[avastmick]

The road toll in the US is staggering given its wealth. The conversation to reduce it doesn’t obviously exist like it does in other places. The NHTSA figures showed an increase per kilometre in 2021, where many developed nations are showing a year on year reduction. Any Americans want to posit a reason why?

[semireg]

I feel that road rage has increased even in rural areas. Being on a bicycle or on foot automatically makes you an “other” and the contempt on busy roads is palpable. The law states “cars must yield to pedestrians in crosswalk” (novel idea) but it seems many in cars look at me like “what are you going to do about me not stopping? nothing” which mirrors a certain political climate as well. There’s a sense of entitlement and power when you have your fellow man’s life in your hands - and many choose to aggressively step on the gas.

As an aside, I’m raising a 5 and 2 year old a block away from a very busy 4 lane (2x2) street. A few years ago the state awarded our city a grant for a road diet (1x1+center turn). Everything was set to be changed and then our city council was replaced by car-loving candidates sponsored by local big-money. The grant was forfeited and the road remains oversized and dangerous.

The upside is I get to teach my children how dangerous this road is, meaning they won’t have a complacency that otherwise could set in if the road was made safer.

What a twisted logic … ugh!

[resoluteteeth]

The conventional answer is that vehicles are getting bigger/higher off the ground/heavier in the US.

Some new pickup trucks are so big and have such a bad view of the road in front of them that you can't even see a normal sized car stopped in front out the windshield and they need to have a front camera. A lot of SUVs aren't quite there yet but they are getting ridiculously big/heavy and still high enough that it's hard to see children in front.

The height means that the bumper is positioned in a much worse way and rather than rolling on the windshield you'll just die if you're hit. The weight also increases the risk to pedestrians in a collision.

Also, some other countries are doing much more serious things to reduce pedestrian/cyclist deaths while the US is doing pretty much nothing.

[WalterBright]

In Seattle, they paint bike lanes everywhere. The craziest ones are the ones that Kriss-Kross the car lanes, like those slot car tracks where the cars swap lanes.

Madness.

There's no way I'd ever ride a bike in those lanes.

I hate the Kriss-Kross when I'm driving, because in slow traffic the bikes often move faster, passing on the right and then Kriss-Krossing in front of you.

[livueta]

I biked many thousands of miles to/from work/school in Seattle - well, up until the third time I got run over and decided to call it quits - and agree 1000%.

The idea that "sharing the road" is possible if only we were all a little nicer and more attentive is a supremely naive fantasy that exists primarily as a justification to not build real physically divided infrastructure.

Painted bike lanes (and crosswalks, tbqh) are death traps and overall fucking terrible fig-leaf concepts. Barriers (and over/underpasses, etc) or nothing.

[MichaelCollins]

I generally feel safe at crosswalks, but I never trust the infrastructure of the crosswalk to keep me safe. If you blindly trust the crosswalk light you'll probably wind up dead. I always look both ways while crossing the street, I keep my head on a swivel during the entire crossing not just the start. Ultimately I am responsible for my own safety, I won't get a second life just because the traffic light said I was in the right.

If you stay attentive when crossing, I think almost all crosswalks are safe. If you aren't attentive when crossing, none of them are safe.

[Reason077]

> ”Painted bike lanes (and crosswalks, tbqh) are death traps and overall fucking terrible fig-leaf concepts. Barriers (and over/underpasses, etc) or nothing.”

Painted, unprotected lanes aren’t ideal, but they’re better than nothing if they encourage more people to cycle.

There’s plenty of examples where I live where painted cycle lanes have later been upgraded to proper protected cycle lanes (with kerbs, cycle-specific signals at intersections, etc) once they showed the demand was there.

I’d also argue that simply having more cyclists in an area makes cyclists safer because car drivers become more aware of them.

[Schroedingersat]

Sharing the road with a sane driver travelling at sane speed limits in a sane car is perfectly reasonable. There's no practical reason 95% of motor vehicles couldn't be as small as the eu L7e class (or even half the weight) and governed to 40km/h (with a manual override for larger roads) with the remaining 5% only travelling on local roads by timed permit. Filling the roads with monster trucks is an intentional policy choice, not some inevitability and even not what people would naturally decide to do.

For rural roads a bike lane works fine as there are very few conflict points.

[Reason077]

> “Filling the roads with monster trucks is an intentional policy choice”

It really is. For decades, US fuel economy standards, emissions rules, and tax breaks and depreciation rules have all been weighted in favor of bigger, heavier vehicles.

