Cars in the US have gotten much larger and heavier in recent years.
A Ford F150 might be safe to drive, but it’s not safer for pedestrians and other road users than the smaller cars we used to have.
Keep in mind that while we had cell phones for a while, it’s only within the past 10 years that the whole “distraction economy” became a thing, so while people may have used phones to communicate back in the day, nowadays they might be using the phones even more just to attend to those distractions.
And it probably has the same accuracy as the spellcheck on the T9, unless you meant to talk about the ducking ponyman in your text.
[1] https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/07/25/21/45875073-9823577-...
[2] https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/07/25/21/45876985-9823577-...
A difference in mass of around 15x, I believe.
All the guns also cause -a bunch of— some small kids to kill their siblings every year.
While controversial because car companies in the US intentionally chose to market large SUVs to the public, there is some evidence that smaller vehicles are safer and that auto manufacturers have doubled down on unsafe vehicles. Why this is the case, isn’t exactly known, but one of the theories is that bad drivers will get behind bigger cars and take more risks.
I’ve driven both large SUVs and smaller subcompacts, and I can talk at length on the pros and cons. However, as a driver, I can tell you that smaller cars are often bullied by larger cars, and this gives weight to the idea that people driving larger vehicles take larger risks, resulting in greater danger to the driver and to other cars and pedestrians.
There’s also the mistaken perception by older generations that smaller cars are inherently more dangerous; this was once true, and everyone can point to disastrously unsafe compact cars in the 1970s and 1980s. But due to modern technology and safety enhancements, this probably hasn’t been true for the last two decades or more. This older, erroneous belief continues to underlie why people choose larger vehicles today.
Most accidents only involve a single car.
There is less control in larger vehicles.
Everyone thinks they are a better driver than they are and the only way they'll end up in an accident is if someone else hits them.
Add all this up and many want to drive larger cars.
Smaller cars bear more of the risk in a multi-car accident from the more dangerous larger cars. The smaller cars themselves are safer.
It's like saying t-shirts are less safe than guns because they won't stop bullets.
Choosing a car to be in an accident, a bigger car is a solid choice. Of course, that skips over being in an accident at all. It also skips over any concern for others -- but so many people view that hypothetical accident as clearly the other person's fault, so may as well go with the big car.
Again, you're victim blaming here. The small car is not causing the danger. T-shirts are not more dangerous than guns just because someone firing a gun randomly into a crowd is less likely to get hurt than someone in the crowd wearing a t-shirt.
Which car is safer if you're choosing a car to be in? big or small? The bigger is safer and the smaller is more dangerous (to be in), in a multi-car accident.
My whole post was on the rationalization of the choice of size of car. Language matters, as you say. It is about people not choosing the smaller car and not being the victim due to driving a smaller car.
Yes, the escalation of size causes problems in aggregate, but not the point of what I wrote.
You are participating in the victim blaming and the arms race by conflating the externalisation of risk with safety. And there is no need to aggregate to see the effect. It is present in every individual case.
The person in the big car is not being safer, they are being more dangerous and more selfish. Just because they perceive that their selfishness is exceeding the added danger (something not borne out by the stats) does not justify it. Acknowledging the framing of the auto industry is making the problem worse.
And that’s to say nothing of what happens when the person being hit is a pedestrian or cyclist.
I hear this a lot and wonder how true it is because I personally think i am a horrible driver and can't wait until actually safe fully self driving cars take away my need to drive. on the other had a drive a small car and want a smaller one despite sharing the roads with behemoth raised 4x4 pickups that seem to be inexplicably popular.
Given the explanations I've been given for why demonstration videos of general purpose vision-based robots are still often sped up x4 or more (despite Tesla and Spot), I have to assume it's at least a few years away yet, but that's not never.
https://insideevs.com/news/575160/mercedes-accepts-legal-res...
I would favour this.
One thing I find genuinely surprising is that the Renault Zoes we have as pool cars at work have got far bigger blind spots and far worse visibility than my 25-year-old Range Rover.
And, in turn, although that Range Rover is described as an SUV (it's not especially sporty, it's a top-heavy three tonne army truck with nicer seats), it's the same length and width as most "normal" family saloons. It's got a much smaller footprint on the road than some large 5-seaters like a Tesla Model S.
My ‘60s Triumph 2000 had amazing visibility. If I’d rolled I’d have died for sure, but I’d have seen the thing that killed me.
It is appears that the driver of the large SUV or pickup believes they have right of way over smaller cars, pedestrians and cyclists.
A "get out of my way" attitude.
I love small cars, not to mention cycling and walking.
It concerns me that the shift of cars parked at the parking lot has dramatically changed over the past 20 years.
