The country closing in on zero deaths on its roads | Hacker News Reader

The country closing in on zero deaths on its roads

bbc.com

30 pointsbelter26 comments

The USA has a 5x higher death rate than Sweden [1]. At ~45k deaths per year in the USA, I don’t understand how this isn’t a higher priority on everyone’s mind. Americas roads are terrible, both from a design as a well as from a maintenance perspective. Often worse than a third world country. This could be done quite easily.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic...

I've personally observed a wide-spread refusal to admit that there's a problem that can be addressed when seeing the topic online before.

Absurd as it may be.

Could it be that America has 335 million people living there versus Sweden's 10.4 million ?

It's almost like population density changes how many deaths per year happen! Maybe there's a statistical tool that normalizes the population scale between the two so you can compare like for like.

Almost like you didn’t bother to check the source. The US rate is 5-6x worse per 100k residents. And 2.5x worse adjusts for miles driven. The US has failed miserably at road safety.

Just because the bad data and the right data tell the same story doesn't preclude the fact that the original post can and does lead to bad assumptions in many other examples.

I expect better from the otherwise number accurate crowd here.

The level of butthurt in down d00ts and replies is telling.

The post was not incorrect. There were two separate figures cited -the rate and then a gross figure. You wrongly took them to be closely related. Your error, not the OP’s.

The stats in the link say that the annual “traffic-related death rate” is 12.9 deaths per 100,000 people in the USA and 2.2 per 100,000 people in Sweden. It’s the death rate that’s (more than) 5x higher in the USA, not the death count. That’s around 45,000 deaths compared to around 225 deaths.

I don’t think I really remember a time when American Exceptionalism wasn’t really just a sort of toxic nihilism. At some point it seems to have gone from believing we could do anything if we put in the effort to believing that all the pathologies of our society are unsolvable. Guns, homelessness, access to healthcare; the despair creeps in everywhere.

That's the death rate per person, which is not really a good measure of how safe the roads are. Better is the death rate per km.

The US drives about 62 times as many km as Sweden does, and has a population about 32 times as big as Sweden, which means the US death rate per person would be expected to be about 1.9 times that of Sweden if the roads were equally safe.

With that correction the US is about 2.6 times as deadly as Sweden rather than 5 times as deadly.

Note: the above numbers are somewhat fuzzy, because when I Googled for population and driving and death data the results weren't always for the same year.

I feel like there are probably diminishing returns on picking your best metric...

Like, does it matter if the number is 5x as deadly or 2.5x as deadly when you consider that not adjusted for population we have a ton of traffic deaths in the US? The priority is to not kill as many people with cars. We just convince ourselves that it's reasonable to have a baseline number of deaths based on how big our population is for some reason. It's not better if we're expanding that definition to arbitrarily include some quantity of driving. If driving is causing more deaths, we should probably be trying to limit the amount of driving we do.

The lack of attention to safety in driving drives me nuts every time I drive.

Speed limits that have absolutely zero enforcement; so much so, that attempting to actually drive at the limit is a road hazard!

Road designs that encourage maximum throughput and maximum distraction (forget phones; injury lawyer billboards are distracting by design).

I've even seen folks run red lights without impunity here in Houston. Ive seen police here speed WHILE ON THEIR PHONES.

Any politician who campaigns on improving driver safety is raked over the coals. Many mayors have gotten roiled over implementing red light or speed cameras or lowering speed limits in cities despite well established evidence that these changes reduce road deaths.

Driving is systemically failed, IMO.

Any chance you can link to the evidence that the cameras reduce deaths?

Here's a study performed in the US, specifically Pennsylvania

https://www.iihs.org/topics/bibliography/ref/1820

The executive summary says it reduced the number of people running through the red light, but it doesn't indicate the impact on accidents or safety.

That's correct. The paper assumes that we understand that compliance results in safety.

From your response I gather you want to disagree?

I think it's probably the most important and powerful statistic they could have published, if it were true. Its ommission implies to me that it does not increase safety.

The problem is that you'd need a much bigger experiment to get a statistically significant result on the axis you've decided matters instead, and yet you've got no argument for why this much more expensive and longer experiment is needed beyond that you're not convinced.