[richk449]

There is a bike lane near my house painted on the right side of the road. At some point, it just ends. Then a hundred feet away, it just starts up again on the left side of the road. Every time I ride it, I’m amazed that such a crazy design is still there. Do the civil engineers think that bikes are able to teleport?

Sometimes I think it is a decorative bike lane - there to give the impression of biking, not for actual use.

[midoridensha]

It's there to satisfy a requirement, nothing more. It's not actually intended to be used. The people who made the requirement don't ride bikes, and are just fishing for votes. The people who made the lane are just fulfilling the contractual requirement for the city, and also don't ride bikes.

[DangitBobby]

People who actually ride bikes were not consulted about any of these designs, no question. I love getting shouted at by belligerents about not using the bike lane because I consider it to be hazardous.

[cge]

Being around local government conversations in California, public and private, for mostly unrelated reasons, and only privately being interested in bicycle and pedestrian policy, I became enormously disillusioned and depressed about the chances of making real change. There was a sense that anyone arguing for good bicycle infrastructure was seen as akin to a militant political extremist who should be excluded from any real conversation: I once waited while a planning hearing for a major project was delayed for around forty five minutes while the simple request from a father that a single bike rack be put near a public park was met with a sea of concerned residents who seemed to describe him as everything from a likely outside invader, to a paid activist, to someone who should be investigated by CPS (Where was the mother of the children? Why wasn't she at the meeting?), to someone who wanted to make the park a place where murderous teenage bicyclists would run down senior citizens trying to walk on pleasant paths. Bicycle infrastructure was only really discussed in terms of getting funding, then placed in pointless locations, or left in endless planning. What seemed like a wilful misinterpretation of Vision Zero was used as an argument against any pedestrian safety improvements other than speed limit reductions and speed bumps, with a seeming focus on suburban single-family-home residential areas where, entirely coincidentally I am sure, residents were upset about traffic noise. I actually heard a transport commission member argue that the city should not consider improving crosswalk and pedestrian intersection safety, because Vision Zero showed speed limits were better for preventing fatal accidents. Even simply asking if police would increase pedestrian patrols instead of driving on pedestrian paths in even small parks in street patrol cars was met with enormous hostility.

At best, bicycle and pedestrian topics would get a question or two at local debates, usually along the lines of "Do you walk, or take public transport, or ride a bicycle in the area?", almost always answered along the lines of "Yes, of course, in [some rare situation], but I can't normally because it isn't suitable transportation when working". But as locals would primarily vote based on somewhat arbitrary senses of feeling and intuition, without considering direct local questions or any research, nothing really changed.

The same projects and funding, which out-of-the-way places to add patchwork bike lanes to, and whether those bike lanes should be painted, or maybe just "bike route / share the road" signs on the side of the road, are probably being discussed now, a decade later.

[DangitBobby]

Almost every bike lane near me is like this. Just randomly fucking ends with no notice, dumping you onto a 4 lane divided highway. Or has you weaving in and out of traffic between cars in the far lane and the turn lane. Or there's parking to the left of the bike lane, and people park in the bike lane (never ticketed, of course) instead of the designated parking area with plenty of room. Or there are cars parked to the right of the bike lane that you must watch very carefully in case a door suddenly opens in your path. Or there's just a bike painted onto the shoulder (2.5 feet wide shoulder) where all the rocks, broken glass, and other debris accumulate. The worst offender I've seen is a set of sharrows in downtown that leads you directly onto a highway that legally cyclists are not allowed on (they certainly couldn't ride there safely), and terminate after you're already beyond the point of no return down the one-way on-ramp. If you didn't know better, you could end up in real trouble.

If it weren't so frustrating it would be comical.

[mathieuh]

I’m not in the US but that happens all the time in the north of Ireland where I live. I’m convinced that bike lanes here are designed by someone who drove a Transit van down the road once.

[resoluteteeth]

Unfortunate NACTO (which is considered LESS shitty for bikes/pedestrians than AASHTO, whose road design guidelines are used in more places in the US) actually recommends these things: https://nacto.org/publication/urban-bikeway-design-guide/int...

This design is absolutely terrible, so hopefully this will change at some point (other countries like the Netherlands have figured out better approaches to how to allow cars to turn when there's a bike lane).

[Reason077]

Yeah, some of those designs look pretty bad. The solution in London at busy intersections is to have separate signals for cyclists and turning motor traffic. Turning traffic will have a red light while cycle traffic has green and vice-versa.

