Every country has its own flavor of bad driving. I live in the Czech republic and people here are very aggressive and inconsiderate drivers. However they are not sloppy or inattentive. The roads here are far too complex and busy to even look at a phone for more than a second or two. By contrast, driving in the us is super duper low stress. Roads are super wide and designed to be ultra comfortable for cars and drivers. As a result people are not alert while driving I think.
Another factor is that EVERYONE drives in the us. It doesn't matter if you like it, or are comfortable with it, or even if you're good at it. You HAVE to drive. Over here maybe only 50% of driving age people even have licenses. People who don't like driving don't have to since we have great public transportation.
The most sloppy driving I've ever seen is in the us. People weaving in and out of their lane staring at a phone, people driving into ditches, driving through building walls in parking lots you name it. The reality is that many people just should not be driving a car but are forced to by abysmal american infrastructure and even worse city planning.
> The most sloppy driving I've ever seen is in the us. People weaving in and out of their lane staring at a phone, people driving into ditches, driving through building walls in parking lots you name it. The reality is that many people just should not be driving a car but are forced to by abysmal american infrastructure and even worse city planning.
Likely in some case they were driving under the influence vs being on the phone.
Australia I’ve noticed drivers are substantially worse on long weekends in particular, there are higher death rates which are generally speed and alcohol related but even outside of that the drivers just seem more inattentive than normal, maybe it’s people who otherwise don’t drive regularly, I really don’t know.
Here we have 0.0 BAC for driving, and you straight up permanently lose your license if caught with any alcohol at all on your breath. It still happens but it's not a huge issue due to absolute zero tolerance.
I think on long weekends in Australia there is just considerably more driving, and for longer distances. My uneducated guess is that "accident per driver" or "accident per hour driven" is probably relatively flat, but there's just so many more people on the roads during long weekends in aus.
That’s to disincentive really dumb behavior, I’m pointing out that moderately dumb behaviour (which I doubt causes many deaths, and I doubt is caused by alcohol) seems to be (anecdotally) more frequent too.
Check page 21 for the report on day vs night deaths.
Does anyone have good data on other countries? I've looked at Australia and there is no great pedestrian death increase. So it's unlikely to be mobile phones driving the increase.
Thanks for sharing. The Ars Technica article focuses on differences between states but I think there is very little to be learned from that chart. For instance, New Jersey is the state with the biggest reduction, but that number represents a reduction from 217 to 190. Does that mean anything? In the previous 3 years, New Jersey had 175, 179 and 217 deaths.
The trend is useful for the country as a whole, but the numbers for the individual states are small enough for the per-year variations to represent noise or one-offs (like a major events with drinking, or a nasty accident).
This really hits home for me. I live in Orlando, Florida and work is a scant 1.7 miles away. However, I do not dare drive or walk to work. Why? Pedestrian fatalities. This is a real shame not only because of pollution, and missed opportunity for exercise, but often because the traffic is so bad, it would only take marginally more time to walk/bike than drive.
I really wish road engineers would ensure ALL roads (sans expressways/interstates) have protected bike/ped zones. Not just a stripe on the pavement that can be easily driven across by a distracted driver. But actual raised protection, like a median or curb.
Did you mean that you only drive and don't walk, or do you just always stay home?
Anyway, some cities are doing better with bike lanes. Making them areas on the sidewalk (which needs to be pretty big obviously), or organizing a road as (traffic | parking | bike lane) rather than (traffic | bike lane | parking). Pretty slow going though, and only denser cities.
Not to blame the victims but recently I’ve noticed pedestrians doing a lot of dumb stuff that is not helping. In the past week I’ve had 5 different people crossing multiple lanes of traffic dressed in all dark colours in areas with poor or no street lighting at night. A couple of people I would likely have hit but I caught thier silhouette against car tail lights ahead of me. Do get me stated on people stepping out into traffic at crossing when cars have a green light. People looking at phones and stepping into traffic with I guess the idea that if they don’t look at you you will avoid them. I do think the is distracted walking as well as distracted driving.
This happens where I live too. The city has installed crosswalks at several lights along a main road, but people choose to jaywalk in one spot where there is no crosswalk and the lighting is weird because of a railway overpass. Always wearing dark colors, moving slowly, usually older men. I understand that walking to the crosswalk adds time to the route. But you're crossing five lanes (2 on each side, common turn lane). If you aren't young enough to jog this, please go to the crosswalk, unless you have a deathwish.
