SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the what-about-the-road-less-traveled? dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
We all became familiar with the idea of "bending a curve" thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now it seems another US curve needs bending: that of US traffic fatalities, which have been up strongly and abnormally over the last couple of years. The low-hanging fruit when it comes to changing that might not be in the car as much as around it.
[...] Thanks in large part to in-car safety tech like airbags, antilock brakes, stability control and, more recently, automatic emergency braking, US traffic fatalities have generally been on a long decline since 1970. The 52,000 such deaths recorded 52 years ago shrank to 36,000 in 2019 even as the US population and vehicle miles driven both increased dramatically. But 2020 and 2021 saw the biggest spike in over 50 years to a total of almost 43,000 per year, turning the roadway fatality clock back to 2002. In short, something's not working as well as it did.
"We need regulations related to vehicle design and street design," says Yonah Freemark, senior research associate at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit think tank focused on urban mobility and equity. "Those two play a really important role in how likely people are to get killed in streets, especially pedestrians (and cyclists) that are struck by cars."
Speed cameras are common in several countries outside the US, often using technology that calculates average speed of a given vehicle based on the time stamps when it passes two or more places on the roadway.
In-vehicle safety technologies that protect occupants have only become more prevalent over the last couple of years, so Freemark looks at pedestrian and cyclist fatalities in collisions with cars as the next key area for improvement. Three-quarters of US auto buyers select a light truck that is typically heavier and larger than the sedan or coupe they may have chosen as their previous purchase, a formula for a more brutal impact with someone outside of the vehicle. In the future, many more electric cars will be sold and their well-known weight problem could exacerbate the seriousness of collisions.
[...] That difference plays out when you compare roadway fatality stats outside the US. "Over the last 20 years or so we've seen quite a divergence between other developed countries, like France," Freemark said of a comparison he's focused on. He noted other countries' taxation schemes that disincentivize the purchase of large, heavy vehicles as well as automatic speeding cameras and the presence of far more traffic circles that still befuddle most US drivers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Hartree on Monday July 25 2022, @06:21PM (3 children)
Yes, we've had a couple of years where the deaths per billion miles traveled is up, but if you take a look at the trend over the past 3 decades it's massively less than before air bags, crumple zones and a whole host of other safety requirements.
It also doesn't make any allowance for the strong drop in non-necessary travel. Perhaps on average, those traveling were more in the position of having to travel, thus making weather, tiredness and a lot of other factors less of a disincentive. So, fewer, but more dangerous miles.
This sounds like someone wanting regulation to go in certain directions and adjusting the narrative to support that.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Monday July 25 2022, @07:39PM
Parent poster is correct. Wikipedia has data for Motor vehicle fatality rates here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year [wikipedia.org]
In 1921 the Fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled was 24.09. For 2021, a hundred years later, it stands at 1.33. Even with the 7% and 10% increases in 2020/2021 respectively, it's still lower than every year from 1921-2007.
(Score: 2, Informative) by chr on Monday July 25 2022, @07:51PM
Or maybe they think the United States is getting even more behind compared to countries in western Europe (for deaths related to car traffic [1]).
According to [1], the US rates are 12.4 [2] and 14.2 [3] respectively. Some (rounded) numbers for comparison:
12 14 United States
5 6 - Austria
5 9 - Belgium
3 7 - Denmark
4 6 - Germany
5 8 - France
2 4 - Sweden
3 6 - UK
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate [wikipedia.org]
[2] Deaths per 100 000 inhabitants per year
[3] Deaths per 100 000 motor vehicles per year.
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by ChrisMaple on Tuesday July 26 2022, @01:19AM
Illegal immigrants are particularly poor drivers, often untrained, often drunk, and always unlicensed. Thanks, Brandon.