At smaller intersections without signals, the turning motorist is responsible for looking for (and giving way to) cycle traffic before turning across the cycle lane.

[YawningAngel]

As a cycle commuter I feel like London compromises very heavily because the authorities aren't willing to reallocate or expand the existing road space to do what's necessary, and instead just do what they can.

[Reason077]

True. It's much better than it was 5-10 years ago, but there's still much more to be done. Some councils are better than others.

Obviously most London roads can't be "expanded", but even reallocating a few parking spaces can often create a lot of space for cyclists and pedestrians.

[u801e]

NACTO really hasn't vetted their designs or really written a standard design guide https://john-s-allen.com/blog/2014/04/endorse-nacto/

[presentation]

Can we just copy the design standards of the Netherlands? With 0 brain-power used it would result in an instant order of magnitude improvement.

[MonaroVXR]

" In Seattle, they paint bike lanes everywhere. The craziest ones are the ones that Kriss-Kross the car lanes, like those slot car tracks where the cars swap lanes"

Same in the Netherlands, not all bicycle and stoplights are equal

[spookierookie]

European here. We mostly get what you guys have in terms of cars and politics lagging just a few years or months back. Usually with narrower roads and worse infrastructure.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

From a pedestrian safety perspective, narrower roads and worse infrastructure is a good thing. It slows cars down and makes it less pleasant to drive, so fewer do.

[spookierookie]

You'd expect so (and I'd hope so) but nope. Drivers become even more reckless. Driving huge, noise-insulated cars seems to put them in the mindset of total control, detachment from actual speed and "I'm not gonna hurt myself anyways". Depending on the country you can add a less than perfect driver education (if any) to the mix.

[Dalewyn]

The other side of the coin is that you're safer inside a bigger and heavier vehicle when you're inevitably in an accident. A big Ford F-350 is going to have a much better chance of successfully protecting its passengers than a Toyota Camry.

[etrautmann]

Safety for you at the direct expense of everyone else. Classic tragedy of the commons I suppose.

[davidw]

This is not wrong, but it's a horrible arms race that leads to an incredible loss of life as well as massive amounts of unnecessary pollution.

[notacoward]

"Make sure the other guy dies" is not a great approach to social policy.

[coryrc]

But it is a very American approach.

[kranelisa]

So, arms race towards everyone driving a tank?

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Let's drive tanks then, and play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoadBlasters !1!!

edit: Did not downvote, because on point.

But mine is too, in extrapolation.

[chillwaves]

Based on what? I have never heard of this rule "Bigger = safer".

Nothing "inevitable" about accidents.

[midoridensha]

It's very simple physics: if your vehicle is much larger than the vehicle you crash into, you're going to have lower acceleration forces inside your vehicle and thus experience fewer injuries.

Sucks to be the person in the other vehicle though. The end result is an arms race of vehicle sizes.

[Dalewyn]

>Nothing "inevitable" about accidents.

Car accidents are a question of when, not if. Sooner or later you're going to be in one.

If you somehow get through life without ever being involved in one, you were a very lucky bastard.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Then I'm a lucky bastard, as lifelong pedestrian and bicyclist. Though I'm always acting as everybody else on wheels is out there trying to kill me.

Not even intentionally, just some distraction, inattention, miscalculation of my speed, or even sudden technical defect, or health problem.

Though I had countless near misses.

[mcv]

That's a defeatist attitude. Most people I know have never been in a car accident (I actually have; I just remembered. I hit a bike when turning right when I just had my license; never happened since, fortunately. Nobody was hurt). But I live in a country that cares about safe traffic design; that matters a lot.

[Dalewyn]

>That's a defeatist attitude.

It's called being realistic.

First, think of the stupidest guy you can think of and understand half of humanity is stupider than him.

Second, think of simply how many people and cars are on the road at any given time. Counting would be a fool's errand, to say the least.

Third, understand that driving a car is not something that comes naturally or instinctively. Some might be more talented drivers than others, but we all have to learn how to drive a car to varying degrees of competency.

Fourth and finally: Murphy's Law.

When you combine all of these together, it's a miracle that we aren't seeing several orders of magnitudes more car accidents on a daily basis. The old saying that you're more likely to be in a car accident going to the airport than the chance you'll be in a plane accident is based in reality.

If you get through life without being in a car accident, I reiterate you were a lucky bastard and I would sincerely be happy for your good fortune.