Walking from the car to the shop is like carpark gauntlet, you need to be increasingly ready to dodge giant vehicles reversing with disregard to their surroundings.
This didn't happen in a vacuum. Poorly written fuel efficiency regulations incentivized automakers to do this.
It would be very interesting to see more studies on this. Where I am, the car of choice is a lifted truck that I don’t think has been accounted for with regards to pedestrian safety.
You can argue that this is irrational based on handling or fuel economy or whatever. But for better or worse buyers prefer size and comfort.
It's still manageable, and fine for occasional trips, but I wouldn't choose that car to drive 4 adults daily.
Is this a typical thing that cars do? I'm not sure if I've seen 4 adults in a car in the last month.
I see two solutions. One is to use democracy and the State's supposed monopoly on violence to ban these weapons. The other is tit-for-tat: SUV drivers need to be killed at random until death rates reach statistical equality. Only then will the expected value to a safety-concious person of an SUV not exceed that of a sedan.
Right now, their thought process goes, "I will probably get into an accident, and when I do I want to dominate the other driver". That thought process needs to include counterbalancing considerations like, "yeah, but driving this will attract legal small-arms fire from Corolla drivers", or, "a knife-wielding spec-ops team of motorcyclists will be able to look up my license plate in the database and infiltrate my home while I sleep".
I'm joking but only kinda. This is literally life-and-death stuff. If people drive SUVs because they fear for their lives, then maybe they need to not drive SUVs because they fear for their lives.
No they don't, unless you're going to quibble about what a bunch is. Numbers that seem to show lots of deaths to "kids" pretty much always include age ranges old enough to include gang members.
So what if they were? It's pretty damn sad for a person young enough to be considered a child to die from gun violence regardless of who they were! A sad societal failure on top of our failure to set them up with life circumstances that made them unlikely to fall in with a gang.
So a policy stricter than the US can have isn't enough to solve this problem. That's why it's better to aim at reducing accidental underage gun deaths which is much more achievable.
As a Canadian who grew up in a household with a dozen firearms, I never once touched those firearms, and hardly ever saw them until I was taken to the range by my father and taught how to use them.
also, fun fact, when your government spends a hundred years assisting coups of democratic or socialist governments, those counties are going to have a lot of political instability.
The United States has one border with a central America country (Mexico). Please show on the map where it has a border with any south American country?
It seems like their policies do go a big way to solve the problem, as infeasible as they appear to be for the USA.
They have a real welfare system, diminishing social inequalities and with that the feeding ground for crime.
…but it’s also worth pointing out that murder rates are also a lot lower than the US in other developed countries that don’t have Scandinavian levels of welfare transfers.
Also, I don't understand the focus on murder rates. Compare all violent crime at least.
It has a problem with a few small and very violent gangs that occasionally gun down people in broad daylight, in the middle of the street, completely disregarding the safety of the people around them, which is bad but nothing like the gang problems in the US or Latin America.
A multi-pronged approach that involves reducing the amount of guns in American is a surefire way to reduce access to guns by children, both in gangs and out.
But that’s of course not the main thing about guns and kids in the US like everyone knows.
School shootings are far down the list. They get a lot of attention but don't account for a large proportion of deaths.
Of course, that any of these deaths occur is tragic, which is why the most sensible solution is repeal of the Second Amendment and implementation of a nationwide, federal license requirement to purchase or own a firearm. 120-day grace period. License each gun, turn them in, or go to jail.
Let the gangs resort to cutting each other like Japanese gangs.
School shootings are far down the list as far as fatalities go. But that's a poor way to measure the impact of school shootings. The trauma inflicted by each of these events goes way beyond the number of children killed. Everyone who has heard actual gunshots in their own school building feels life-changing trauma.
When a kid in the US says "I'm scared to go to school," you can't tell them they have nothing to be scared of. You can tell them "It's not likely to happen at your school today." That's small comfort.
Repealing the 2nd would be a full-throated declaration that wielding weaponry is a privilege, not a right.
I am not a gun nut, and have little interest in owning/shooting guns. I've done it, and found it boring. But my defense of the 2nd Amendment is based on the domino theory that if the 2nd can be ignored, there goes the First and every other "inconvenient" right enshrined in the Constitution. The First is the most important of all those Rights.
Thanks for illustrating I am right that the First would be put on the chopping block right after the Second.
I don't care about gun rights. I do care about the Constitution, and I very much care about the First Amendment.
You could clarify that you mean the rights stated in the amendments of course.
Sorry, but the first amendment, as currently formulated, really needs to go. It should be replaced with a formulation of freedom expression that better balances individual freedom with the public interest according to modern political standards.
