Traffic Fatalities Are a Choice

A great thing about the Netherlands is that their infrastructure makes it much easier for them to take away the licenses of older drivers who no longer can pass driving tests without leaving that person stranded at home.

I noticed that link shows the jump in fatality rate for older cyclists and pedestrians is bigger than the one for drivers. How much do your skills as a pedestrian really degrade as you get older? To me, this suggests that part of this increase in fatalities is due to the body weakening as we age. An average 30-year-old almost certainly has higher odds of surviving the same accident compared to a typical 75-year-old. Maybe looking at the fatality rate for 70+ year old automobile passengers versus passengers under 60 would be a good baseline to show this and allow us to better estimate the true danger of declining skill of a driver.

>However, we also need to improve the driving skills of the young and elderly.

In the US, at least, an 80-year-old driver is safer than a 21-year-old.

Additionally, the least safe group of female drivers, females aged 15-20, is only marginally more likely to be operating a motor vehicle that causes a fatal crash (25.5 per 100k licensed drivers for teenaged girls) than the safest male cohort (23.8 for males aged 65-74).

The gender gap is not even close. Males aged 15-20 are 60.3, my cohort is in the mid-30s, and retiree males are in the mid-20s.

Female retirees are 7.5, geriatrics 10.1. All other age groups are in the mid-teens.

It doesn't matter how you massage the data.

Driving for work vs. not, crashes per hours driven, crashes per number of licensed drivers by gender, crashes per 100 million miles driven, highway vs. surface street, at all times in every instance women cause fewer single vehicle, multi-vehicle, pedestrian-involved, injurious, and fatal, crashes.

Crashes involving a female driver are also less likely to have passenger fatalities, due to the greater likelihood that all passengers will be wearing their seatbelts. Females are less likely (by a LOT) to drive intoxicated, less likely to drive distracted, and are less likely to speed.

Actuaries working for insurance firms and rental car bean counters have known this irrefutable and unquestionable truth for at least 30 years.

Whenever I suggest that males receive additional training and oversight until their crash rates fall to those of the typical 16-year-old girl, people get irate.

edit: I can't find the numbers but it is fact that CDLs (commercial driver's licenses) both lower and level the statistics so training and oversight is almost certainly the answer.

The article you link to specifically calls out that they can't and won't speculate about whether age is a factor in causing car crashes. Elderly people have higher mortality rates in virtually all cases of injury and illness so it shouldn't be surprising this is true when they are involved in a car crash.

Yes, age diminishing driving skills certainly is a huge factor but I wonder how much of this age stat is due to the different generation in which they learned to drive.

I'm not sure the article takes the opposite side on this point, and I don't think it it was claiming to be a cure-all.

Ah, so close.

Old people aren’t bad drivers because of “driving skills”. They’re bad drivers because driving is incredibly dangerous and they’re old.

What we need to do to prevent this is eliminate driving as a lifestyle. Treat it as the dangerous act that it truly is. We don’t let 75 year olds operate heavy machinery, we shouldn’t let them operate cars either.

Assuming no weather, your driving below the speed limit on an expressway is almost surely working against your stated goal of improving road safety.

I think this is great as long as the speed limits are set correctly. What I worry would happen is that the speed limits would intentionally be set low to maximize revenue from the speed enforcement system.

On my way to work there is a long stretch of road with great visibility, two lanes in each direction, physical separation between directions, very wide shoulders with virtually zero pedestrian traffic, but the speed limit is 50km/hr. Nobody drives 50 on that road. The traffic generally flows at 70. Similarly there are many semi-industrial areas with wide roads, no traffic, few pedestrians with a 50km/hr limit. We also have highways with 80km/hr limits where traffic generally flows (safely) at 90-100.

Guess what, all those places are where police hangs out looking for speeders.

Contrast that with small streets in dense urban or suburban areas where despite the limit being 50 most people drive closer to 40. Or when it's foggy or raining heavily and you want to drive slower on the highway than the speed limit.

That said there is a question of balancing the somewhat improved safety of lower speeds to the improved efficiency of driving a bit faster. I'm not sure how you balance that. There are other options like moving people to mass transit or closing some city streets to car traffic completely.

People who drive below the posted speed limit (road boulders) are a menace. They increase the risk to everyone else as other drivers try to get around them.

What does require in person enforcement is making sure license plates aren't obscured, defaced, or removed. The left in this country needs to reconcile that enforcement of laws is a good thing. Matthew Yglessias talks about this a lot.

This requires the most enforcement in front of NYC precincts. I truly don't know how such a corrupt organization could be reformed.

https://x.com/hashtag/CriminalMischief

https://x.com/GershKuntzman

Death / km driven is only a good metric if you think driving more is inherently good.

miles driven/person is also a choice that the US has made.