There was a big push in my city to stop “over policing” things like jaywalking and disorderly conduct. We stopped ticketing people for this and over a few years people have started jaywalking and even just chilling and having conversations in a lane.
Jaywalking is not "wrong"--it's a problem of cultural expectation. In many countries, streets are significantly safer than in the US, and pedestrians are allowed to cross freely at any point. Precisely because it is understood that pedestrians will do this, cars drive more cautiously and defer to the behavior of pedestrians. The street is a shared space, and cars do not have a special privilege to use it over all other transportation means.
In the US, however, streets are understood to be owned by cars. Drivers move much faster and without regard for bikes/pedestrians/etc. Even the fact that a pedestrian in the street is called "jaywalking" is an expression of this difference--it's culturally frowned upon, if not actually illegal, for pedestrians to be in the street.
So the challenge is: how do you change a culture? There's a better way demonstrated in many other places, but people get very grouchy when you ask them to start acting differently--"It's our way of life!"
Articles such as this are not wrong to point out SUVs, but I think they miss two other important issues:
- Increased driver distraction due to smartphones and in-car touch screens.
- Decreased driver visibility due to improved rollover protection. (Ironically, this may largely be the blame of SUVs as well, since passenger cars are much harder to roll over)
I can’t go through a single day without seeing some driver looking down at their phone. I honestly wager I could drive better drunk than some drivers can manage when distracted by their phones.
At my license renewal I clearly failed the vision test yet they passed me anyway. When I finally got to the eye doctor they said I really should not be driving until getting corrective lenses. Thankfully I was able to minimize driving until getting a cheap pair of glasses.
In the US the only way to legally kill on multiple occasions is by vehicle accident. Yet the system is afraid of taking away ones 'right' to drive as it degrades quality of life so much. You can report someone you know is unsafe, though in some states they'll be notified who reported them, causing a chilling effect.
For those interested in urban planning, including contrasts between the US and places that do it well, I highly recommend the Not Just Bikes youtube channel.
The drivers need to put the cell phone down, of course - I was almost run over by an Amazon Prime truck when the driver was on a phone - but the pedestrians need to put the phone down too. Six years ago I was using Google maps to find my way around as a pedestrian, and I walked directly into a pole. Where I live the local news recently did a special on distracted pedestrians walking into things. I know a lot of people like to use headphones to walk around and listen to music, but I also think your ears are a MUST HAVE if you're walking anywhere there could be cars. It's the driver's responsibility to stop, but I live in an area with a lot of blind hills, and you need to hear the car before it crests if you're in the road.
Sunrise and sunset are bad times for car crashes especially in cities where streets line up with the sun.
In my town there is one street that in winter with a wet salty road is like a mirror. The sun at a certain time during a certain time of year plus the "salt mirror" makes it practically impossible to see.
How much does a driver's license cost in the US? What do you have to do in order to get one?
Here in Germany, my son has to sit through 14 theory lessons and then pass a theoretical test (with questions out of a pool of 1400 questions). Then he needs 12 mandatory driving lessons (night, highway, country road) and probably 8 more lessons to get him to the rquired level to pass the driving test. This will set me back approx 3000€ ($3000).
IMO the requirements for a drivers license in Germany are a bit too strikt, but what I heard from my brother, who got his drivers license in Minnesota during a high school exchange year, the requirements in the US are really, really low. Maybe we can agree on an international standard somewhere in the middle?
I'd rather everyone adopt the German system and have public transport as an alternative for those who can't pass the test.
Over here, across your eastern border, there's been a huge increase in the number of people on the road and it's becoming increasingly obvious that some people are better off taking the bus/train.
Problem is, trains/buses are disappearing, so especially elderly people are either stuck at home or have to get behind the wheel, to mixed results.
Do people in Poland still drive at the very right side so others can overtake even if there is oncomin traffic? I could not believe it when I saw that (maybe twenty years ago).
There was an official design of road in England when I was a child: three painted lanes. The middle lane could be used for overtaking by traffic going in either direction. I hated when my dad would overtake using this lane. I could see from the way he was concentrating and pushing the car to its limit that it wasn't a comfortable manoeuvre, and it generally seemed rather pointless as we'd soon be stuck behind a line of vehicles that was too long to overtake.
It looks like they've all been removed, even the tiny bits this page says still exist:
That practice fortunately fell out of fashion with the advent of proper infrastructure - instances of this are now rare because other drivers usually don't know what's going on, so they don't move to their right.
Two or more cars overtaking at the same time is still a thing though.
