[0] https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2010/04/inflated_traffic...
Wary = cautious about
This long lecture is making me weary.
He was wary of drunk people with an attitude.
I can't find a source for it, but they are definitely rarer than most other places, and I feel like they are taken more serious because of it.
It's true however that some countries are more prone to what I call "traffic restrictions overshoot" then others - e.g. in Italy there are many stretches of highway limited to 50 km/h, apparently in hopes that drivers will at least reduce their speed to 70-80 km/h, and many STOP signs hoping that drivers will at least slow down at the intersection.
But I'd think a Give Way sign should suffice in practice even if the intersection has poor visibility. Only if the intersection proves to cheat drivers in to thinking the visibility is not so bad (and hence drivers won't slow down enough) is a Stop sign needed?
It's the old "if it looks safe but isn't".
For safety, the crosses should probably be placed far ahead of the dangerous corner, not distracting drivers at the precise point they most need to pay attention.
Perhaps they could install some sort of blinking warning light on top of the hill and maybe joyriding teenagers would heed that warning, or maybe not. Otherwise I think you'd have to cut through the hill or move the roads completely, either of which there probably isn't much money for.
On the side of a hill? That's a ton of earthwork.
Country lanes don't get roundabouts. There's no money for that.
This also seems to be farm country. Converting productive fields to non-productive traffic calming structures would be about as popular as banning pickup trucks.
A example of this (here done for laugh) is [0], where a single lane muddy curvy hillside road has a speed limit of 80 km/h (50 mph).
The point I would like to make here is that on a street like this is it impossible to joyride and even with low visibility intersections the risk of a T-bone or a fatal crash is minuscule.
This particular example is a strawman of the problem: there are many reasons why most roads cannot be like this, it is just an example of "If the drivers have to pay attention they will pay attention"
The vast majority of rural roads get plowed. Everyone who lives in a rural area has at least one plowed route from their driveway to the rest of the world.
I'd just love it if roundabout signs posted before the entrance showed: * The lane starting from the left, that you need to be in to get to a certain exit * Number of lanes/exit
Atm it's a bunch of guesswork involving: * Not being able to see the arrows/road names painted on the road because THEY'RE COVERED BY CARS OH HOW DID WE NOT THINK OF THIS * Not being able to see the arrows/road names painted on the road because they're so faded because they haven't been painted in 5-10 years
It's several orders of magnitudes different amounts of effort. Putting up a cross can be done one person in an hour. Fixing a road or intersection is months of work for tens of people,several machines, tonnes of material. Source: I've worked on making several dangerous intersection less dangerous
Economics/value of human lives at play, I guess...
I mean, I want to know when I'm on a road that's got problems, so it's useful for that much I guess, but we kind of have that already in form of the roadside memorial (Descansos) trend that crept north from Mexico and Texas, If a road merits a "safety corridor" sign changes should be being made, otherwise you risk an incentive to build dangerous roads or to do nothing more about them in order to make more money on traffic tickets.
The most dangerous roadways are what Strong Towns (article source) refers to as a stroad, which are characterized by many, wide lanes, with frequent turnoffs and other points of conflict. They make drivers feel safe, and so they go fast (regardless of speed limit) and kill people. There is a lot more nuance there that is valuable to learn about, but at the moment, it is really difficult to build safe streets, and even fix unsafe streets, in North America.
This relates to a general issue with society(in the US, and to varying extents in other industrialized countries) that has gradually crept up over time: in the post-war period, one-size-fits-all bureaucracy was normalized across many institutions. The rules were necessarily kept simple and strict, using a small amount of data, so that they could be followed accurately. When an exception was needed you talked to an appropriate contact and hoped you were listened to. It was under this system that you got things like the interstates, redlining and urban renewal projects, because there was arbitrary power to decide what was built where and all you had to pass to get a shovel-ready project was a routine checklist.
Then computerization took over and every bureaucracy started adding more complex data models and rulesets. More choices appeared, forms got bigger, more rounds of approvals were added and everyone lost track of who to talk to when things went wrong. You are more likely to be addressed as a categorical minority(e.g. gender or ethnicity) but aren't allowed to be singularly exceptional because there's too much automation in the way.
And when we look at the state of road infrastructure now there's absolutely a case of that phenomenon: The design premise remains locked in "first design for cars at speed" and then other modes are the exceptions that are harder to access: you have to make exceptions to have less parking space, exceptions to add bike paths, exceptions to try a different intersection design and so forth. Major cities are undergoing reform to a lot of these rules, but at varying rates and levels of pessimization. Once you have an established rule, it's not a career-ender to follow it blindly, so you have to take a risk to not follow it.
What kind of lunacy is that.
Basically the city I lived in is going anti-car, which would be cool... if it weren't for ALSO de-prioritizing bicycling, busses, and sidewalks. Basically, it's anti-car and laggard to non-caring about alternate choices.
note: i am a leftist. Cars need reduced, significantly. But that also means converting roads to trails, making friendlier bicycling/walking areas, better and free public transit. Basically it'd be improving society at all levels upward - from a pollution, transit, AND poverty position. Which, in the case of the US neoliberal "you will suffer", well, won't really happen except in actual leftist enclaves.
There is a very good reason:
> Results show that the average risk of severe injury for a pedestrian struck by a vehicle reaches 10% at an impact speed of 16 mph, 25% at 23 mph, 50% at 31 mph, 75% at 39 mph, and 90% at 46 mph. The average risk of death for a pedestrian reaches 10% at an impact speed of 23 mph, 25% at 32 mph, 50% at 42 mph, 75% at 50 mph, and 90% at 58 mph. https://aaafoundation.org/impact-speed-pedestrians-risk-seve...