In fact, given the problems with corruption in the American system and first-past-the-post voting leading to money-driven, rather than truly democratic, politics, the entire constitution probably needs to be rethought. No less of an American political thinker than Justice Ginsburg has opined that the US constitution is no longer, in the current era, a model for good governance. This should happen in a civilized fashion with a convention and ratification much like the current constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation, but it nonetheless needs to happen.
No, there aren't.
> the first amendment, as currently formulated, really needs to go
That's the first thing the Nazis did, as well as Mussolini, and every other repressive government. Without free speech, the rest of your rights go down the drain.
If Ginsburg advocated getting rid of free speech, I'd like to see a cite from you about that.
https://africasacountry.com/2012/02/ruthbaderginsburg/
On the matter of free speech, note that the South African and Canadian constitutions, and the ECHR, all protect freedom of expression exclude hate speech as protected speech. It is VERY much in line with modern statecraft to do so, and the doctrinaire approach of the First Amendment (only established in 1969, by the way, before which the USA implemented speech restrictions not dissimilar from those seen elsewhere) is the outlier here. Also note that getting rid of the First Amendment is not getting rid of freedom of expression.
Granted, her position was not even as radical as mine, which is that we must rethink the constitution from the ground up and implement a new form of government more resistant to corruption, again drawing from examples of more modern statecraft -- a multiparty parliamentary system, for instance. All she was saying was that new governments should look elsewhere for a template.
Ginsburg's views that the U.S. constitution is the supreme law of the land, and must be hewed closely to and not played fast and loose with for as long as it is active, were congruent with mine.
What's needed is a ban on semiauto rifles and pistols in civilian hands without a license. While we're doing that, may as well restrict all firearms.
What is that based on? The only people I hear even talk much about 'gangs' is conservative propgandists trying to demonize black and brown people and cities. I'm not saying no gangs exist, but they aren't really an issue (unless you define 'gang' as any association of >1 person
> the most sensible solution is repeal of the Second Amendment and implementation of a nationwide, federal license requirement to purchase or own a firearm. 120-day grace period. License each gun, turn them in, or go to jail.
It's a politicized judiciary. For centuries, nobody interpreted the 2nd Amendment the way the conservative judges do now, but when the Federalist Society intentionally politicized the judiciary, this is what happened.
Sounds like you've never been poor in urban areas?
For one thing, talking about them like they are all the same betrays that you haven't. They are as different as any other neighborhoods.
Not too far off. The federal definition is 3+. Gangs aren’t necessarily big.
and likewise, people are getting so big they can't drive their cars...
in Texas, police officers in some municipalities have requested that their vehicles be modified to elevate the steering wheel...they literally cannot jam their stomachs between the seat and the wheel, and if they push the seat back far enough they cannot reach the pedals
I don't know why every car doesn't have around-the-car view cameras right now. New teslas have all the cameras, but don't show the view!
That goes double for trucks of all types - even though they are professionally driven.
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/ford-focus-2022-5-d...
I laugh every time I walk to my car because I don't want to cry.
Fine if that's what you happen to have lying around, but why would you choose something like that? It's totally impractical.
Smartphones.
Hell, about an hour ago a cop tailgated me while I was going 15 over the limit, wove through traffic to cut me off, run a red light, then damn near ran another driver off the road. No lights, no emergency, just an asshole. This is the behavior you have to expect from all drivers now.
At least two or three times a week I have a close call that would wreck my car or seriously hurt someone, and I pretty much only drive up and down the one road between my house and the office, it's a 5 mile drive.
There's something very deeply wrong in American society, and I don't see things improving any time soon.
Having said that, the data backs you up. 7% increase in per capita road fatalities in 2020. Then a 10.5% increase on top of that in 2021!
Why signal your intentions to your opponent like a chump? They'll just use that information against you to block you from changing lanes, or to duck into a parking lot row ahead of you in a crowded parking lot and steal that empty spot. /s
Any hypothesis as to what it is? I think it is a lack of community. We've become transactional and virtual/online communities are not sufficient.
In terms of driving I think it got a lot worse during the pandemic because with the lack of daily commuter traffic allowed people to drive faster and hence more recklessly.
By the time the "regular" people feel it (ala, the rich people), the problem may be irreversible.
> By the time the "regular" people feel it (ala, the rich people), the problem may be irreversible.
I think they definitely feel it. You can see it here on HN. You can see it everyone resigning, in the vogue of despairing and not caring.
Yes. This is the commodity fetish and alienation that Marx spoke of. It is the natural consequence of unfettered capitalism that seeks to maximally exploit the labor class.