That being said it's still part of local "car body language" that you move to the right if you want someone to pass you. Using your right indicator in turn says "I am going to make a sharp turn to the right now", so you'll have people behind you hitting their breaks if you do it. I occasionally use that to stop people from tailgating me.
I have taken and passed driving tests in the UK (in London) and California (in San Francisco).
Both the theory test and the road test were far easier in California. There were no challenging road situations, and this was in a 'city'. I'm sure in rural areas it's even easier.
Regarding required lessons, in California this differs by age. If you're under a certain age, you need to complete a certain number of lessons before you can take a test. If you're older, you don't.
From movies I've learned that Americans get their licenses in high-school by a teacher who just gives them the license so they don't need to sit through another crappy attempt at the course they built in the parking lot with traffic cones.
Dunno how it works for real, but can't be much different =)
- at ~16, you become eligible for a driving permit which allows for supervised driving only
- getting the permit requires you to "pass" a pathetic 10ish question exam for which the literal questions and (multiple choice) answers are publicly available
- after 6-12 months (again, variable) you become eligible to get your full license
- to get a license, you usually need a guardian or affiliated adult to sign a form saying they taught you for over 40 hours of supervised driving.
- sometimes you also need a "safety class" or possible a "driver's education" class. Driver's education can be useful, since it's literally just a teacher riding around in a car driven by students and pointing out where the students go wrong. Safety classes are almost invariably useless, since they mostly just regurgitate rules of the road and obvious safety tips that most students immediately forget.
- Once you become eligible for a license, you go to a Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), the same place where you got your permit. Schedule an appointment, and an employee will take you for a driving test. In the driving test, you have to show your mettle at serious challenges like parallel parking a car, stopping at stop signs, looking over your shoulder while changing lanes, and looking both ways before making a turn at a stop. This basic test has a less than 50% passing rate, but you can take it as many times as you like so even the worst drivers eventually jump through the hoop.
So basically the process you imagined but with more time and hoops where the government gets to charge you $$.
The price and inconvenience of getting a drivers license is hardly a measure of how skilled as safe drivers a people is. I would be surprised if there hasn't been any research where they pit drivers from different nationalities against each other to see ground truth.
Not really it's just a proven psychological effect applied successfully in many places: people will drive as fast as they feel comfortable. Make it too comfortable and they'll start speeding. This is not to say to actually make it dangerous or impassible or anything of course.
Different people are online at different times. Maybe the submitter didn't see the first submission because it had already dropped off the frontpage when they came online.
Drivers in the US are VERY inattentive. It's reacched the point where operating the vehicle has come to be seen as just a distraction from playing w/ a cell phone.
Sadly, pedestrians are ALSO VERY inattentive. My closest encounter to a pedestrian accident was when a pedestrian stepped in front of my car, mid-bloc, on a very dark night, wearing all black, and staring at his phone.
The first thing I saw in the dark was his face, lit by the glow of his phone...
"Pedestrian deaths have been climbing since 2010 because of unsafe infrastructure and the prevalence of SUVs, which tend to be more deadly for pedestrians than smaller cars, according to Martin"
The report itself shows there's an increase in pedestrian fatalities in slightly fewer than half of states and the increase comes from deaths at night and not in the daytime. How would an increase in SUVs (which is a national trend) cause this result?
I hadn't spotted this, but you're right. It's actually slightly worse - to justify this, the author links to another article titled "Fatal Pedestrian Crashes Increasingly Involve SUVs, Study Finds".
I say this is off because an increase in proportion of SUV involvement is primarily an indictator of popularity of SUVs, rather than anything about SUVs being more deadly.
I happen to believe, fairly uncontroversially, I think, that SUVs are far more deadly than a regular car, hitting adults in the chest instead of the legs, and children in the head instead of the chest, but I also think poor journalism is pretty dangerous, and worth investigating.
> How would an increase in SUVs (which is a national trend) cause this result?
Do you agree that a SUV has worse ability to observe the road? Do you agree that a pedestrian has more chances to survive after being hit by a small car?
If you answer "yes" to both my question than you have to understand that the real question is "why an increase in SUVs is not causing this result in other states". If your answer is "no" then you are talking not about "this result" but about a something else.
SUVs are certain to be more deadly - they are bigger and higher, but they are replacing older cars and older cars, by dint of lack of modern safety features and degraded condition, are likelier to be in an accident - so the effect of more SUVs is not obvious.
Regardless, the fact is that the increase in pedestrian deaths is mostly in a few states and mostly in nighttime driving and SUVs don't explain either of those factors.
