First, we only need to slow down cars to 25mph where pedestrians are present. It’s not like cities with low pedestrian fatalities are stuck in the Middle Ages. Places where pedestrians are separated from cars can and should go faster.

Secondly I find it disturbing that discussions around acceptable traffic fatalities focus on unnamed and unspecified people as the apparently acceptable fatalities in pursuit of shorter commutes. I think this let’s a lot of people push off that moral calculus as something that happens to other, lesser, people. See: the reactions once people realized that Uber’s self driving car had killed a homeless woman. A better question is “what is the acceptable level of risk for you and your family to accept in return for faster commutes?”

Finally, don’t underestimate the feedback effect. High speeds are only economically necessary, if they even are, because we’ve chosen to design cities in a way that assumes high speed car traffic. Continuing to focus on keeping traffic going just puts off very necessary and politically difficult discussions about public transit and housing density. We could setup a society where 25mph in the cities works just fine, but we’ve made the explicit choice not to, and continue to reinforce that.

> we only need to slow down cars to 25mph where pedestrians are present.

I don't have the numbers on hand, but I would wager to guess that a good chunk of road injuries and deaths happen not just between drivers and pedestrians, but between drivers and other drivers.

Also, most areas in the US where pedestrians can be present are already limited to 25mph/35mph.

60% of the 2019 road fatalities in Los Angeles were non-drivers. So drivers represent a good chunk, but not even a majority. Of course this statistic is going to very wildly based on which city we’re talking about.

To be fair to my original point, we can also reduce driver fatalities by slowing down highways and offering non-car transit options. The lowest hanging fruit in this area is probably shifting cargo transit from road to rail as much as possible, which might actually save the public money, since interstate highway companies receive billions of dollars in subsidy via subsidized road maintenance.

Secondarily would be high speed rail between major metropolitan areas, which would potentially save both road miles (and deaths) but drastically shorten the commute for some citizens.

It kills me that we give such huge hidden subsidies to the trucking industry. Every time this discussion comes up, at least on Reddit, someone always comes out of the woodwork claiming that truckers pay a bunch of fuel tax and registration fees and that proposals to increase taxes on trucking is going to drive up the costs of all goods. For anyone who isn't already aware, the "billions of dollars in subsidy" is in reference to the substantial amount of damage large trucks do to the roads. My Honda Civic going down the road does basically no damage to it at all and it doesn't appreciably damage the road. A large truck going down the road at 80,000 lbs is going to cause far more damage to the road than the fuel tax and registration fees that they paid. Road wear scales to the fourth power of axle weight, so aside from road age itself the vast majority of wear is solely from trucking.

https://www.denenapoints.com/relationship-vehicle-weight-roa...

>60% of the 2019 road fatalities in Los Angeles were non-driver

Non-driver != pedestrian. Non-drivers include car passengers.

In this case the statistics specifically refer to pedestrians and cyclists, I just shortened it to “non driver” here, which wasn’t an accurate way to summarize the stats.

> I think this let’s a lot of people push off that moral calculus as something that happens to other, lesser, people

The main person I put at risk when driving fast is me. Others too, sure, but mostly me.

So it's not at all bout killing "other lesser people". People mostly just think some risks are worth the reward.

Where I am, Los Angeles, that is simply not true. 60% of the people killed here by a car in 2019 weren’t in a car. And that’s not even accounting for drivers who were driving reasonably and were killed by someone who was not.