If we didn't have a gigantic military that spends over a trillion dollars a year on the purchase of armaments, our armaments manufacturers would have less money to make our news media insane.
I think defensive driving is becoming more important as well and I worry far more about driving at night, as people get more erratic, than I used to.
That's easy enough. People who were socially minded stayed home; people with an individualistic attitude ignored recommendations. You hear similar stories from people working in customer service - the average quality of the person they had to deal with plummeted.
What's a bit peculiar is that, according to you, road culture has not recovered.
Jevons Paradox perhaps; you make the cars safer, so people feel more empowered to drive recklessly.
Because with advent of SUVs you can't actually see most of the things that you normally would see through your car window. Because SUVs are bigger people believe they are safer, they are deathtraps on wheels for everyone involved. Also because they are bigger drivers believe they can bully everyone else on the street or just don't pay any attention to what is going outside.
Here's a bit of an anecdote, but I bet my family isn't alone in this type of story... my cousin died from cardiac arrest at age 45. Keeping the story here brief - he was a high-income business owner who got into a tough spot in his marriage and business, found himself without health insurance when he had a medical episode. Knew something was wrong and would likely bankrupt him - and we think that's why he didn't follow up with his doctor and was dead two weeks later. Congenital issue, could have been easily resolved - but without health insurance it was probably a death sentence either physically or financially.
Now, this was just as the ACA was coming into play - but I'd argue it's moot. The ACA was well-intentioned, but has not actually improved the insurance or care situation for the majority of Americans. I need a surgery at present that won't be covered by my insurance to any meaningful degree, and being in rural America my care options are limited. So I'll live with regular pain because the system doesn't work. And I hear stories like this in my social circles weekly.
Almost everyone with insurance has a maximum out of pocket limit now. It's possible to have a grandfathered employer health plan, but they'd have to have been running it since 2010 without substantial changes since then, including in benefits or cost increases. There are very few employer health insurance plans that would have met that criteria, and even fewer who tried to.
They also have to directly inform you that you're on a grandfathered plan, so it should not be a mystery to those who somehow are.
"maximum out of pocket" does not mean what any normal person would interpret it to mean. More than one year I have had to pay way more than the "maximum out of pocket".
The insurance company gets to decide unilaterally how much of what you pay out of pocket is credited toward their tally of what you supposedly paid out of pocket. In several years I've paid a lot more out of pocket than what the insurance statement credits me for having paid.
How it works is that blue shield (with employers I've typically always had blue shield in California) sends a statement saying your doctor visit cost $XXXX, blue shield will pay $YYY and this will credit $ZZZ towards your annual out of pocket total.
But $XXXX - $YYY > $ZZZ, so what I actually had to pay to the doctor was more than blue shield credits me for having paid. So at the end of the year what I've actually had to pay has been well above the so-called "out of pocket maximum".
It doesn't happen most years (to me), but has happened on multiple years.
Labs that don't have a clear medical justification are probably easy to end up paying for out of pocket without getting the amount counted against the out of pocket insurance limit.
Would expect that to be clearly delineated on the bills though.
I hear you about the health care situation though. Health insurance is definitely not the same thing as health care.
https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/migrated_legacy_fil...
My buddy separated his shoulder snowboarding when he was 22, but had no health insurance because he was working at the ski resort for something like $6/hr (US Ski Resorts are legally allowed to pay below minimum wage... go figure).
So he never went to the Doctor, because he couldn't afford it. He's 41 now, and that shoulder impacts almost every day of his life.
Oh, I'm not American, and actually I was there as a 22 year old Australian and was horrified. The idea that people in a Developed country didn't have access to a doctor was shocking - I'd never seen that before, and simply didn't understand. I thought everyone could just go to the doctor when they needed to.
I saw the same thing in Europe, southern Italy was very chaotic roads compared to Northern Italy.
Every other nation in Europe manages to keep the car between the white lines, Italians can't even manage it when parking.
Or maybe they are driving more dangerous vehicles (e.g. bigger and heavier)?
A sudden secondary effect - legal pot is leading to many more stoned drivers where I live (NJ).
This isn’t true for the US, cars are actually more dangerous due to the prevalence of SUVs that skirt safety regulations by being sold as light trucks.
Wow. Actually impressed with the analysis backing this up. If you read the entire thread, he actually covers nearly every correlating factor I could think of.
And it's pretty clearly drugs, guns, suicide, and cars. (The cardio health one doesn't seem as strong).
The one that is crazy to me is the uptick in driving fatalities. Cars are an order of magnitude safer than they used to be and we were trending towards 0. An entire generation has to be that much more reckless than before to make that kind of a dent.