Agreed. I think that it's in fact quite immature to act like we must always optimize for lives saved, no matter the cost and no matter how small the gain.
The important thing to remember is that dollars are always lives, but there are finite resources available. If we can save more lives spending the same money on medical research or emissions reductions or housing construction[1] then we should do that instead.
[1] Keep in mind that a single new housing unit that reduces the owner's commute by 40 miles/day is good for eliminating more than half a million vehicle miles, in addition to all of its other benefits.
This presumes efficient spending of effort and capital across government, which, especially in the USA, a State comprised of up to nearly a hundred governments depending on where you're standing (federal, with federal agencies; state, with state agencies, county, with county agencies, city, with city agencies, school district, with school district agencies; etc), is not a good presumption.
If a local government can get together a million bucks to install some bollards at one or two dangerous intersections, that's a win. That million dollars could never have been spent on a national emission reduction effort.
It doesn't presume anything, it's just relative value. The local government by definition can't enact a national program, but it could certainly use the money for e.g. local tax credits for solar panels or electric vehicles or heat pumps. It could provide incentives for local housing construction or a hundred other things. They could even return the money to citizens, who would do something with it, often something good. And if any of those things provide more value than the bollards then that's what they should do instead.
This is still assuming too much efficiency. The transportation department gets a budget and spends it. Should we remove their budget until cancer is cured?
The transportation department doesn't choose their own budget, the legislators do. Many of the things the transportation department does are life-critical -- emergency services need usable roads. And if you don't have transportation infrastructure then you don't have commerce or a tax base or money to spend on anything else.
Whereas if you're asking whether they should remove other waste from the transportation budget, or any other budget, which is money spent with low value (e.g. overpaying to use a politically connected contractor), and use that money for cancer research, the answer is yes.
Clearly then, the legislators should restrict road usage to emergency vehicles only, and in order to allow other people to get to work, set up a cheap bussing system. This would be the most cost effective way to save the most amount of lives, letting you write off transport and focus on funding cancer research.
Because it isn't actually the most cost effective. Mass transit only works in areas of high population density. Otherwise you get empty buses or extremely long waits between service intervals. It's also, in general, slower because you have to wait for the bus and then be delayed as it picks up other passengers or takes an indirect route to your destination, which reduces the efficiency of ~everyone. There are also many others who need roads other than emergency vehicles: Delivery vehicles, tradesmen with their equipment, the proverbial soccer mom who has to transport the soccer team and all their gear to the game, etc.
And once you're already paying the cost to build and maintain the roads, you might as well use them for general purposes.
> Because it isn't actually the most cost effective.
That's simply not true. If people combined the money they spent on car payments, insurance, the opportunity cost from lower average lifespan due to car emissions and children being run over by pick-up trucks, and used it on taxes for busses, we could very easily have a high availability public transit system, even in suburban hell.
Though of course to achieve maximum efficiency the government must create tax incentives for dense housing and tax disincentives for suburbs.
Your points about busses don't make sense - a bus takes up 2 or at most 3 car lengths on the road. One nearly empty bus with three people in it is thus more efficient from every angle, including time because those people aren't traffic.
Your idea that point to point travel is faster with cars is false: come to Houston and I'll show you why (traffic). You can get around cities and even suburbs with public transit much faster for all rides. A great example is the train from the airport to an Airbnb in NYC. Only a fool would attempt that in a cab to save time.
In other countries, soccer clubs hire busses and vans for meets and the like, or individual children simply take public transit to events. This was true in America in the 70s as well according to my grandpa.
Building a road for emergency vehicles and commercial deliveries is one thing. Just needs one or two lanes. But for every person and their car: Houston. 8 lane nightmares.
> we could very easily have a high availability public transit system, even in suburban hell.
This is simply false. There is an unavoidable problem in suburbia: During parts of the day the number of vehicles that drive down certain roads is one vehicle with one occupant. Replacing a single-occupant car with a single-occupant bus is not more efficient. But running the bus only once every four to eight hours is unreasonable latency and objectively worse than the status quo where you can leave whenever you want.