Matters instead? I feel like it's the only statistic that matters here. Here's the reason: if it makes a negative impact on safety, the cameras should certainly be removed, and if it makes no impact on safety, the money to install those cameras and monitor them should be spent on something that does have a positive impact on safety. Otherwise, it's just a cash grab and safety theater.

The state of Illinois specially requires a statistical analysis to prove they don't make a negative impact on safety. As far as I know, the cities that have the cameras haven't done the required analysis; I've inquired with a few.

I'm not sure why you think it would be more expensive to study the safety. I'm sure police have the data. Are accidents just so rare both before and after install that there's no chance of achieving statistical significance? That just seems like reason enough to abandon the project.

> I'm not sure why you think it would be more expensive to study the safety.

Because you'd have to run a much larger experiment. The end point you're measuring (RTAs or possibly deaths depending) is significantly rarer than just running a light. But you're still trying to collect enough data to achieve confidence, so you'll need a larger experiment.

My very strong impression is that your priorities are messed up and what you're looking for isn't safety at all, so that no matter what studies are done you'll find another excuse as to why enforcement isn't a good idea, at which point of course any further study is a waste of their time.

For example you suggest in this comment that somehow police data would be good enough, and Chicago has police data showing the same thing, but no doubt you'll say you have a different reason why Chicago's police data doesn't satisfy you.

I'm sorry, I thought I was clear. My priority is the safety.

I don't like the Chicago police data because it fails to address the safety.

>Speed limits that have absolutely zero enforcement; so much so, that attempting to actually drive at the limit is a road hazard!

Speed limits really don't do anything other than let local authorities say they're "doing something." People will drive as fast as they feel comfortable to do so, which is primarily a function of road design. No one is going to follow a 25 MPH posted limit on a straight unobstructed 4-lane road.

This is the key to all of it for me

"Wasn't changing the road layout tantamount to admitting liability for the crash?"

We act like road design is not a modifier on these crashes

Because it's a British story this does spend more time on mentioning the particular British political push back from drivers than it might.

But one example they don't mention I think needs to be mentioned here. Some years ago, British highway authorities tested two interesting ideas. One of these ideas is: Lets put cameras on gantries so that we can see cars in difficulty or stopped in a running lane. Then use the per-lane signage to close that lane, protecting the vehicle and its occupants. The other was: Let's turn the existing "hard" (ie paved) shoulder of multi lane roads into another lane, thus increasing the maximum throughput of the road.

The first idea of course reduces deaths and serious injuries. If your car drops dead in a middle lane of a free flowing road, the people immediately behind you will hopefully realise and evade, but now after a few seconds or at worst minutes the lane will be cleared, meaning fewer opportunities to get rear-ended. Hooray.

But the second idea increases deaths and serious injuries. Instead of a safe(ish) refuge (the shoulder) now it's all running lanes, if your car fails you can head for the slowest lane and if you make it now anybody who doesn't realise you're stopped might hit you at 60mph rather than 80mph. Previously the shoulder wasn't a running lane so while it was hardly a safe place to be, since it was right next to vehicles travelling at high speed with no barrier, you weren't one moment's inattention from a violent collision at any moment.

Under Vision Zero clearly only the first idea can be implemented. But the second idea is very popular with the usual "one more lane! Just add one more lane, that'll fix it" drivers and it's much cheaper than actual road widening. So the British government resolved to do both and claim that if you add them together they're a safety improvement. You know, like if I charge $5 extra, but also give you a $1 discount I'm actually saving you money...

Then of course the first idea is sometimes kind awkward and hard to get right - and the "one more lane" people can't tell the difference anyway. So, eh, you can slow walk that and if a bunch of people die you can probably say the really important thing is you added more lanes - yeah, people are dead but those people probably wouldn't have voted for you anyway.

This seems so obvious to me. How the hell do traffic engineers earn their PEs if they don’t grasp this? Or are they not engineers at all (but perhaps should be)?

Engineers usually answer to something like a city council who are elected representatives. If the community at large does not support a change, it is unlikely to go anywhere.

I know many engineers in these sorts of roles who spend years building up the consensus to push small improvements through.

The positive side is once the first scary change is implemented, and the public actually likes it, the political will suddenly emerges to do more.

> "Don't pretend that there are laws that you know everyone will follow," Tingvall says. "That's very unprofessional. You would never do that in aviation or in other areas where you really care for safety."

I've heard this as "trust but verify"

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