you're in command of a few tons of steel, and your priority is to get to some arbitrary location. Your second priority, I assume, is to not murder anyone.
Here's what you know about the environment : it is populated with (harmless fleshly) people who are also going about fulfilling goals 1 and 2. You know with high probability that at any given moment one might quickly cross the path of your vehicle - it is normal (80-90% of people do it) to behave this way.
You can:
- reduce your speed, knowing that accidental collisions are likely. This slightly penalizes your first goal, but greatly increases the outlook for the second.
- Blame 80-90% of everyone, for not taking the cost onto themselves to ensure you can get to your goal quickly without much effort.
I guess it also boils down to your views on responsibility:
"I shouldn't be accountable when the risky situations which i knowingly entered materialize into accidents. Especially because these risks mostly apply to others."
or
"I am personally directing a large amount of kinetic energy for convenience reasons and am responsible of where it ends up. the onus of carefulness befalls me and not the other unwilling participants as they are handling much less kinetic energy and therefore by themselves orders of magnitude less likely to cause the death or injury of others."
After watching hundreds or even thousands of accidents on Youtube it could be said that there typically are two parties that could be blamed for the accident. One is officially at fault but there typically is somebody else who did not pay enough attention or did not slow down at intersection or did not do one of the many things that careful drivers would be expected to do.
Drivers (or pedestrians) with certain attitude that I would describe as expecting everybody to follow the rules but at the same following the rules only selectively and not giving anybody any margin for error are people that I think cause most of accidents.
Everybody makes mistakes and it is in human nature to miss a sign or occasionally misplace attention for a second or two. If everybody was driving defensively most of the time it would take two people to make a mistake at the same time which would cause accidents to be very rare. On the other hand if drivers give no margin for error it only takes a single person to make a mistake.
I have an uncle who thinks he is a good driver. Yes, he can drive fast, precisely, he knows rules and knows how to not be the driver at fault. But while he is not officially causing accidents over the last decade he took part in around a dozen accidents. He is not giving anybody any margin for error and this attitude is what I think is more damaging than people that make mistake from time to time.
Since no one then feels like they are just "in the right" everyone tends to be much more attentive.
The reason the number of accidents got suddenly smaller is because people were used to markings but then they had to re-learn how to function when the markings were removed. When you learn to drive or when you are in unfamiliar place you tend to drive slower and be more attentive.
But this is only temporary effect. After some time people adjust and same problems show up.
Still not convinced? What about south asian countries which tend to have little in the way of traffic signs? If lack of markings makes people behave more carefully how do you explain relative lack of safety in countries like Vietnam, Thailand, etc?
I’d like to see a direct comparison of loss of life vs mph including figures on deaths from increased air pollution and other climate considerations.
I think one could also argue time lost in transit as a “loss of life” but that’s understandably too far for some.
Though 55 mph is much more energy efficient than 65 mph, 35 mph is much more energy efficient than 55 mph as well.
I think the 55 mph point is realistically a balance between energy and time efficiency, not an optimum of energy efficiency alone.
For a while I did experiments with this and the most efficient speed was much slower. 55 is more about safety I would think or it’s possibly totally arbitrary.
I think you'd see it in a very different light if you were living here. I am honestly very worried for my friends and relatives who drive, most of whom do it very, very carefully, and still they have yearly encounters with adults who behave like feeble-minded children.
BTW, didn't I say I don't have a driver's license?
I understand how you feel. However if you are right and I am wrong - then your words are not wasted, even if they are not well received, as long as they are read.
> and still they have yearly encounters with adults who behave like feeble-minded children
I guess our road safety practices and status-quo should not bother to extend as far as guaranteeing the well-being of the feeble-minded. Children playing in the street are fair-game.
To be fair, I understand that your viewpoint is economically efficient, to an extent. I can accept that favoring cars has significant economic benefits, and I understand why society has done it at the expense of quality-of-life at the ground level (children shouldn't play in the street, the area around your appartment/house is not for you to enjoy but for commuting strangers, etc), and personal safety.
