I know the article focuses on the UK and what I'm about to state has little to do with the UK, but as a suburban US dad with three children I feel compelled to share that drivers are what keep me from feeling comfortable letting my seven and four year old play outside unsupervised.
I've seen so many incidents of (young?) drivers tearing through sleepy suburban streets at highway speeds here in Maryland that I specifically chose a house on a dead-end street full of retirees in order to lessen the danger of one of my children impulsively running into the street after a ball.
It's nuts. I grew up in an NJ suburb in the '90s and I don't have memories of insanity like what I've seen here.
The mayor of a municipality in Istanbul proudly announced that they built walls around a small city park to keep kids safe.
And I was the only weirdo who asked why they didn’t put measures in place against speeding drivers instead.
People see completely normal to take their kids to this walled garden that looks like a prison yard with a few trees and a playground.
This hysteria of every stranger must be a criminal and everything is dangerous successfully pushed people into compartments.
Eastern Europe is honestly much more free than all the places I’ve been. To be honest, Eastern Europe does have safety problems but it’s mostly about self harm caused by nihilism, maybe that’s part of the reason why people don’t freak out about everything in first place but when I’m in Eastern Europe I feel significantly less stressed than when I’m in the UK or Turkey.
Maybe an approach somewhere between Eastern European nihilism and Western “everything is extremely important” mentality must be reached.
Put the speed bumpers against the maniacs and let the kids learn how to operate without the safety nets.
Like at the ending of “Demolition Man” movie, maybe some of us need to take stuff a bit more seriously and others relax a bit.
Also Eastern Europe has by far the highest road crash fatalities - according to Eurostat[1] Romania tops it. So some worry might be earned... even when other people are less stressed about dying in a car crash.
IMO traffic violations should be punished way, way, way more severely than they are. In the US, licenses do need to be easy to get otherwise you lock people out of society (unfortunately), but they don't need to be easy to keep and you should drive with constant awareness that you will be taken to the cleaners for mishaps.
Automated enforcement tech should be widespread and incur license revocations and salary/wealth-adjusted fines left and right.
This is what allows the situation we have. People either don't get caught, or only get caught after injury has occurred.
"traffic violations should be punished way, way, way more severely than they are."
It depends on the infection. Many are already severe, such as being arrested for racing, going 25+ over the limit, DUI, etc. DUI is a factor in about a 3rd of fatalities and is already punished severely. Seems like the punishment focus isn't working. The preemptive education portion is more promising.
DUIs are not punished nearly severely enough. I used to work with an alcoholic who had been arrested multiple times, for all sorts of things: Fighting, property damage, indecent exposure, racing, going +100 MPH on a suspended license, etc.
He was arrested for his 4th DUI and was upset because, according to him, he "got the book thrown at him". His sentence? 6 months in county jail, with 5 days per week of work leave. He only spent evenings and weekends at the jail. A few months in, he faked some letterhead for a landscaping company and sent a letter to the judge, claiming to be the company, saying they just hired him and they were requesting a 6th day of work leave. The judge allowed it, so now this guy would just leave jail on Saturday morning and hang out with his elderly parents all day.
He saved money while in jail because he would work all week and then sleep at the jail, so he had no rent to pay. He was arrested for his FOURTH DUI, and came out financially better than when he went in. He was practically rewarded for it.
In my opinion, a DUI should mean 5 years in prison with no possibility for a shortened sentence, your second DUI gets you 10 years, and your third is an instant life-sentence. I've had too many people in my life killed or paralyzed by inebriated drivers. I have literally not one single drop of empathy for anyone who drinks and then gets behind the wheel. In the case of an accident, I think it's actually immoral that they are provided any level of medical care at all. If they caused the injury or death of someone else on the road, leave them in the ditch to crawl out themselves. Let them take accountability for their actions, because obviously 6-months in county jail isn't fixing the problem.
Some states are more strict than other. That seems extremely lenient. They are generally misdemeanors or felonies that would cause many people to lose their jobs. Your part about faking work release is really a separate issue - did you report them?
Most states will not issue you a license if you have multiple DUIs. So he should have been on a suspended license, which should have drastically increased the penalty in most states. It seems the judge may have been ignoring sentencing guidelines if it was so lenient.
When he was arrested for his 4th DUI, his license had been suspended. Because of this, his dad bought him a car so he could get around (doesn't make sense to me either, haha). So he had a suspended license, no insurance, he was drunk, and driving 100+ MPH down an empty country road when he was arrested. I know all this because I bought his car from his mom, and I'd drive him to work from the jail on Mondays and Tuesdays and he'd complain about how unfair his life was.
But therein lies the problem. It shouldn't be up to a judge's opinion on how much time someone with a DUI should receive. Just make it a flat 5-year sentence across the board so we don't have to worry about how the judge felt that day.