And this understates the difference, because at lower speed those collisions are also much less likely to occur at all.
If you could systematically reduce the speed on all urban/suburban streets to no more than 20 mph (actual driving speed, not posted limit), it would be a huge safety win for humans living in those places.
It would also make the environment much calmer, quieter, and less stressful.
What evidence is there that the attrition we see from car accidents is actually a net-loss for society?
Furthermore, is safety the highest priority, or is it balanced with other concerns, including road efficiency?
If safety trumps all other priorities, why don’t we just eliminate roads altogether. We can mandate that everyone wear inflatable sumo suits, assign a personal “safety monitor” to every individual, responsible for ensuring they do not make unsafe choices, and then monitor the safety monitors to make sure they’re correctly monitoring everyone else.
Or, we can accept that life has risks and that “accidental” death isn’t actually the worst thing on a societal level.
What does "attrition" mean? People killed in car crashes? How could that not be a net loss? Your second sentence says "furthermore" to introduce the idea of the cost of safety measures, so that seems to imply the first sentence isn't considering the cost of safety measures.
Yes
> How could that not be a net loss?
Is every human a net-positive to society? Obviously an objective measure is impossible to establish, but I doubt everyone is a net-gain.
How random are car-related deaths? Is this actually a problem?
Yes, the US does today in fact actively kill some people with the death penalty. Though it does have a lot of checks in the process to avoid making the determination wrongly. It's a very expensive and thorough process. I'm against the death penalty because it goes against the idea of the inherent value of human life. If you live in a society where jails are very primitive and can't stop determined prisoners from escaping, then the death penalty could make sense to prevent prisoners escaping and then hurting others. We have jails that can hold people though.
So, if you don't care much about Bob one way or another, but Bob and his family care about Bob, on net society cares about keeping Bob alive.
We’d be much better off if we re-planned the whole society to switch as many trips as possible to other methods of transportation. This would require changes in land-use laws, a shift in investment toward mass transit and pedestrian/bicycle infrastructure, etc.
Making the roads we already have safer would be a good start though.
What is lacking is any learning. Despite widespread knowledge of what is wrong nobody does anything about it for the future. We keep designing new roads with all the known bad features. We keep allowing people to get and keep their drivers license with minimal training. I'm sure traffic engineers who study this stuff have a better list than me, but the above two (or variations thereof) will be near the top of theirs. So long as we don't act on what we already know nothing will change.
More often than not EU designs will put main roads apart from the activity centers, and have shared ways or slower ways inside dense areas. From a car POV it is subobtimal and ill thought out, while from people's point of view it's pretty great in general.
The most dangerous situation I can think of would still be where cars cross a bicycle road after doing a left or right turn in a crossing and not checking for trafic on the bicycle road.
We got all around Europe (Slovakia to Switzerland to Italy to Austria and back) all without a car. As a US citizen this priority can be frustrating at times because some cities even have no admittance for non-local cars, so you gotta park out of the city and transit in if you don’t have a local plate. But as a US citizen I am incredibly envious of the rail network and the downtown areas which are pedestrian only and entirely devoid of cars.
But also fundamentally we found that just as in states within the US, country to country things were vastly different with road quality. Many Eastern European countries are still weeding out corruption in their political systems and funds allocated for infrastructure are finally making it into public projects, so they often had worse roads and rail systems.
Modern metro areas or developed suburbs not so much.
When we drive in a different country we know that the driving rules are slightly different. We suspect that the conventions for driving are not quite the same. But the differences in rules and conventions of road design are mostly invisible. We may notice the most glaring differences like preferring roundabouts vs preferring crossings, but the large majority of those design principle differences, they are so close to invisible that we expect our expectations to still work. But they don't. Everything just feels subtly off, and sometimes there's a large difference standing out and we just declare that badly planned. Even when it's in fact perfectly in line with local expectationsand usage patterns, and works just fine (except for the confused foreigner). We notice a few standout differences and then blame every bit of traffic badness we encounter nonetheless on the few differences we consciously notice. The parts that work well are usually completely invisible, because traffic, in our perception, only exists when it's bad.
Rules/conventions on the design side exist for and can differ in just about every aspect, down to draining angle of road surface (do you drain symmetrically or to one side? Do you switch to draining to the inside in a curve? What about softer curves, sharper curves? A consistent threshold is very valuable, but if one country has a different consistent threshold than the other it feels "wrong" to everybody cross-driving even if no side is objectively better). Or the general shape of curves, some places have strict rules for keeping the second derivative of direction as flat as possible, with few, definitive jumps, others prefer a gentleness above all approach.
The US has a whole lot more miles of road, and a lot more miles traveled, but I'd be extremely surprised if there weren't areas that prove to be far more dangerous than any other mile of road, and where some efforts couldn't minimize the problem. The way we look at traffic is so much different though: In Spain most roads where cars travel fast tend to be outside of cities. In the US, we have a wide variety of streets rated at 30-40mph, With width and sight lines like roads where you could do 60, but that are really suburban streets where people might actually attempt to cross the street. Who is going to want to track, and fix, the fact that there are a lot of accidents near a high school, in a place where people do 45mph, and teenagers are trying to cross the street to get to the only nearby convenience store?
We build more dangerously, and organize our government in ways where it's far less likely accountability will happen.