But is it really necessary to hold on to this so dearly and for so long? Especially when other cities/countries have shown that alternatives are possible and attractive?
I'm not sure the first of those pre-conditions has been met and I doubt our ability to commit as a nation to the second.
Any worries about friends and relatives who walk?
Why should only the driver carry the responsibility? Driving slower than average increases the driver's chances of getting in an accident.
Also, lower speeds aren't guaranteed safety. I know of an accident that occurred around 10-20km/h right next to a hospital, which resulted in instant death. Pedestrian was crossing on red, behind a car parked at the traffic light and flew right into a path of a vehicle, trying to pass the car parked at the semaphore, this bounced him just enough to fall and crack his head on the curb. Ironically, according to policemen, was that had the driver driven faster, he might have bounced pedestrian harder, and not kill him on the spot.
That's why, in "normal" countries, it's always the driver that needs to be questioned by default, not the pedestrian. If the driver proves that he did all he could to avoid the accident, he faces no consequences. If not, he faces them.
This really isn't that complicated. It's okay for the pedestrian to not respect all the rules because he's not in the position in which he can put other people's lives in danger — only his own. Drivers are willingly putting themselves in a situation in which they can put other people's lives in danger, so the burden of proof is on them.
Sure they can. They can increase the likelihood you'll get in danger, by trying to avoid collision with them.
E.g. you drive on a road designed for relatively high speeds say 80-100 km/h. They decide to cross it, despite it not being a safe zone for crossing. You hit the pedals and swerve off the road injuring yourself (or you get rammed by a vehicle behind you).
Injury =/= death. If you swerve off the road, you have airbags. If a car behind you hits you, again, you have airbags. You have tons of metal shielding you from a collision, insurance that is supposed to take care of the situations that can't be blamed on you, and airbags and seat belts that are supposed to reduce the consequences of a collision.
Pedestrians have none of that. Where I come from, this (alongside first-aid skills) is the very first thing you learn on your way of getting a driver's license, before road signs and traffic rules are even mentioned.
A behavior like that should be illegal for both party. The driver is at fault of causing the incident and the pedestrian is at fault of being inconsiderate and a danger to the vehicles (one collision can cause many other collisions) independently from whether the accident actually happened.
I think you have it backwards. The pedestrian that darts out into traffic that cannot stop in time causes the accident. The driver who does not travel slow enough to reasonably hedge themselves against a pedestrian darting out is being inconsiderate.
I agree with you in your (arguably more common) case, but in this case the driver must have had good visibility and enough reaction time.
> Do you think more drivers or pedestrians are harmed by incidents involving both?
pedestrian obviously. This implies to me that regardless of the law, pedestrian should be careful when crossing the streets. From the legal side I believe we should adopt the regulations that are more likely to decrease the number and gravity of incidents, this is heavily dependent of local customs.
> when one party is much more likely to be injured or killed than the other.
the focal point to me is: "When one party's mistake are much more likely to endanger people (both others and themselves)" Where my intention is to focus on how the car is the dangerous element of the equation rather that on how the pedestrian is the one at risk. I personally find it a more solid building block.
However, if the driver was half their age, all else equal, would we say the DMV should assess if they're competent to drive? The primary cause of the accident could be independent of age.
Just bringing some perspective from a country with a lot of idiots (that's what they are -- idiots) needlessly risking their lives.
You want to take out your air-conditioned garbage-spewing box out to race across the city without a single care for anyone else using the streets? Well I think you're an idiot for advocating towards that selfish goal.
> but I think it's idiotic for pedestrians to follow the same intersection rules as a 2 ton vehicle.
I mostly opt for having rules on the pedestrian side. But each person should be careful about their own life and constantly be aware of the current risk.
Recently I've had to take some "defensive pedestrian" tactics and strategies at certain crosswalks at certain corners at certain times of day. It's a little more than the usual common sense for when walking around in an urban environment, but it's helped.