I don't see the work release issue as a separate issue. People with DUIs should have no single recourse of action to leave state custody until their sentencing is complete. You've proven you're a danger to society, it would be irresponsible to toss you right back in. There should be no work release, no reduced sentence, nothing like that. If you voluntarily risk the lives of others on the road, you give up 5 years of your own life if you're caught. I think that's exceedingly fair.
I would say that about half of the people in county who had a job and didn't lose it get work release. That's not specific to DUI.
My main point is he provided fake documents about landscaping. That should have been reported.
"If you voluntarily risk the lives of others on the road, you give up 5 years of your own life if you're caught. I think that's exceedingly fair."
I think the system most states have in place is fair today - usually one diversionary program with probation, fine/costs, interlock, etc if nobody was hurt and there was no property damage. Penalty tiers based on BAC level. Progressive sentencing based on details like not your first time, someone got hurt, property damage, etc.
Plenty of things depend on the outcome for the severity of the punishment. I do think that is fair to increase penalties based on the circumstances and results. What we really need is better education. Although stricter penalties or education aren't going to help people like the guy you say thinks his life is unfair. Perhaps rehab as his attitude sounds like an alcoholic.
These are fair points, but I personally still want more punishment. I'll admit I probably don't have the clearest mindset when considering these things either, because I've had too many people around me injured, paralyzed, or killed because of drunk drivers. I'm at the point where I am literally incapable of feeling any level of empathy for anyone who voluntarily drinks and then gets behind the wheel because of how much it's affected my life, directly and indirectly.
My grandparents, my high school girlfriend, another girlfriend just a couple years ago, my best friend's brother, a coworker, 2 great uncles... All people in my life who were either injured or killed by a drunk driver. Hell, one of my uncles was literally run over outside of his car by a drunk driver. He survived but lost his leg, and he couldn't ever breathe right after the accident...
That's not to mention all the indirect drunk-driving deaths that I've dealt with via mourning friends and family. It's very difficult not to be incredibly calloused at something that is so, so destructive and yet so, so easy to prevent. Like, literally if you had just called an Uber my friend would still be alive, I'm sure glad that you saved $20!
...Y'know? No easy answers, at this point I'm just venting a little bit. :) Thanks for the response and for reading my spiel!
If education worked, we wouldn’t see stats going up contrary to the rest of the world. The problem is that enforcement has declined radically and drivers have learned that there will be basically no consequences for anything short of a fatality and often even then it’ll be minimal.
One of the big problems is that the early signals are ignored: the guy saying the dead pedestrian “jumped in front” of his truck now almost always has a history of things like speeding and signal tickets, parking violations, etc. but as long as that doesn’t interfere with their ability to drive, they’re just being trained not to treat it seriously.
What I’d like to see is a progressive escalation of natural consequences: more than one speeding or light ticket in a year and you can’t keep your license without showing that your car has a speed/acceleration governor installed, more than a few in a year and your license is suspended for a month, etc. The focus should not be on money but reinforcing the idea that driving is dangerous and if you refuse to be safe you will lose that privilege.
China has 10x the road traffic fatalities per capita than we do. People ask if China is safe, and...they never really look at traffic fatalities numbers which are way more significant than getting stabbed to death by some guy at a drum tower. Beijing is the only place I saw someone die before (bicycle ran a red light, taxi was speeding through the intersection at a yellow light, its weird how everything goes at slow motion at the point).
I've actually had pedestrians jump in front of me before at green lights in North Seattle on Aurora, which is famous for traffic fatalities. In this case, the problem aren't bad drivers, but fentanyl. Sometimes the pedestrians really are at fault. Also, we design our streets like ass; e.g. encouraging pedestrian and car traffic at the same time along with ample pedestrian-obscuring on-street parking (you really can't have both!). In this case, yes, the cars need to do the right thing, but that's made difficult enough that tragedies occur way too often. We need to get the Dutch to teach us how its done.
Similarly, 16% of pedestrian fatalities were on freeways. 59% were on non-freeway arterials, while 22% were on local streets.
It seems like individual pedestrian can do quite a bit of risk mitigation by staying sober and out of traffic.
These stats match my anecdotal experience where I have had numerous close calls as a driver due to pedestrians where they shouldn't be (eg people on the freeway), but no close calls while walking sober on Surface streets.
"It is really true. There are various causes being debated but we’re the only rich country where the fatality rate is moving in the wrong direction:"
I'm not sure we're on the same page with what I'm taking issue with. The requirements to get a license are a joke in the US. The other nations with lower fatalities have stricter licensing. Yes, it won't explain it on it's own, but it is highly correlated and supported by studies around stricter licensing in other nations and graduated licensing in the US.
But your claim that if education worked the stats wouldn't be going up has no basis in anything you've posted. The overall licensing has not improved in the US. The jurisdictions in your chart have much stricter requirements.
