Having spent time driving in both Europe and Southern California, I'd say that European drivers are more attentive to their driving and way less likely to be looking at their phone while driving, since it's policed. You can often see drivers in SoCal holding their phone for a video call.
One thing I was surprised by when driving in Coquitlam where I have cousins is that drivers there would start moving right after the green. This is strange to me because drivers in San Francisco will frequently be stationary for seconds afterwards. Looking at the rough statistics, it appears the RCMP police for smartphone usage in a stricter manner than SFPD does (or at least they write more citations) which makes me think that drivers in that region have adapted by not using their smartphones as much.
I wonder if this metric of "traffic light change to driver action" delay is a thing we could use as a performance metric for how well cities are ensuring smartphones aren't used by drivers.
Hah, near me the Police Chief claimed this was fine as they were professional drivers who'd had "special training".
I wonder why this "special training" to allow people to be able to safely text and drive isn't available to all of us... but I think I can hazard some theories...
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen drivers in the Bay Area conducting a full blown Zoom call, video and all.
(I used to have a corporate laptop I put a 4G WiMax chip in, and would boot it and connect to corporate VPN, open Lotus Notes, and then start my one hour commute. Then at work my Notes would be fully sync’d which otherwise took a half hour.)
It could be Europe has stricter driver's license requirements resulting in fewer people who might succumb to distractions getting behind the wheel. And more availability of walking and public transit options meaning more of those people don't need to drive in the first place. Giant vehicles certainly don't help regardless.
But when we cast around for other explanations, for some reason it's always interesting to zero in on an uncontrollable factor that means we aren't responsible for the situation we find ourselves in.
Btw Europe is full of the same dumb humans that live everywhere else. Granted, they have better bread, cheese, and health care.
>Sedan hits you, you get hit in the knees and fall on the hood. Brodozer hits you, it strikes your chest/head, pushes you over and drives over you.
You just made that up. Pedestrians are mostly killed by head onto solid object.
Your two most common options are pavement and windshield. Pavement is worse because cars have a fair bit of engineering that goes into preventing head onto windshield. At the end of the day it's mostly a question about getting hit above or below center of mass.
Modern (ie. larger than they were 20yr ago) crossovers and midsize SUVs are doing a lot of heavy lifting in these stats. But the people who want to talk about this problem tend to drive Rav4s and not Chevy 2500s so the latter gets complained about even though the former outsold it 2:1
Relatedly, minivans are kind of bad no matter how you cut them because it's hard to stay true to the form factor and not have pedestrians go straight into windshield in fairly low speed crashes.
> The issue isn’t mass alone, but also height. Yes, spreading impact over a greater area reduces the force experienced by any given part of your body, but when that surface area rises further and further from the ground, the impact point on your body rises with it. If you’re hit below your center of mass, you’re likely to fall toward the vehicle. If you’re hit at or above that point, you’re likely to be knocked down in front of of the vehicle instead. The latter becomes less survivable due to the poor visibility offered by taller trucks and SUVs.
> “We see a lot of devastating collisions even at lower speeds because the pedestrian gets punted forward,” said Shawn Harrington, whose company, Forensic Rock, conducted crash testing for the report. “Before the driver knows what’s happened, the pedestrian’s head is under the wheel.”
Afair, e.g. Land Rover stopped producing the classic Defender due to more stringent pedestrian protection regulations in the EU. They introduced strict front-end safety requirements for cars and SUVs whereas the US does not. So vehicles designed and sold in European (in numbers) are probably safer for pedestrians because it is tested for and required - but there are exceptions for some US trucks somehow.
> You just made that up. Pedestrians are mostly killed by head onto solid object.
Not to be combative, but I'd also like to see stats on that - that sounds just as made up. I'd expect a lot of pedestrians to strike the hood (about just as likely as windshield) as most pedestrian accidents happen in parking lots, drive-ways, traffic lights and vehicles exiting across a sidewalk (under 25mph).
> Pedestrians are mostly killed by head onto solid object
Several EU car models literally pop up the hood on impact so that the head hits a hood that buckles instead of the engine underneath.
