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Comment by bradfa | Hacker News Reader

Pedestrians are hit by cars in the USA because the roads are not designed for non-car users. This is exacerbated by distracted driving, drunk driving, and recent car design changes like higher hood heights but the root of it is poorly designed roads which don’t consider pedestrians’ needs.

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A huge part of poorly designed roads is wider lanes (and parking spaces) that allow/encourage huge cars. Its been proven that narrower lanes correlate strongly with lower crash and fatality rates (e.g. [0] below) yet lane widths are under pressure to increase with larger vehicles, and every time this happens the vehicles get larger again.

[0] https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2023/narrower-lanes-safer-stree...

I heard the fire department wants wide lanes so they can drive around in those huge behemoths they love.

People living in buildings that are currently aflame tend to be fans of those behemoths. Speaking from experience.

In Europe they're smaller. I don't know if the fires are also smaller.

Surely that's not THE determining factor behind American transportation system.

Because if it is - seems easy and cheap to fix.

But they can easily use more than one lane, why should they care about lane width?

It is part of it. Notjustbikes did a video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2dHFC31VtQ

Higher speeds, too.

Someone didn't read the article.

The article that fails to consider that the sedans have changed in shape and size over the past 20 years?

The article that has all the cool plots, and no relevant information like the actual vehicles being discussed?

The article that doesn't even bother putting a 2000 Camry side-by-side with a 2025 Camry to make it blatantly obvious that it's not just SUVs?

That article?

>Someone didn't read the article.

Someone doesn't understand that any article that's drawing conclusions based on a workflow that involves putting a Chevy Suburban (functionally a chevy pickup from the B pillar forward) and a Honda HRV into the same category is sus at best and anyone uncritically accepting said conclusions is also sus at best.

If one wanted to be honest they'd look at GVW or some other metric that tracks size far more closely than a fairly arbitrary categorization that is highly gamed for regulatory reasons.

We're all just so sick of these shallow analysis. Shitting numbers and graphs onto them doesn't make them not shallow. Like what even is the point of a raw "deaths by state" map?[1]?

[1] https://xkcd.com/1138/

Suburbans are on truck chassis and are SUVs. HRVs are on car chassis and are crossovers. The bucket is called "trucks and SUVs" to make this less ambiguous.

>Suburbans are on truck chassis and are SUVs. HRVs are on car chassis and are crossovers. The bucket is called "trucks and SUVs" to make this less ambiguous.

TFA does not use data broken down in that way.

TFA cites "sales by body type" which puts a 'Burb (functionally a pickup for this discussion) into the same category as a 2002 Forester (which is an SUV on paper, but obviously a car).

As an adamant enthusiast of both cars and infrastructure design, if someone puts a crossover in the trucks and SUVs category, I am dubious of anything that follows. Crossovers are basically just cars with higher rollover risk. They're lighter, they have smaller engines, they can stop more quickly, and overall have much, much better safety characteristics.

Like I'm sorry but if you put crossovers and SUVs in the same bucket for a discussion anywhere, but especially in the realm of safety, I'm not taking your opinions seriously.

>Like what even is the point of a raw "deaths by state" map?

It does give slightly more insight than the map of US state population per capita[1].

[1] https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=710896291698831&id...

It's more the trend in cars than the roads because the roads didn't change starting in 2009.

And drivers. Readers should ask themselves when they first got a smartphone and if it was around 2009.

You should ask yourself whether smartphones are a US-only phenomenon. From the article:

> Other countries haven’t seen this increase in pedestrian deaths: in every other high-income country, rates are flat or declining. Whatever’s causing the problem seems to be limited to the US.

It reminds me of Americans blaming school shootings on video games as if nobody else in the world had them :)

Smartphones + US culture is limited to the US.

That's a deeply silly assertion.

Culture is one of our major and most successful exports. Afghan tribesmen have seen The Simpsons. Osama Bin Laden played Half-Life and showed his kids Pixar films. https://www.history.com/articles/bin-laden-compound-abbottab...

And the US isn't under Sharia Law. Saying that The Simpsons in syndication is the reason why two cultures behaves the same is the sillier of the two statements.

> And the US isn't under Sharia Law.

We have our moments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_county

> Saying that The Simpsons in syndication is the reason why two cultures behaves the same is the sillier of the two statements.

American culture is influential. Americans and Afghans aren't the same, but they've absolutely picked up on bits of it. And Afghanistan is an extreme example; you'll find even more American cultural influx in, say, England.

As compared to the European roads that are half the width of US roads?

Yes, european roads are not as wide, since they make place for proper sidewalks and bike lanes. Another advantage is that narrower roads make drivers drive more carefully and slowly, reducing accidents even further.

In Japan many neighborhood roads (even in cities) are narrow and have no sidewalk to speak of. But I feel safe walking down them because drivers expect to go slow and look out for pedestrians and cyclists.

If you want to blow through an area fast, there are other roads for that with lighted crossings and sidewalks, and often slower mixed-use parallel roads for pulling in and out of businesses.

I wish people would stop assuming that an area with 500M people, more than 20 countries and far more cultures are one addressable block.

Some places are, others are absolutely awful.

> Another advantage is that narrower roads make drivers drive more carefully and slowly,

In some places, in others people go absolutely hell for leather because the roads are pretty fun.

This varies city to city.

I've no doubt it varies, but they're all doing something differently that seems to work versus the US.

> Other countries haven’t seen this increase in pedestrian deaths: in every other high-income country, rates are flat or declining. Whatever’s causing the problem seems to be limited to the US.

I don't have an issue with that, or the article, it's the comments about "ah but in Europe they do X" like every road looks like Amsterdam.

Then we shouldn't really be talking about the US, which has similar size and population stats, but instead individual cities and states. Denying that US states are correlated and European city construction are correlated is to ignore the history of how they were made.

Not in my experience. The road widths were set hundreds of years ago and the buildings have not changed. Walking around European and UK towns I find myself much closer to cars than walking around in the US. This is a factor in keeping car speed low, which likely affects how often and severe pedestrian collisions are.

You seem to agree with the parent comment

I do agree that European roads are safer, but not because they have made large segregated sidewalks (which is what I disagree with as reality and the root cause).

Ah. Ditto.

On small village roads with little traffic you don't even need pavements (not to mention bike paths) as long as the road is narrow and winding with good visibility. Cars drive slowly and rarely, it's perfectly fine to walk there.

Yeah. Halving the width halves the time to cross and also causes drivers to slow down in proportion even if the speed limit is significantly higher. Narrowing and placing “obstacles” is the only effective way of showing traffic permanently.

There are lots of narrow roads in America, like the one I currently live on, which is about 1.75 lanes wide. If I come up against a large truck, one of us has to pull to the side.

Most people prefer not to drive on roads like that.

people drive slower on narrower roads — some traffic calming efforts in the US include making right turns at lights narrower so people slow down while potentially turning into a crosswalk

Yes. Wider roads are worse for safety.

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