Visibility, maybe? As interior comfort took priority in design, those beefier body columns resulted in larger blind spots. Also, some SUVs are just massive, and might suffer from similar forward-visibility limitations that modern pickup trucks (classified as "light trucks," oddly) are getting slammed for right now, namely the front end being so high that the driver can't see a 3 foot object 16 feet in front of them.
> How would an increase in SUVs (which is a national trend) cause this result?
It's going to depend a lot on local pedestrian habits and on the available infrastructures: as a thought experiment say in State A people are never walking in the street, while in State B they are walking a lot, then the national increase in SUV will have no impact on pedestrian death in State A but will have on State B.
Only if this is true. If the increase at night then it's unlikely to be because of SUVs, unless there's correlating evidence that shows it's states where SUVs are driven at night more.
If there were evidence found that is linked to nighttime, e.g. because more people are crossing roads at night than before, or wearing less night-visible clothing than before, then that would be the place to start.
> If the increase at night then it's unlikely to be because of SUVs, unless there's correlating evidence that shows it's states where SUVs are driven at night more.
Or if you replace “people walk” by “people walk at night” in my example above…
That is to say, there are many parameters at stake here, and you cannot infer or refute anything from the aggregated data.
I wonder how much is actually attributable to people moving from one state to another, where the second state doesn't "drive the same" as where they're used to.
Playing devil’s advocate, since I think the article didn’t really address this very well. I would assume that SUVs can have two issues with regard to pedestrian deaths.
- Worse outcomes when pedestrians are struck. A lower car might “merely” break legs, while an SUV with a higher belt line might strike a head or vital organ and be more lethal. SUVs tend to weigh more as well, which only hurts pedestrians.
- Worse visibility due to higher higher ground clearance, longer hoods, and of course modern rollover protection. I wouldn’t be shocked if you could do a study on pedestrian visibility using a passenger car from 2000, and an SUV from 2023, and found that the SUV had significantly worse visibility of pedestrians.
Anecdotally, in NYC it feels like something “clicked” during COVID where some small but meaningful segment of drivers just stopped caring about any social contract. I see more cars blatantly running reds, driving with expired (or no) plates, and doing stupid things to shave a few seconds off their commute.
in canada drivers are usually respectful/good but theres still an attitude that drivers own the road and pedestrians are an afterthought. Theyll pull into intersections blocking the cross walk, or begin a left turn very early or blindly while people are crossing. stuff like that reminds you that the city was built for cars and not pedestrians, and i think thats the systemic thing that should change to prevent deaths
And until states make texting while driving a DUI-level offense, with the same penalties, it's not going to get better.
There's no excuse for it. And this superficial, useless article doesn't discuss it at all. Instead, it regurgitates pablum about the same regressive do-nothing "solution" known as "traffic calming." That's just ruining our streets instead of attacking the real problem.
Traffic calming is just an admission that state and local police are utterly useless to enforce laws against distracted driving and texting.
On almost every drive I see people speeding >15 mph over the limit, recklessly weaving in and out of traffic and making dangerous passes to get slightly ahead. The police are doing nothing against this dangerous and illegal behavior and won’t do anything about texting either regardless of the offense level.
In my area it’s because the police are also breaking the same laws. I’ve seen cops drive with defaced license plates on their personal vehicles, park on sidewalks, and recklessly speed.
Traffic calming measures would be by some entity the cops can’t control, so they hate them too.
Recently, while waiting for a bus, I took a picture of a car with "sheriff" emblazoned on the side stopped in the crosswalk, blocking pedestrian traffic. The police officer just wanted to turn right and didn't bother to stop at the line.
Yes, creating congestion on purpose, along with dangerous physical obstacles, makes people "calm."
And even more calming is the delay it introduces to emergency responses. Because when your dad's having a heart attack, I want the the paramedics to drive languidly up a lane and over picturesque mounds of asphalt and around "bump-outs" and wait for an immobilized column of traffic that can't pull out of the way because a lane has been deleted and replaced by a concrete berm or a field of plastic bollards.
the thing is, traffic calming works, it is applied in a lot of places with 'vision zero'. Is it a bit more uncomfortable because of bumps, turns, narrowings? yes. Is it a deal breaker? nope. Drivers are still in comfortable cars, with AC, overall speed is not affected because of less accidents, they mind their own business and 'calming infra' is enforcing more attention and reduces nr of decisions a driver must take to go from point A to B
"But signing on to Vision Zero proved to be far less difficult than adjusting policy and infrastructure to reflect the approach."
