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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

> controversial opinion here but older cars teach you a healthy fear of operating a 2000lb rolling death machine. no infofainment means they are safer for the driver, and no nanny-state A pillars mean you arent doing 80 in a 65 quite as often.

Yes, because that's how people work. Nobody was driving unsafely before, because they were afraid of their cars rolling over.

No, that's not how they work. They just died at higher rates.

Would you look at that!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

Turns out unsafe cars killed more people and when we started making them really safe, they stopped killing as many people, despite people driving more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

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You conveniently ignore pedestrian fatalities, which are headed off the chart thanks to modern "safer" vehicles.

From the same article you referenced:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

Per that link, pedestrian fatalities had a sudden break in trend and skyrocketed right when motorcyclist deaths stopped climbing and flattened.

Wouldn't you expect the hypothesis of new vehicles increasing ped deaths show up in motorcycle fatalities too? It seems much more plausible from this baseline data that the introduction of the smartphone is more relevant: the skyrocketing happened at the precise time the smartphone took off, and smartphone ubiquity naturally wouldn't affect motorcyclist fatality (while new vehicle shapes would).

Of course, there are myriad other potential explanations, including the trend towards urbanization and walkable cities over the last decade and a half, but I don't see how you can conclude that the pedestrian fatality graph is useful evidence of the greater dangers of newer vehicle designs.

Tall SUV and trucks + smartphones. One battle at a time.

Tech companies have the power to end the smartphone problem overnight. Just takes Apple and Google disabling the screen of any phone moving faster than 5mph.

Passengers would be inconvenienced, but basically every phone-related crash would be prevented.

People on buses, trains, ferries, and planes would also be inconvenienced.

Google and Apple are already tracking the bus/train/ferry through their mapping software. Wouldn't be hard to set up a crude geofilter and guestimate whether a user was on transit or not. Some transit agencies even integrate directly with the phone's wallet system, so you could measure that a fare was paid concievably.

Not in most of the world where the buses or trains are running disconnected from a public network

Yes, they would have to return to pre-2010 life while being transported. Not exactly a huge cost compared to the number of lives saved when it’s almost entirely entertainment.

Yes, we should severely inconvenience people who are _doing the right thing_ by taking public transit so that bad drivers who can't stop checking their phones won't main/kill themselves and others.

Going without a smartphone on transit is not a severe inconvenience. It’s a very minor one. Just a few years ago nobody even knew they needed one.

Snapchat was not worth my cousin's life.

YOu assume that only drivers are the problem with cell phone

More than a few pedestrians walk and use their phone, walk right out in the traffic, or other situations (some hilarious walking right into poles and getting laughed at on the internet.

I know in a few nations this may be a hard concept, but here in the US, it is absolutely NOT true that "pedestrians always have the right of way"... no no no

Pedestrians always have the right to not be run over.

“Right” is a strange word here, but there are absolutely cases where pedestrians have no right-of-way over cars.

In these cases, you can be run over and you (or your family) will have no legal recourse against the driver. Zero, nada, zilch. So in the legal sense, it is not true that a pedestrian always has the right to exist at any point on the earth without being run over.

In a moral sense, perhaps every driver has an obligation to try not to run over pedestrians. That might create a “right” in some moral/ethics frameworks, but it doesn’t exist as a legal concept in my state.

If you don't mind sharing some examples I'd love to hear them, out of curiosity more than anything. Which situations (and in which country/countries) do pedestrians not have right-of-way over cars?

In America, at least in same States, pedestrians only have a right of way in a sidewalk or crosswalk. I all also add, stepping in front of a moving vehicle means having to obey the laws of physics.

They only have the right of way in a crosswalk WHEN they have the walk symbol. If a pedestrian enters a cross walk under a don't walk symbol they do not have the right of way.

In most countries that I know of (throughout Europe, the US, Japan), if you're on the road as a pedestrian, there's no law that protects you in case you get hit by a vehicle, it's considered your fault as a pedestrian.

The exceptions are street crossings or purely pedestrian streets, which have to be marked as such.

I don't expect this to be different anywhere in the world, since most paved roads are paved for vehicles, you don't really need pavement that much for pedestrians (well, you kind of need it for pedestrian with baby strollers or wheeled luggage & co).

That's definitely not the case in France, a pedestrian always have right of way over anything else, even on the highway.

"Le piéton est l'usager le plus protégé par le code de la route : il a, quoiqu'il arrive, toujours la priorité sur la chaussée"

For the highway it's a bit trickier than you're describing:

> Pour un piéton victime d’un accident, on retiendra faute inexcusable s’il «franchit des glissières de sécurité pour traverser une voie à grande circulation (alors qu’un passage souterrain existe à côté)», s’il «fait un effort particulier pour braver les règles de sécurité», ou encore s’il «contourne délibérément les obstacles lui interdisant l’accès à une voie rapide» ;

In 99% of the cases a pedestrian would have to go over a barrier to end up on a highway, as part of regular traffic.

I'm not counting someone from a broken down car on the side of the road as a pedestrian, since those are covered by different laws.

Not unexpected but TIL ! Thanks - my driver license instructor had definitely told me that pedestrians were always the most important

Argentina for one.

It depends on the country. In Japan pedestrians have the always have right of way, no matter what.

Not only that but in any road accident the bigger participant is automatically the guilty party. So huge trucks are very very careful while grandma with her trolley of vegetables trundles merrily along.

If you step in front of a 2 ton hunk of metal moving at high speed, the laws of physics don't care about your rights.

Iwould think you would need to separate the rate of car-v-pedestrian accidents from injury-rate-given incident. You might even have to break down speed of incident to really understand if modern vehicles were actually safer or not.

That graph also correlates perfectly with smartphone adoption. Drivers are more distracted and pedestrians less aware of their surroundings than in the past.

Which begs the real question: shouldn't we have continued to allow "driving a car well if you're going to be driving one" to have been a natural selection point...?

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