Only issue i have is that they need to reduce the top speeds on the app based scooters. Way too many people flying around corners on the sidewalk and i have to peak around corners now in busy areas.
> kill by far the largest share of people by any transportation method.
That's only because cars are by far the largest share of transportation period.
When you normalize by looking at the death rate per person-mile, the numbers are very different. If you're trying to decide "what is the safest way to get to work", then the best numbers I could cobble together (which are not great) from a few sources are:
Deaths per 100 million miles:
Car: ~1
Bicycle: ~9
Walking: ~16
Motocycle: ~40
It's very hard to get good numbers here because most car fatality numbers also include fatalities from pedestrians and cyclists who were hit by cars.
Really, there are two different questions to ask:
1. What is the safest way for me to get to work?
2. What is the safest way for all of us to get to work?
You might assume those have the same answer, but they don't. The safest way for all of us to get to work is probably to have everyone walk and/or bike. But if you unilaterally decide to start biking or walking to work in a heavily car-dominated area, you are increasing your own personal risk unless you can find a route that separates you from the cars well.
Transportation safety is fiendishly complex and no one sentence comment on HN will capture it well.
Your statistic is how many people are killed while using the method of transportation, not how many people the method of transportation kills.
Approximately 100% of the walking and cycling deaths and a good portion of the motorcycle deaths are caused by cars. Approximately 0 deaths are caused by walking or cycling.
> When you normalize by looking at the death rate per person-mile, the numbers are very different. If you're trying to decide "what is the safest way to get to work"[...]
This is a strange metric to use though, because you're unlikely to walk (say) 20 miles to work, while you might drive that distance. Unilaterally choosing to walk or bike to work rather than drive in such a situation also typically means moving closer to work.
I think a more useful metric to use when talking about safety for an individual would be a per-trip metric. I might have a 40 minute walk to the office where someone else would have a 40 minute drive to theirs, but they are functionally the same trip.
> This is a strange metric to use though, because you're unlikely to walk (say) 20 miles to work, while you might drive that distance. Unilaterally choosing to walk or bike to work rather than drive in such a situation also typically means moving closer to work.
If the decision you're trying to make right now is how to get to work, then holding the mileage constant is the right way to look at it. If you're trying to decide where to live then, yes, the analysis gets a lot more complex.
Well of course where you live plays into what mode of transportation you'll choose, and the mode of transportation you'd prefer will often drive where you live. For example, I live a long walk from work (or a short bike trip, which is what I do 99% of the time; walking is mostly reserved for nice lazy evenings or blizzards). Yes, the rent is more expensive, but I'm also saving a lot of money on not having to buy/maintain/insure/park a car. And my daily commute is only around 4 miles round trip each day.
So it does make sense to evaluate commuting mortality on a per trip basis, e.g. "what is the mortality associated with day of going to the office". The point of a trip isn't to go X miles, it's to go accomplish Y thing, such as going to work, running an errand, etc. Sparse suburbs shouldn't get "credit" and have their mortality normalized away on distance for everything being spread out. The sparseness itself is a problem in that it's requiring such long mileage for such trivial trips as "going to work" or "getting groceries".
Perhaps, but let me throw in an additional consideration. Per-passenger-mile statistics treat a mile driven within a city (which involves complex interactions with pedestrians/cyclists/other drivers) the same as a mile driven on a freeway (relatively uncomplicated).
If you happen to be in a position right now to be able to walk to work at all, most of your driving is probably intra-city, because you probably both live and work in the same city. However, I suspect per-passenger-mile stats weigh freeway driving more heavily than city driving: on a typical car commute into a city from the suburbs, most of your mileage is not within the city proper, but on the freeways surrounding it.
I used to believe that speed-cameras were "unsportsmanlike" until I a) grew up a little, and b) visited a country where they were in extensive use and driving felt safer.
Speed cameras massively decrease the need for traffic-stops, which is a huge win for both safety and potential profiling/discrimination. Lowering speeds can decrease the consequences of a crash and more-uniform low-cost enforcement can allow law-enforcement to focus limited human resources on responding to calls that actually require a human.