Vision Zero failed in US failed because it stayed on paper, Vizion Zero worked in Europe because those countries actually did infrastructure changes...
I did, and it did not "stay on paper." That's why the results are viewed as "perplexing." Saying it was difficult and saying it wasn't done at all are different things.
We have all kinds of "Vision Zero" bullshit in L.A., and fatalities remain high. Why? TEXTING.
Care to show regions where it was implemented in l.a. and fatalities in that regions? I just really doubt that speed bumps, artificial turns, increasing the turn angle, adapting semaphores to be before intersections and raised crosswalks have no effect. If there are no such regions that adapted these changes than vision zero stayed on paper. If such regions exist, I would be glad to research how fatalities changed after them
I do not understand this aversion toward creating environment in which people have to or are motivated to drive the good way and preferring ranking up punishments as the only supposed solution for everything.
And making everything punishable as much as possible does not work all that much either. It just make people feel good that someone was punished.
I would feel great if someone who deliberately puts other people in danger by not paying attention while driving got punished.
Making streets endlessly more impassable results in driving "the good way," whatever that is?
No. I am happy to drive within the speed limit in most cases (the exceptions being glaring rip-offs with no possible safety excuse, such as 40 MPH on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago). All I ask is that we the taxpayers are afforded properly-timed lights and anything else we can do to make traffic as efficient as we can.
While I agree, I think we need to widen the net to "distracted driving" so phone calls, eating while driving, yelling at kids in the backseat, etc all fall into the same consequence. Drivers in the US, in my experience, tend to believe their vehicles have some some of magical autopilot mode, and I'd argue that some safety features come dangerously close to advertising themselves as such. What drivers fail to recognize is just how splintered their attention becomes when they focus on other tasks while driving, even something as seemingly simple as changing the radio station. No amount of data seems to be able to convince them that their brains are no more capable of juggling operating a vehicle while doing other things than anyone else's is, but we all want to believe we are capable.
Yes, I do not mean it should actually be specific to texting. It's just harder to catch people doing the other things. And they don't tend to be as habitual (minus the eating, perhaps).
But texting? If you actually look at the drivers around you on a given day on a single errand, you can't NOT see it happening. And it's so easy to spot from a block away: the random braking, veering, creeping along, not moving their ass when the light changes... at the very least these people are stealing from everyone else on the road by blocking traffic.
> It is also crazy how unreliable cars actually are. 20 years old car means some surprise every 3rd or 4th drive
Not so sure about that, petrol engines and cars matured a lot in the last decades. I'm driving a 2004 Ford Focus and it is still going strong, with no "surprises", which, granted, I remember having every drive in 1996 with a 1981 Renault 14.
I would considering changing this old car for environmental impact, in-car entertainment or driving safety measures, but not for the reliability of it.
Yes, I think hardware2win has it backwards. Old vehicles are very reliable, so there are lots of them on the road that are missing safety features like automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection.
This is an example of "normalization of excellence".
A modern car has several thousand moving parts, high temperatures, high pressures, an oxidizing environment, and is subjected to potholes and wide temperature swings. That it is expected to survive 200K miles is a miracle.
Before the model T, a car that would last 20K miles was a considered a reliable car. The model T pushed those expectations up to 50K. Post-war expectations increased to 100K and the Japanese pushed expectations this millenia to 200K.
At the same time that lifetimes went up, maintenance went down. You used to have to regularly inspect tune and replace stuff like timing chains, spark plugs and seals.
A couple of comparisons: a computer fan has an expected lifetime of 10 years, and it's way simpler than a car. A fighter jet needs 16 hours of maintenance for every 1 in the sky.
Much sadder: the car is the only the transportation option many people have in the majority of places in the US. The best way to reduce the number of car accidents is to reduce the number of cars by providing other options.
Cars from the 2000s are like spaceships they are so much more advanced in all areas compared to what I had to drive in the 1980s or even 1990s. At least cars from the USA were foreign cars; Toyota, Honda, Volvo, BMW tended to be better in quality and safety.
Another factor is that EVERYONE drives in the us. It doesn't matter if you like it, or are comfortable with it, or even if you're good at it. You HAVE to drive. Over here maybe only 50% of driving age people even have licenses. People who don't like driving don't have to since we have great public transportation.
The most sloppy driving I've ever seen is in the us. People weaving in and out of their lane staring at a phone, people driving into ditches, driving through building walls in parking lots you name it. The reality is that many people just should not be driving a car but are forced to by abysmal american infrastructure and even worse city planning.