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Comment by powvans | Hacker News Reader

Not just efficiently, safely.

Car crashes are the leading cause of death of children under age 18. The number of deaths has risen in the US even as it's fallen across the rest of the world. I have begun to wonder if phones are just a convenient scapegoat, even if the criticism is in the right direction.

I wonder if it's a combination of phones, car centric city design with wide stroads, and automatic transmissions. The latter two make driving very easy and boring, with long waiting periods at red lights, high speed between the lights, and you can keep your phone in one hand all along because there's no stick to shift. No wonder people are not looking at the road.

Wide stroads definitely don't make driving easy and boring -- stroads make for high speeds and constant opportunities for crashes

They absolutely reduce the number of variables requiring attention, except the problem and the source of danger is they only appear to. They make the way appear to be free of things to look out for, and so appear to require less attention. That's the "boring".

In reality of course, all the same kinds of unexpected events can still happen at any time. A baby can suddenly appear anywhere along one of those roads. But that doesn't mean the road does not encourage inattention.

Is there any real data on this?

It comes up periodically here and it makes some logical sense but I don't know of any regulatory efforts or push back and I'm certain someone would blame in-car screens if it was the cause of more accidents. Screens seem to keep getting bigger and incorporating more function.

The other factor that counters it is there is also a lot more automation. I have a 10 year old car and the lights are automatic, the climate control is automatic (I think my wife or I adjust it about twice a year) Things like hazard lights are used fairly rarely and I've never needed muscle memory for it.

Several studies have shown touch screen are less safe. Having tactile controls doesn’t prevent automatic wipers etc, it’s a pure UI choice as your generally run everything through the CAN bus either way.

The initial idea for the CAN bus was simply to save copper by having fewer wires inside the car, it was only much later that touch screens leveraged that system. Basically if you want a truck release from a key fob and a trunk release from a door you might as well have both talk to a computer which only runs connection to the trunk. At which point you can redesign the controls more or less independently because they don’t change how everything is wired up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus

Hazard lights need to be accessible with zero thought so you can warn people the instant a hazard arises, without taking your eyes off the road during hazardous conditions. My car has them on a big red button in the middle of the dashboard, and that's the way it should be.

Cars kill 1,500,000 people per year (= a 787 full of passangers every couple hours). What's the big deal about safety? /s

In the US that number is usually below 30,000, and majority of that 30,000 is alcohol related.

>majority of that 30,000 is alcohol related.

What's your source for this? Most sources I'm finding say alcohol-impaired driving is involved in about 30% of US traffic deaths.

I didn't make the claim but I thought to look it up. From NHTSA's report, if I'm reading it correctly, 2021 had 42,915 traffic fatalities, of which 8,174 were related to alcohol. I think those numbers are estimated. I'm not aware if there's better data.

https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

My information appears to be a few years out of date - probably from the last time I had this debate here on HN. 2021 does appear to have been a particularly bad year...

Regardless, the numbers are very good for the US, compared to the rest of the world. iihs.org[1] indicates the US is averaging somewhere around 1.5 fatalities per 100 Million miles traveled.

Compared to the rest of the world... that's pretty decent. Most of the places with significantly high fatality rates are not the places that will be purchasing self driving electric vehicles anytime soon...

[1] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...

You are deluding yourself if you think the US is doing well on traffic fatalities. From the graph at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedest... we can see that US car deaths/capita have dropped slightly (10-20%?) since 1995. Meanwhile, in France where the rate about matched in 1995 they have dropped by 3x, leaving the US rate at about 2.5x the French rate.

But at least we aren’t French.

Recent US Traffic fatalities:

2021: 42,915

2020: 38,824

2019: 36,355

2018: 36,835

2017: 37,473

According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_... the last time the US had fewer than 30,000 traffic fatalities was 1945

Alcohol is 100% orthoganal.

If every single driver were legally drunk at all times, poorly designed vehicles will still result in more and worse accidents then well-designed.

If every driver were drunk at all times, roads would be designed with that in mind. It's much harder to dangerous things in a car with better designed roads

Sure, but irrellevant.

The point is that the design of the vehicle, or anything, needs to be as good as possible regardless of anything else, and there is no overriding excuse not to.

It's not like the poorly designed controls are necessary for some other even more important reason.

If both roads and drivers were all excellent, the vehicle still needs to be as excellent as possible. If all other factors are so good that only 10 people die each year from car accidents, there is still no excuse for making vehicles less safe and make that become 20.

Alcohol, lack of alcohol, good roads, bad roads, speed limits, none of that matters.

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