[sveme]

Live in Germany, driving for 25 years. Never was in an accident. Same as my father, who has been driving for more than 45 years. Anecdotes, I know, but I definitely know less people that were in accidents than those that were not.

[usr1106]

Nobody in my wider family drives. But I remember 4 accidents. 2 as passengers in a car, which is already very rare in a family without cars. 2 hit by cars breaking traffic law when cycling. Nothing overly dramatic happened, but still.

Most of my relatives and friends have been in car accidents. 2 friends of friends even deadly.

Germany, too.

Edit: My active memory is around 50 years.

[Tiktaalik]

Other countries are literally reducing road space that is exclusively for car use and building protected bike lanes and pedestrian spaces where such road users cannot be killed by cars.

The USA is likely not to the same degree. (Certainly not at the pace of Paris, which has changed remarkably)

This is the simple, dull solution. Cars inevitably kill other road users because they’re fundamentally unsafe. Remove cars from having any possible interaction with other road users and deaths go down. It’s that simple.

[coryrc]

Many factors:

The Americas, as a whole, are a more violent place. Life is just not valued as much.

American apartments suck in every way, particularly sound. Most people in cities go through a phase of apartment living and it sucks and as soon as they can afford they move into a house, but they require cars because even the houses are built poorly and only have a semblance of privacy with big spaces between them.

So most people need cars, any costs added to cars are costs borne by most people, people don't like voting for things that cost them personally. We don't trust the government to execute social change, because both the right and left preach against it (cabrini green, for example).

[coryrc]

Oh, fun fact: Washington state legislature tried to reduce the number of DUIs before you go to prison from 5 to 4, but they decided not to because it would cost too much money.

We have to have some sort of collective trauma that should be worked out.

[aidenn0]

I was on the Jury for someone in California with a prior DUI that caused an accident (injuries but not deaths) while drunk, fled the scene and ditched the car. After a plea bargain, no jail time.

[zdragnar]

Driving culture is pretty bad here. Get out into very rural areas, and drinking and driving can be frighteningly common.

Also, as is in the article, the punishment for speeding tends to be a slap on the wrist by way of a comparatively small fine. You'd need to be going at least 20 miles an hour over the speed limit before you're in real trouble.

That said, the numbers are still small enough that the average person doesn't really care about it come election day- not in comparison to other issues. And that's if they even care about local elections at all- these are issues handled at the state level, which makes a very tiny percentage of the population who is even remotely interested in.

[screye]

I'm not entirely sure if this is a US only problem, but Americans have a way about making logistical details of how they lead their life a fundamental part of their identity. Roads, cars, obesity, single family homes, HOA are IMO all symptoms of this.

The bureaucrats are never trusted with even the most minute details by the populace or the politicians. This is a problem of the left and right. If statistics show that BRT will reduce traffic, but if the population thinks that 'removal of a lane' will slow road traffic, then no change will occur. From the location of a train-stop to an affordable income apartment, local politics poisons all efforts grinding all efforts to a complete halt. participation in local politics is good. Micromanaging governance using 2 minute snippets from a tiktok video as inspiration is not.

The left ignores all literature around urban crime management, the science around obesity and effectiveness (or lack thereof) of good-intentions based educational interventions. The right ignores all literature around infrastructure regulation, transit, welfare or coercive religious interventions.

The gridlock means that systems that are in a downwards spiral (urban crime, car accidents, obesity epidemic, drug epidemic, school costs, healthcare costs) continue spiralling. The most radical of either political side leverages this using promises of policies that can never be enacted, while any politician who might have been willing to strike compromises for slow movement towards real solutions is pushed out of their party.

IMO, a center-left or center-right govt. with a Party Govt. (Pres, Senate, House) up & down the ballot with the ability to pass bills would be able to push for useful change, even if it is with policies that are diametrical. The grid-lock is an unstable equilibrium, where a move in any direction will probably make things a lot better than just staying still.

[aqme28]

> The left ignores all literature around urban crime management

Can you elaborate here? Didn’t mean to get totally off rails but this seems the opposite to me. Social-democrat European cities tend to have less crime than American ones.

[watwut]

> The left ignores all literature around urban crime management,

Isnt it the right that ignores any literature except like two old books with the theories that are heavily under dispute?

[Dalewyn]

>The bureaucrats are never trusted with even the most minute details by the populace or the politicians. This is a problem of the left and right.