From Wikipedia:
> The hood of most vehicles is usually fabricated from sheet metal, which is a compliant energy absorbing structure which poses a comparatively small threat. Most serious head injuries occur when there is insufficient clearance between the hood and the stiff underlying engine components
> Some models, like the Citroën C6 and Jaguar XK feature a novel pop-up bonnet design, which adds 6.5 cm (2.5", C6) extra clearance over the engine block if the bumper senses a hit. In 2012 and 2015, the Volvo V40 and the Land Rover Discovery Sport have an under-the hood airbag designed to operate if the hood senses a hit
The roads in a lot of places in europe will punish you with death or destruction for being distracted. They might be single laned, windy, and narrow, maybe following a cliff of certain death below.
The US however builds a lot of roads that lure you into thinking its safe to take your eyes out. Even countryside rural roads are dead straight for dozens of miles. We take our narrow certain death cliffside roads and replace them with highways with embanked generous turns and other features like that.
maybe there are other confounding factors that make smartphone utilization much less likely in Europe. Specifically no daily long commute in a car where people get bored and are tempted to use them.
Surely someone somewhere will bring to bear a solution that will disable all but voice calls on smartphones while the smartphone is paired to the car and the car is moving but allow for the devices of minors in a moving vehicle to still function like smartphones. They might also use interior cameras to ascertain who is driving and which device should be neutered but for emergency communication.
Yes, people would be annoyed at first but they also will experience a sigh of relief that they don't have to reply to a boss's or co-worker's text in the middle of a commute or running deliveries, etc.
Yep. The linked NYT article has this weak-sounding line -
> Most other wealthy countries haven’t seen similar increases, suggesting that possible culprits like smartphones don’t tell the whole story.
- but it is so focused on telling a long-winded story that I didn't bother checking whether they'd really tried to correct for that. (My cynical guess is "no" - since if they really cared and had ruled phones out, they'd clearly say so.)
Other countries take it way more seriously. The US has way more deaths per capita than Australia (just one example) simply due to lack of enforcement of speeding, drunk driving, smart phone use.
In Australia I would get a speed camera ticket for 2kmh over. 15+ kmh over and I’m getting pulled over, mandatory court appearance, minimum license suspension of 90 days.
I would get a random breath test every 2-3 months. Pulled over, breathalyser handed to me, blow, and then on my way. Very fast and efficient.
Smartphones are an absolute no no. May e you’d touch one in the outback where you can see clearly for 20 miles in every direction that nobody else is around. Everyone sets up hands free operation through a car Bluetooth. If you can’t do it hands free you simply don’t do it. You program in your GPS maps before you release the parking brake.
In America… people are annoyed when they get a $150 fine for going 30kmh over the limit.
You're either grossly misinformed or you're being disingenuous; try installing 40" mud tires and a 6" lift kit on your truck in Australia and see what happens. In the U.S. it's just another brodozer and no cop will ever bat an eye.
You wrote that Australia has plenty of brodozers. Crossovers are not brodozers, nor is it possible to operate a brodozer on public roads in Australia. Clearly, you're misinformed, if not entirely disingenuous, but your commitment to stay the course is admirable.
> Vehicles with 40s on them and a 6” lift are so rare in America they have no statistical significance in regard to accidents.
Do you have a source for this? Asking as someone who recently narrowly escaped death with a loved one as victims in a highway rollover crash caused by a dimwit operating a brodozer with 40" mud tires and a 6" lift in America.
that's called a hypothesis. now go author a study to test it, like the study being reported on. hypotheses without evidence don't stand up to hypotheses that have been tested.
You could compare rates to other countries that do have smartphones like the US, but don't drive the large vehicles like Americans. That might be illuminating.
Per tfa vehicle size “ represents about 10 percent of the recent increase in pedestrian deaths” so the title is really a distraction from the (likely) root cause that GP brings up.
Could it be that the other differences are driven by differences in the built environment? Like narrower roads making people drive slower, or bollards, or alternatives to driving making it less likely to have people that shouldn't be driving doing so?
But that isn't the case at all, maybe Europeans are immune to smartphones: https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/document/download...