Even in sprawling suburbia, most trips a person takes are under 3 miles, eminently bikeable, but the bike infrastructure and built environment sucks for that. So people drive, from parking lot to parking lot.

The fact that the US is huge doesn't mean that the majority of miles driven are on long trips.

Yes, while road design could be better, a contributing problem is that US sprawl requires people to travel longer distances to commute/shop/etc. This then contributes to a desire for higher roadway speeds and the designs that support those higher speeds.

Living in suburbs instead of in dense walkable cities is a choice as well.

It's a bit sad that we were never able to solve this problem by designing safer streets, but you're probably right that self-driving cars will end up being the solution in the states.

The probability that I've driven on a Kazakh or Kyrgyzstani road is 0, as is the probability that I've died on an American road.

The math checks out.

So you had accidents 100% of your Kazakh roadtrips.

As a European, American culture baffles me in this regard. Things like school shootings, police violence, traffic deaths, healthcare, alternative (public) transportation, all seem to be linked by a common thread of inaction towards things that should in principle be solved. And it seems baked into the way the system works, if not the culture itself (due to the focus on U.S. exceptionalism/defaultism, individualism and bias towards individual freedom at others’ expense). But I wonder what causes such structural cultural/political issues to just be ignored.

It turns out that the USA operates kind of like "twitch plays X", so your comment reads like "Twitch has great potential to beat Pokemon but as an outsider it's unclear whether that is actually a goal"

Lots of different interest groups in the US have lots of different issues they care about, including traffic safety. Said interest groups compete in various political contexts to get their issues addressed.

Many believe the priority of the US government should be to protect individual liberties before saving lives or improving quality of life, even if to do so is at their detriment.

In the words of Patrick Henry spoken at the founding of the nation "Give me liberty, or give me death!"

We have great potential to save lives but we're willing and eager to exchange safety and control for individual liberty. Risk taking and individualism is also a reason why America has dominated many fields for so long. Silicon valley doesn't exist in Europe for a reason.

It's also impossible to argue with some people about safety because they're never satisfied, no risk can't be reduced, no risk is ever balanced with what you have to give up in exchange for safety. An argument about where one should set the balance is fine, but plenty of people want to set the risk to zero and that kind of extremism has no limit and runs into a paperclip problem where the only purpose of life is to preserve and extend it and as long as you're breathing it's a good life... or something like that.

I have to wonder where you live. In TN, I very rarely feel that the speed limit is too low.

I don't see people clamouring for more enforcement anytime soon but there are definitely benefits to automated speed cameras. In many ways i much much prefer driving on freeways where the speed is extremely strictly enforced, forcing everyone to turn on cruise control, rather than dealing with drivers that simply can't maintain a constant speed.

> crowd by setting them 10+mph too slow for a given road

In NYC at least, they are set for speeds that make the roads safer for other users, such as pedestrians. They are not set in order to please the perception of drivers.

> If self driving cars do nothing better than on par with alert and sober human drivers, that might cut half of those deaths by itself.

Self driving probably fixes the fatality rate entirely once most people use self driving modes.

Self driving will be the US' economic superpower. We've got so much vehicular infrastructure and it's practically sitting latent waiting for this opportunity.

When most of everything transits this way - food, goods, packages, people, instant fulfillment - it'll be one of the biggest unlocks of the century.

Anything we lost due to underinvestment in rail will be dwarfed by the returns from self driving.

I think this is great to think about however I think many of the same lessons may still apply and can and should be applied now in a forward looking way:

From the article:

> Whereas the Netherlands clearly differentiates roads and streets — as do Germany, Spain, and France — the US is known for having “stroads,” roads where cars reach high speeds yet must also avoid drivers entering from adjacent businesses and homes. The majority of fatal crashes in American cities happen on these “stroads,” and impact pedestrians and cyclists in particular.

I think this will be _more_ important with autonomous driving. We've developed a built environment where car through traffic and destinations are co-mingled which leaves very little room for people to actually experience their destinations when they get out of their vehicles.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but my expectation is that the problem of "stroads" will only become more apparent if less focus is placed on getting from point A to B and more on where a person is trying to go which is my current long term expectations of the impacts of autonomous vehicles.

Some argue that autonomous driving will enable even worse infrastructure choices if we don't plan ahead. The Youtuber Not Just Bikes, for example, did a video called "How Self-Driving Cars Will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it)"[0].

If we start focusing on making alternatives to cars the most attractive options now, they can still be the most attractive(and efficient and safe) options even with self-driving cars everywhere.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0

For me the last 20 years showed the opposite. You should plan infrastructure considering current tech and adjust if required. There were so many promises not fulfilled and surprises where there were no promises that I don't see the point planning based on assumptions.

I lived in the Netherlands and infrastructure was great now and I am sure it will be great in 10 years, because they constantly think on how to improve given the situation. It will not be perfect in 10 years (and neither is now) but that's just life.