering, better design, better equipment, and better driving characteristics of vehicles. Today’s SUV has more control than yesteryears cars. An important thing to remember.
————-
“When someone runs off the road it’s easy to blame speed, but was the sole reason the physics behind the vehicle attempting to maintain a straight line at the rate of speed in relation to the pavement surface, or was it the driver not paying attention and negotiating the curve?”
That is the same thing. If the driver was paying attention, they wouldn’t have been going so fast in the first place.
It is very likely Matthew, that they would have been going just as fast.
When planes crash nose first into the ground, everyone on board dies. When parachutists crash into the ground, they rarely die. They both hit the same large immovable object, the difference is how fast they did it.
You failed to mention the main solution. The effect is to decrease speed, but it is by design. If people should go slower, design roads so that people do that. We know how to do this. If something is supposed to be a car only thoroughfare (ie interstate) then it should be built for SPEED. The whole damn point is to enable commerce (and allow the military to land airplanes and move equipment), so why do we retard it so by limiting the technology (cars) that is capable of so MUCH MORE!
It’s all kinda retarded/stupid/nonsensical, etc.
“It is very likely Matthew, that they would have been going just as fast.”
Let me give you an example: Terwilliger curves. You are right that they should be straightened out, but that will be very expensive and it hasn’t happened yet and it isn’t going to happen soon either. In the meantime, there is an accident there almost every day. Many of those accidents could be prevented if people simply drove slower, in fact, there are big signs with flashing lights before the curves that tell you to do exactly that, but they don’t… Your argument seems to be that loaded semi-trucks could safely navigate those curves at 65 if they were simply paying more attention, but history seems to indicate otherwise.
Adding to the list:
6) Cell phones.
Adding to the list:
6) Cell phones.
THANK YOU MATTHEW!!!
Studies, both scientific and otherwise, have shown that people using cell phones while operating vehicles are as impaired or more than those who are drunk(!) – even when using hands-free devices:
Since we’ve outlawed drunk driving (and rightfully so), we – or our elected officials – should have the intelligence to outlaw driving while using cell phones.
it isn’t the root of the problem,
Well, yes it is. Even an unprotected pedestrian hit by an auto going 15 mph would likely survive, often with nothing worse than bruises. At 25 mph they would more likely be dead.
Almost every traffic fatality is a result of the trade off between speed and safety. We have simply accepted the price of 40-50,000 lives each year as the cost of faster trips.
And traffic speeds over 30 or 40 mph require more road space to move the same amount of traffic. So if you look at safety and road congestion, both can be attributed to the demand to travel faster.
As for cell phones, you will have to unglue the ear of most politicians from their phone to get their attention. I think we have lost that battle. You aren’t going to get people to stop talking because they are too distracted to recognize the near misses. And even when something goes drastically wrong, they don’t recognize their distraction had anything to do with it.
If people remember the woman who drove her car off the Morrison Bridge (or was it Hawthorne) a few years ago and into the Willamette. She was talking on the phone. But even after being miraculously fished out of the river unscathed she denied talking on the phone had anything to do with her losing control and driving over the side.
Again, “talking on the phone” is not inherently dangerous, otherwise every airport in the world would collapse from the mass caused by people crashing because they were standing and talking on their phones.
If talking on the phone (actually that was not the source of the study, it was any electronic distraction that involves interaction by the user/driver) was made illegal, then why do police officers (who likely need MORE concentration on the road, not less) get a free pass despite the huge amount of electronic devices in their car (multiple radios, cell phone, mobile data terminal)? At least paramedics and fire trucks have a second occupant that mans the radio and uses any other equipment, but police cars often don’t (especially OSP Troopers).