I'm a big fan of speed cameras now, especially those that measure average speed by photographing cars at the ends of a long road segment.
Those segment cameras are great and they made a good impact where I live. They control a school zone that up until recently has been massively disrespected by commuters trying to avoid a stoplight on the main artery.
Honestly the only cameras I really don't like are the red light cams that for some reason are also accompanied by lowering the yellow signal's time by half compared to a non-cam light controlled intersection. I'm sure there's a great reason for that happening but I can't think of anything charitable.
A lot of the cases I know about here in Ohio is they reduced the yellow time to generate more tickets. Ended up being banned state-wide because they being used for revenue generation rather than safety.
Which is obviously terrible, but that's not fundamental to the system. It would make more sense to have a state law mandating, say, a minimum yellow time for such cameras.
But when most people drive, it's easier to do something that seems very pro-driver, even if it's anti-safety.
The average speed system has an advantage for drivers: if there's congestion in one section, you can make the time up on the later stage of the road (because there tends to be no live enforcement).
It would help if there wasn't blatant corruption in the installation and maintenance of those cameras. At least locally, multiple municipal officers have been arrested for taking bribes. It doesn't have anything to do with convenience.
My biggest issue with speed cameras is that one in my city also enforces the school zone limit even if it's not currently in effect. It's on a main arterial road that people usually go 40 on but brake check to slow down to 20 for a few blocks which inevitably causes traffic + crashes around the school.
Yes, the speed governors would be GPS-based, like they are for e-scooters. You'd be limited to going the speed limit of whatever road you're currently on.
Given how excellent my Model 3 wasn't at determining the speed limit of the freeway near me, let's not. If you want people to slow down, there are effective ways to design roads that work better than arbitrary speed limits.
This is more of an indictment of Tesla than anything else. And if governors were actually required then they would come with a good open access source of data with updated speed limits on all roads.
Design roads to the speed. Too many of our roads (US) are wide, open, and "trick" drivers into going faster than necessary.
Things that can help reduce speeds:
- narrower lanes
- less shoulder/median space
- trees, bushes
- traffic circles instead of red/yellow/green signals
- various curbing arrangements
Blindspots like bushes and shrubs only REDUCE SAFETY. People can't see the cars, cars can't see the people. Probably 70% of the cars will slow down, making it even more dangerous with a false sense of security among pedestrians.
Since pedestrians don't have signaling apparatuses, the only way to share the parts of the road that must be shared is to clearly see everyone.
Common example I'm used to seeing is narrowing of the roads and causing a slight bend at various points to essentially 'force' you to slow down. It's not technically causing you to slow, but you feel much more comfortable going slower when transitioning through the calmed area. No speed enforcement needed... just some small changes to the road.
Yeah, poorly worded. Tree/vegetation work to slow traffic on straight portions without intersections. You wouldn't want them at intersections with pedestrians/bikes.
Because people who self select to drive some alternative vehicle for fun are a safer demographic than the general public because the "I don't like commuting so I'm gonna do my nails and post on HN about how cars are evil while sitting in traffic" types are absent in the former group.
If the general public started driving motorcycles it would get more expensive.
Space should be re-allocated from roads to properly protected scooter/bike lanes. The real problem is non-pedestrian traffic being forced onto sidewalks.
I doubt it. The rate at which you get new riders and old riders forgetting their painful lesson will naturally become equal to the number of people learning a painful lesson, and the number of reckless scooter riders will tend towards a stable equilibrium. I'd say we're already not far away from that equilibrium.
Yes, though I can hardly blame people for doing it. They should be used in bike infrastructure instead, but at least in the states there's almost no safe bike infrastructure except in a handful of cities.
Choosing between the sidewalk with pedestrians and the road with cars, I mean it's obvious right?
And some of the scooter companies have developed technology to detect when people ride them on sidewalks. Mandating its use or fining the rental companies for rider behavior would help with this problem.
