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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: 4, Insightful) by Snotnose on Monday July 25 2022, @07:58PM (3 children)
I remember when I could adjust my cabin temp with slide knobs without taking my eyes off the road. My current car (2005 G35) has 8 buttons, some I can push multiple times (fan +/-) to adjust heating/cooling/defrost. After 17 years of driving this car I still have, at 80 MPH, "why isn't cold air coming out of these vents?". At 80 MPH after 17 years this is not what you want to be thinking.
New cars have touch screens. At least with my car I can press a button that's in a unique place. I may not be 100% sure that button is either the solution to my problem, or the cause of my problem, but I know where that button is.
With a touchscreen UI (disclaimer: did I mention I drive a 17 y/o car?) you don't even know what button your hitting without looking at the screen, focusing on the screen, parsing the screen, and figuring out which button to touch.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2022, @08:41PM (1 child)
Yes, touch screen UI's suck away your attention. All the cars in my extended family are pre 2014 and none have touch screen interfaces for the driver.
But going back to the frist piss, many people spend a lot more time fussing with the UI on their smart phones (while driving alone) than they do changing the HVAC settings. And at least part of this distraction is by design--FB and many others have been actively designing software to suck up user attention with micro dopamine hits.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 25 2022, @11:03PM
>micro dopamine hits.
We used to get our dopamine / seratonin hits from the driving experience itself. They've "advanced" the vehicle driving experience so far into numb territory that there's little of that left.
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25 2022, @08:51PM
here's a free idea for an aftermarket product that I'd like to buy--if I ever get stuck with a car that has touch panel controls for basic functions.
It's a small panel that can be rigidly attached to the dashboard in a convenient-to-reach location. It has on it a few distinct mechanical switches/sliders/knobs for basic car functions like heater/AC/fan/recirculate, floor/face/defog, 4-way flashers. Behind it is a microcontroller that reads the switches/sliders and communicates to the car CAN bus to run these functions in parallel with the touch panel.
Any takers?