This has to do with the founding principles of the United States.

Remember, the US came about as a result of giving the finger to British governance (read: bureaucracy). All Americans can unanimously agree to hate on politicians and the government, specific exceptions notwithstanding.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> Remember, the US came about as a result of giving the finger to British governance (read: bureaucracy). All Americans can unanimously agree to hate on politicians and the government,

This is bullshit. The cry in Boston was "no taxation without representation", not "fuck the government".

[cycomanic]

Puerto Rico would like to have a word.

[Dalewyn]

Yes, no taxation without representation.

Also known as: Fuck a government that just takes our money and then tell us to fuck off.

The sentiment is enshrined in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, and it is the basis for the forever-long American distrust of bureaucracies.

[watwut]

USA was heavy on governmental involvement whole its history - both for good and bad purposes.

[jrockway]

> Any Americans want to posit a reason why?

2 things. 1) Covid / social distancing fucked up everyone's interpersonal skills. So if you're driving towards a pedestrian or cyclist, people are like "fuck it, they deserve to die if they're in my way." 2) It's currently the "style" to have pedestrian-killing bull bars on your truck. People think they look cool, but it just crushes the pedestrian you hit into a paste instead of pushing them up and over your hood.

1 is probably hard to fix. 2 should just be made illegal instantly. I get if you drive your pickup truck on a farm, or are regularly participating in high speed chases as a police officer, they might come in handy (?), but if you're driving around in the city commuting to your desk job, you don't need 'em. It just turns "we broke every bone in that poor pedestrian's body" into "he's dead, Jim". Absolutely no need for that; if we want to keep cars around, we need to design them to do minimal damage to the other road users they hit while their drivers are drunk. It might not look cool, but even better than looking cool is not murdering other people.

[Reason077]

On the bright side, at least collision avoidance systems (AEB) in modern vehicles are getting better at detecting and avoiding pedestrians and cyclists.

[TheCoelacanth]

And yet still the pedestrian death toll is rising. Even technology that would seem miraculous 20 years ago isn't enough to slow down the carnage.

[gernb]

This isn't just a car driver issue. 90% of the cyclists and 75% of the pedestrians are also like "fuck it!", I don't care that the light is red, I'm crossing now. Fuck anyone who has the right of way. They'll have to wait". Add in the pedestrians who don't even look up from their phones as they cross on the red. Probably drivers doing this too.

I'm not making excuses for cars. They are obviously big and heavy and kill people. Rather I'm saying the attitude of "fuck you, I'm going" is ubiquitous, at least in some parts of the USA.

[jrockway]

Yeah, you should wait. The streets are for pedestrians and cyclists, car drivers can do whatever they need to do later. You can accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 5 seconds. We're walking around at 3mph if we're in a hurry.

[fnordpiglet]

Because we are generally extraordinarily stubborn.

[jeffbee]

"Given its wealth" America is basically dirt poor. We have almost no public realm worth having. The only things we have that make us seem wealthy are things you can easily count, like bank accounts and big TVs and huge medical bills that make our GDP seem artificially high.

[aetherson]

People going faster due to less congestion due to the pandemic.

[eesmith]

Don't know why you're down-voted when NHTSA agrees that's one of the factors. Quoting https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/56125 :

> During the first 9 months of 2020, driving patterns and behaviors in the United States changed significantly (Wagner et al., 2020; Office of Behavioral Safety Research, 2021). Of the drivers who remained on the roads, some engaged in riskier behavior, including speeding, failure to wear seat belts, and driving under the influence of alcohol or other drugs. Traffic data cited in those reports showed average speeds increased during the Q2 and Q3, and extreme speeds became more common.

At https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/58456 :

> Analyses of speeding behavior (driving faster than the posted speed limits) since the start of the pandemic reveal other changes. Cambridge Mobile Telematics (2021) analysis of telematic data suggested that as trips taken decreased by 50%, their measure of speeding risk increased by 45%. Further, they reported an approximate one third increase in speeding above pre-pandemic levels from November 2020 through March 2021.

Or from https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/03/30/as-roads-empty-to-cov...

> “We do have fewer car crashes right now, because there are fewer cars,” said Jacque Knight, a St. Louis-based traffic planner. “But the crashes we do have are likely to be more severe because speed is the biggest determinant of serious injury and mortality — especially for pedestrians. Our hospitals can’t handle that right now.”

[bagels]

Was it because there was exceptionally less driving in 2020?