> One nearly empty bus with three people in it is thus more efficient
You're assuming the bus will have more than one person on it. That's the unavoidable trade off. If there is one traveler every 90 minutes then getting a bus with three people on it would only be possible if there is only one bus every 4.5 hours.
> Your idea that point to point travel is faster with cars is false: come to Houston and I'll show you why (traffic).
Traffic is caused by bad design. Ironically it's the density separation that does this. You put all the density downtown but people live in the suburbs. Then there is no traffic in the suburbs but, because you need a car to leave the suburbs, unreasonable traffic downtown where everybody takes their cars, and on the main road that leads to downtown.
If people lived downtown then they wouldn't need to drive. But if every place was medium density instead of separation of high and low, you also wouldn't have a problem because some people could walk and the remaining traffic wouldn't all be concentrated in one place.
The problem is entirely caused by zoning rules and I'm not at all convinced we wouldn't be better off to utterly abolish all density restrictions whatsoever.
Your argument only holds where prices reflect the real (internal + external) cost. Otherwise you are bound to market failure (which has already happened to the transportation market).
The values are entirely on paper. It's a comparison you make when deciding how to allocate funding.
Politicians obviously and frequently don't get the math right (or even do the comparison), but that doesn't affect what they should do if they were making better policy choices, or what voters should ask for if they're doing the numbers.
It is a bit more complicated since car drivers don’t pay for most of the externalities of driving. If you take individual car traffic as a given, I agree.
Externalities are a separate thing. They have a cost, but internalizing them also has a cost in overhead and enforcement etc. For large externalities that's worth it, for small and diffuse ones it often isn't because the cure is worse than the disease. It does you no good to spend $100 to prevent $50 in harm.
1. taxes - I pay hefty taxes on fuel (in the UK) and tax on owning a car
2. insurance - I have to have an insurance policy that will pay for any damage to third parties. The payment for those externalities is pooled, but paid.
Not perfect, and not entirely, but a lot of it is paid.
Yeah the fuel price sucks. In germany car traffic is highly subsidised. It doesn’t even pay for the infra it needs. Probably the situation in the uk is not that different.
I'm not sure if you're from the Netherlands, but I can assure you it's more nuanced that this. Mixing only works when cars are not dominant, so you need low car volumes and low speed in these areas. Residential areas in cities are an example of this: no through traffic, max 30kmh limit.
Most of (new) Dutch road design is designed to give pedestrians and cyclists multiple safe options, while cars have to take the long way round. You can in theory still get basically anywhere with a car if you need, but often (especially in cities) it easier to walk/cycle/take the train/tram/metro. The result is that things can be closer to each other (no parking moat everywhere) so in the end the trip is shorter and safer for everyone, including people choosing to take the car.
As an example: More and more "cars are guests" roads are being added. These are usually cycling dominant routes and while completely removing cars might be preferable it's not always possible. Due to the roads being designed as widened cycling paths (and look like it) which barely fit a car you can have cars there but you'd think twice driving there, which makes the drivers more cautious and lowers the car traffic volume a lot. Note: the throughput of a cycling path far exceeds that of a normal road per surface area used (about ab order of magnitude vs cars).
I’m aware the Netherlands don’t implement Vision Zero, I just put them in as another example of a country that aims to reduce pedestrian deaths from cars :)
I would argue the point of the article isn’t “we need more bollards everywhere “, it’s “our regard for pedestrian safety is absurdly low, even cheap tools to increase pedestrian safety (like bollards) are uncommon / controversial"
Vision Zero rules are that you either need physical separation or a speed limit of 30 km/h. 30 km/h is approximately the threshold where the vast majority of vehicle-pedestrian collisions aren't fatal.
They've chosen to lower the speed limit rather than add bollards.
