The Positive Impact of Advanced Safety Systems for Cars
consumerreports.org
consumerreports.org
http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safet...
Shouldn't it be possible to cut these numbers in half with advanced "assistance?
[0] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit... (You need to manually divide for the percentages, oh well)
But anyway, most of the things you mention are social solutions to social problems. We are not very good at actually implementing those.
We are fairly good at implementing technical solutions, however. And whenever we can (even if only partially) convert a social problem into a technical one, that's a win.
Cities are getting way too big. It's much worse outside the US; NYC was 8 million in the 1960s, and it's 8.2 million now. Beijing is up to 21.5 million, and China's government is trying hard to keep it from growing further.
If walkable areas are expensive, that's presumably because
A) people want to live in them and will pay a lot for it.
B) there is more demand for said areas than supply.
Which, in effect, means exactly the opposite of your assertion - forced sprawl (making most of the bay low density suburban) is what led to the aforementioned $4637 /mo apartments.
Why do you mention megacities? Walkable development helps safety in cities of any size.
Individual transportation is already a reality, but there are more problems to it.
I think autonomous vehicle technology would be better applied to collective transportation: less cars, autonomous or not, means more manageable traffic and as such a lot less accidents.
But it also means more efficient energy usage, because of the scaling factor. The more people moved at a time, the least energy per person.
Static topology public transportation may also be broken, with all its social consequences, but a dynamic/semi-dynamic topology with self-driving technology would, imo, do wonders for cities and their inhabitants.
Individual cars are great for individual transport, no doubt. Going with more collective systems makes sense if the economics work out. (Or if that's your ideological bend..)
Why do you worry about energy usage? I see two reasons why anyone would want to worry: CO2 emissions, or cost of energy.
The latter is largely alleviated by shale oil these days. The former could be by moving to eg electric cars and nuclear power (or solar). The move would be relatively straightforward technologically, if the political will for eg a huge CO2 tax existed. (Of course, the conversion would cost society as a whole a lot.)
Another factor to wonder about that you mention is the effect of various kinds of traffic on the shape of living. I am with you that pedestrians should reign supreme again---and I am actually hopeful that the very convenience of self-driving cars will make people adopt them (either as individual owners or uber-style) even though in practice they will always yield to pedestrians and cyclists. Thus essentially voluntarily ending a century of car drivers bullying less armoured road users.
This is deeply classist. Those of us who can't afford centrally located real estate (and therefore need motor transport of some kind) should lose more of our lifespans to the commute, so that people who can afford centrally located real estate don't have to bother with crosswalks?
The inconvenience of sticking to sidewalks and crossing with the light is so small, and the quality-of-life impact of additional commute time so large, that this is a really weird trade to make.
Certainly they can and should improve the rate of actually yielding to pedestrians where they currently have right of way, but it will become basically impossible to live beyond walking distance of your workplace if pedestrians are allowed to wander in front of your bus at any time and make it wait arbitrarily long.
I just moved from car-dominated Sydney to pedestrian-dominated London, and the difference in quality of life from that alone is huge. (Even if Sydney otherwise has better weather and food, and more modern housing stock etc.) The inconvenience ain't small.
>Why do you worry about energy usage?
It's not just CO2, but energy in general. If it never becomes arbitrarily cheap, it will always be a constraint. Also vehicle production, since steel might become a scarce commodity.
>the effect of various kinds of traffic on the shape of living Definitely. This century of individual transportation has had cheap energy and vehicle production on its side. Besides, ubiquitous pavement and city planning have been forced into fitting the idea that it is a good thing.
I agree. But to use words inspired by mathematical optimization: it's more of a cost than a hard constraint.
Framing "traffic" as a problem that should be solved by getting others off the roads reads as pure selfishness.
Certainly we should have less (zero) fossil fuel combustion, but we can already do that with personal vehicles.
Where I live, every time I go south, roughly 8-9 am, with opposing traffic, I see a >5 mile train of engines waiting in line. And I call it a train because in the exact same direction there is an actual train, this time with only one engine, transporting hundreds of people at a time.
Public transportation could be better, if public administrators really wanted.
Before we get to the time autonomous personal vehicles have 0 emissions and are maximal efficient, being so cheap anyone can afford one, every other solution than rationalizing transportation and city planning will fall short of it, imo.
Around here, even regional (Transbay) bus service works fine in arbitrarily bad traffic because no matter how many people are waiting to get through the personal-vehicle lanes, the bus flies right over them on a dedicated lane. The primary impediment to Transbay service speed is actually the stream of pedestrians preventing the buses from getting a right turn between the freeway off-ramp and the bus terminal.
Certainly improving public transit is good in and of itself, and traffic will diminish if people are taking public transit instead, but this is a secondary effect. Reducing traffic should not be a goal by itself.
Traffic is bad to the extent that it wastes people's time. If public transit and bicycles would waste even more of their time, then we should be happy people have access to something better.
I didn't said that less traffic leads to better rail service. It just seams irrational to me to avoid the cheaper, quicker alternative. However, it does mean better bus performance.
The virtue of less traffic is that whatever traffic remains is easier to manage, there is less urban noise, and since we are far from optimal, to some extent it will mean a lower energy consumption.
>Reducing traffic should not be a goal by itself.
Of course not, but minimizing traffic while maximizing mobility should.
It's politically conceivable that the freeway will be ripped out due to "noise," as you indicate, but meanwhile there's no chance of anything being done about the far greater menace of passenger rail.
- fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants/year: 2.9 vs 10.6
- fatalities per 1000,000 vehicles/year: 5.1 vs 12.9
- fatalities per billion vehicle miles: 3.6 vs 7.1
Maybe a chicken and egg problem but here 1. The wealthy don't seem to prefer public transit preferring to drive. 2. Nobody cares about the poor people. And thus there is no meaningful investment in public transit in a lot of the country.
This means the road of good intentions with 1. Raising the cost of ownership of cars 2. Raising the bar for driving license hurts the poor the most.
Tl;Dr need more public transit to make driving safer
As to making it more expensive to drive, I don't see how that would affect fatalities per mile driven. Or do you have evidence that those driving cheaper cars are more likely to be involved in accidents?
But yes, "nobody cares about the poor people" probably is somewhat part of the answer. In quite a few countries in Western Europe, the government seems to care more for its poor than the USA government does for its poor.
I do think it is interesting that many countries with lower fatalities are not known for driving slow.
A major part of driving safety is simply attention. I can only guess, but it seems like responsibility (points), training/culture of attentiveness, and quality, well planned roads can work together to provide better results than the sum of their parts. The US has the first, has abdicated the second to a culture of inattentive slow and "safe" (I personally hypothesize this stems from the use of automatics), and its roads are not at the same level of repair as many countries with better results on the list.