While their conclusion is probably correct, I would have liked to seen the number of fatalities normalized by population, miles driven, number of pedestrian increase, speed limit change etc
Normalizing by miles driven will take you to the wrong conclusions. It underestimates the extra deaths directly caused by the fact that we’ve built exurbs farther and farther away from where people work over the last 20-30 years.
So maybe deaths per mile would be similar, but we’ve pushed people further and further so they have to drive more miles, increasing the deaths due to poor design.
Building society in a way that we increase deaths due to poor planning, like making driving the only option for the majority of people, gets hidden by statistics like “per mile” or even speed limit changes, which are also more necessary as people need to go further to get to their daily activities, rather than everything being within a short walk or safe bike ride
It is not clear to me that exurbs would increase deaths, at least if we are still talking about pedestrians, because isn't most driving between the city and homes in the exurbs on freeways which generally do not have pedestrians?
? The correlation is trivially demonstrable. You can probably ask an agent to pull the relevant datasets for a state, run a linear regression, and demonstrate this. It's the entire reason traffic crash statistics in the US are normalized per mile.
> Building society in a way that we increase deaths due to poor planning, like making driving the only option for the majority of people
It's not poor planning, it's what Americans want. Americans, by and large, do not want to live in dense neighborhoods or tiny homes like in many parts of Europe. You get that in places like NYC and quality of life in those places is atrocious.
There are millions of people in American cities, and tons of people move from the less dense suburbs to these cities.
There are probably even more people who would move if they could, but our cities are expensive (because housing is expensive when you don't build it) and so they stick with the "default". Staying put, getting a car, and finding a way to make it work.
You can't conflate "this is what Americans want" and "this is largely the only choice most Americans get".
Quality of life is very subjective though.
Americans by and large are anti-social, so these sparse layouts/nimbyism are a result of that. This in turn reinforces living patterns which may or may not be optimal for any given person.
Again, they may be social enough on their own terms, but insufficient to want to live closer to others for a variety of factors, manifesting in very real differences in civic planning.
I would look to this behavior need to change before any substantive zoning/transportation changes are really adopted.
Yes, that's why people pay the ridiculous cost of living to live in NYC, because the quality of life is atrocious.
At least around where I live (DC suburbs), every dense neighborhood becomes tremendously popular. The limit is that planners are very reluctant to allow them to be built. No problem getting permission to build an 8,000sqft house on a 1/4th acre lot though.
He's right though beside the point about NYC (if it were awful why do people pay for it). Americans love the suburbs, i'd imagine most non Americans would like them .
Americans are just rich enough and lucky with geography to be able to have them.
... his whole point was that people don't want to live in cities, which is just factually incorrect. just baseless, pointless idiocy that is just par for the course on HN these days.
I find any conclusion that doesn't focus on TEXTING to be suspect.
By focusing on the wrong things (especially the endless caterwauling about "speeding"), people are letting legislators off the hook for abetting murder. Texting while driving should be a DUI-level offense, with the same penalties. But year after year, they refuse to do anything about it.
Not only does that not have anything to do with texting, but it has nothing to do with the roads. That's about giant vehicles hitting people above the waistline. If you hit someone with a tall-ass truck in Portugal, I'm pretty sure he's going to fall over just like he would in the USA.
> Not only does that not have anything to do with texting, but it has nothing to do with the roads.
From both the NYT video and their article:
> And that increase is unique to the US. Most other wealthy countries haven't seen a similar surge, suggesting that possible culprits, like the raise of smartphones, don't tell the whole story.
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> If you hit someone with a tall-ass truck in Portugal, I'm pretty sure he's going to fall over just like he would in the USA.
How popular do you think the tall-ass trucks are in Portugal?
It's not the biggest factor. Phone use tends to increase accidents but not to change the severity of the accidents much. Tall more vertical fronts change the severity of accidents, which changes the ratio between fatal and non-fatal accidents. The data shows that since ~2010 the ratio has changed significantly towards more fatal.
1990s SUVs were different vehicles than 2026 SUVs. A 2026 4Runner Hybrid weighs 1500lbs more than a 1996 and is 19 inches longer, 12 inches wider, and 6 inches taller. This is significant.
SUVs started becoming popular in the 1990s but there is significant lag between becoming popular among new car buyers and becoming a significant fraction of cars on the road.
For example SUVs and light trucks rose to 30% of new sales in 1990 but it wasn't until 2003 that they were 30% of vehicles on the road.
This stuff wouldn’t bother me so much if I didn’t regularly get reports of an acquaintance’s daughter who is now almost brain dead (can’t speak after a serious accident).
Phone is 99% likely the culprit.
Self driving AI or putting the #%£€ phone down would have prevented it.
So maybe deaths per mile would be similar, but we’ve pushed people further and further so they have to drive more miles, increasing the deaths due to poor design.
Building society in a way that we increase deaths due to poor planning, like making driving the only option for the majority of people, gets hidden by statistics like “per mile” or even speed limit changes, which are also more necessary as people need to go further to get to their daily activities, rather than everything being within a short walk or safe bike ride