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Is there such a thing as being too safe? Jeff Kaufman writes that buses are much safer than cars, by about a factor of 67 but buses are not very popular and one of the main reasons is that if you look at situations where people who can afford private transit take mass transit instead, speed is the main factor. According to Kauffman, we should look at ways to make buses faster so more people will ride them, even if this means making them somewhat more dangerous. Kauffman presents some ideas, roughly in order from "we should definitely do this" to "this is crazy, but it would probably still reduce deaths overall when you take into account that more people would ride the bus": Suggestions include not to require buses to stop and open their doors at railroad crossings, allow the driver to start while someone is still at the front paying, allow buses to drive 25mph on the shoulder of the highway in traffic jams where the main lanes are averaging below 10mph, and leave (city) bus doors open, allowing people to get on and off any time at their own risk. "If we made buses more dangerous by the same percentage that motorcycles are more dangerous than cars," concludes Kauffman, "they would still be more than twice as safe as cars."
(Score: 2) by AndyTheAbsurd on Saturday March 19 2016, @01:50PM
I'm not sure what "on the shoulder of the highway" means (that's my English lacking; the only shoulder I know is where the arms are attached), but I'd say in a traffic jam your speed is not limited by how fast you are allowed to drive, but by how fast you can drive.
In American English, the "shoulder" of a roadway is the part that is paved but not part of a travel lane. It can be anywhere from non-existent to a width equal to a full travel lane. In some cases - especially highways, which is where it becomes relevant to this story - the shoulder is often a full lane wide and serves as an emergency/breakdown lane.
The real solution here is to have separate bus lanes on which normal cars are not allowed; there will not be any traffic jam on those bus lanes, and therefore the buses can drive at standard speed without making it less safe.
I suspect that very few people in the US would respect this (and changing social norms so that they begin to do so would require a massive ticketing effort by the police), and the traffic jam would simply spread into the "bus-only" lane.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 19 2016, @09:52PM
Where I'm from, the shoulder is the flat but unpaved area between the pavement and the railing|soundwall|ditch|woods|dropoff|rock outcropping.
If it's between 2 pieces of roadway that have traffic going in opposite directions, it's called the median.
It's where you pull off to if your vehicle is having problems.
It's supposed to be for emergencies only.
If you get up a lot of speed on it and somebody ahead has a conked-out car and wants to pull over, things can get hairy.
.
...and, as for "More Dangerous":
Frida Kahlo was in a bus accident at age 18. [wikipedia.org]
So, "More dangerous"?
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(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday March 20 2016, @01:11AM
So, "More dangerous"?
Yes, because the plural of "anecdote" is not "data." Especially if you have to go back to 1925 for your anecdote.
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