As for a pedestrian being struck by a fast moving car, let’s see. Was the pedestrian jaywalking? If so – is the source of the incident the driver’s speed, or the fact that the pedestrian was in an area they shouldn’t be? Both that pedestrian and the car could have safely co-existed (and survived) despite the speed of the automobile – so once again it becomes a design/human factor. If the motorist barrels down the sidewalk and kills a pedestrian, it’s not “speed” (speed might have been a contributing factor), but it’s the fact that the car was not where it should have been, and I’d properly call that “reckless driving”.
If we want to insist for an absolute safe environment, then we must do the following:
1. Ban all mechanical devices.
2. Ban all electric devices (for fear of electrocution, or failure which could cause a fire).
3. Ban any structure taller than one story (particularly in our geologically active area!)
4. Ban any development that is in any type of a flood plain, landslide prone area, near a volcano, or other unstable area.
5. Ban any development that alters the natural geological features of the land. (including dams, retaining walls, or requires massive logging or resloping).
And as an aside, we must also focus on limiting population growth, in part by restricting the number of children that can be born as well as to restrict immigration only to equal emigration so as to provide for no net population growth. This way we will not have to grow out more than what is absolutely necessary for the community.
“Again, “talking on the phone” is not inherently dangerous, otherwise every airport in the world would collapse from the mass caused by people crashing because they were standing and talking on their phones.”
You are right, talking on a cell phone doesn’t cause buildings to collapse, so clearly it is safe to do while driving. Come to think of it, smoking doesn’t cause buildings to collapse either, so it can’t possibly be bad for your lungs. But a bus running into a building can indeed cause the building to collapse, where as MAX never runs into a building in the first place, so the lesson we need to take away from this is that MAX is better than a bus.
Erik, I get what you’re saying, but you’re being overly cynical about it. The fact is that a great deal of people I see on the road aren’t skilled enough drivers to handle the task of driving alone – introduce anything extra into the equation and it gets much worse. Even the most capable drivers I’ve known (several professional drivers, a stunt driver, a few race car drivers) aren’t safe to drive while intoxicated, and by your philosophy, it isn’t the alcohol that is dangerous, so why is that illegal? Because it results in accidents and deaths.
Again, studies show that while distracted by an electronic device (most often a cell phone or changing a CD), even while moving in straight line, vehicle operators are less attentive than those who are intoxicated, and a large number of accidents and deaths over the last decade are the result of somebody driving while distracted, making it a serious safety concern.
If we’re going to look the other way simply for the convenience, then we ought to be requiring all drivers to take driving safety courses before they are issued a license. Driving is a very, very serious thing, piloting roughly two tons of mass, and yet hardly anybody who does it takes it seriously enough, otherwise they wouldn’t be making phone calls and changing CD’s while they’re moving. We Americans are so callous about driving, we forget that it is both a luxury and a privilege to do so. We thumb our nose at the dangers and shrug off the statistics that prove how dangerous driving truly is in this country.
we ought to be requiring all drivers to take driving safety courses before they are issued a license.
And do we tell them that talking on the phone while driving is inherently dangerous? That someone who uses a cell phone while driving is being as anti-social and irresponsible as someone who is driving falling down drunk?
The changing CD stuff is a red herring designed to dilute the dangerousness of talking on the phone. It takes a couple seconds of distraction to change a CD, people can drive a half hour while talking on the phone.
And do we tell them that talking on the phone while driving is inherently dangerous? That someone who uses a cell phone while driving is being as anti-social and irresponsible as someone who is driving falling down drunk?
Yes, that lesson would be a part of teaching people how to drive safely.
Ultimately I believe it should be outright illegal to talk on a phone while you drive, though. People would drive drunk if it was only “suggested” that they shouldn’t; they do anyway even though it’s illegal (and repeatedly in many cases).
And no matter what legal action is or is not taken on the cell phone topic, a driver safety course should be required for all drivers, in my opinion. I’ve always felt that way, though. Germany should serve as a model for the issuance of driver’s licenses. While there are certainly accidents on the speed-limitless sections of the autobahn, it does not occur at the rate of accidents here in the states.