The general point, however, is simple: neither the US nor our peer countries significantly changed licensing requirements in the last 10-20 years. We didn’t suddenly stop doing public safety campaigns, either, but the United States is the only country where the fatality rate suddenly started going back up. The licensing hypothesis could explain why our numbers are higher in absolute terms but not that stark, sudden increase in legality – even if we made the license exams much easier in the mid-2010s, that wouldn’t affect the majority of drivers who already had their licenses by then.
In my mind, just increasing penalties will have little effect (except excluding more people from society adding an overall drag). They need to do better at educating to avoid it.
I'm talking mostly about DUI. But yes, even with speed limits. A stricter licensing program with better education could fix a lot of the issues. Most people don't understand vehicle dynamics. If they had some basic understanding about stuff like 2x speed is 4x stopping distance, it might wake them up. Most drivers do risky things without realizing they are risky because they are so ignorant, even when following the speed limit. Many other developed nations have lower fatalities and stricter licensing (even when speeds are unrestricted like the autobahn).
Or who fear consequences. That means enforcement has to be effective enough that people know there’s a high risk of consequences - for example, if driving on a suspended license means your car is sold at auction, people will care a lot more about following safety rules.
There are tons of "minor" infractions committed by people who see themselves as perfectly responsible and law-abiding. And they are to the degree that they wouldn't drive without a license and would be legitimately deterred by that threat, but they just view various infractions as a normal part of driving (because they are, as our enforcement schemes make clear!)
That won't get you anywhere. If you require cars, you'll get misbehaving cars, as they come in no other format.
What fixes this is creating collective transportation. Multimodal and capillary transportation options that people can use. And after that, you just phase cars outside of the city.
Obviously not true. There are gradations of strictness in driving behavior. Driving in Germany, for example, is a totally totally different experience from anywhere in the US.
Ditto. It’s not the breathless hysteria about child abduction or (conversely) busybody neighbors calling the cops on unaccompanied minors that keep my kids inside. It’s the insane drivers in 4 ton lifted pickups and the town’s refusal to lower the speed limit, or even post “Children Playing” signs that does it.
Lowering the speed limit isn't going to get the guy in the glass packed souped up Honda who blows through the stop sign in front of my house multiple times a day to actually slow down. That's that dudes whole deal.
It's just going to give highly attentive people tickets that want to get to work at a reasonable speed like 30.
Speed limit signs are almost useless, especially if not enforced (preferably by speed cameras, preferably without announcing their location with signs).
The correct solution to get that guy to stop is to make the street less deadly by design. It should be narrowed, made more winding and have visual 'clutter' added like trees, flower planters, etc. It should be intensely uncomfortable to speed more than 5-ish mph, and people who choose to do so anyway need to meet a traffic calming measure and be on the phone to their body shop well before they speed up enough to endanger a life.
In our neighborhood, some streets have speeding problem. Some neighbors asked city to install speed bumps but the city refuses to do so those because then emergency vehicles will be slowed down too.
In our Canadian city, the speed bumps have breaks that allow wide-axle vehicles (buses, emergency vehicles) to pass with minimal braking[0]. Some large passenger vehicles can get through the same way, but for most vehicles it's a speed bump.
The issue with speed bumps is that it's just not a good traffic calming design. Why should a vehicle slow down to, say, 20 kmh at random spots when the limit is 40 kmh? Traffic tables[1] are much better, in that if they're properly installed, you don't need to slow down if you're already going the speed limit. They should be installed at pedestrian crossings to make the crossing level with the sidewalk (cars go up and down) instead of being level with the street (pedestrians go down, then up). The street should be narrowed at pedestrian crossings too, and at all intersections (no parking there anyway).
Hitting a kid at 30 is going to cause some harm. I don’t think that 30 is a good compromise.
They are rare where I live but street layouts which promote better driving would help. They have low/no kerbs and wind through planting etc to keep speed down.
However this messes up a commute to work, so unfortunately it’s not a perfect solution.
The likelihood of severe injury or death goes down dramatically with lower speeds. A reasonable speed is a variable concept, but certainly minor residential streets should never have speeds in excess of 40 kmh (25 mph). My city recently reduced the limit to 40 kmh on all such streets. Now they just have to go the other 95% of the work - physically designing the streets for their posted limits, so that the option of speeding is simply removed (unless you're okay with regularly spending money at a body shop).
30 MPH is not in no way a reasonable speed for side streets in a neighborhood that you want to be walkable and child-friendly. Save 30 mph for major arterials. If neighborhood side streets have 30 mph speed limits people are just going to blow through any stopsigns the city puts in to pretend it is pedestrian friendly, and they are going to kill people when they do so.
What will "Children playing" signs do? The concept always amused me. Does anyone seriously think a driver, having already made a decision to be a speeding asshole, will change their behaviour because of some lame, barely noticeable sign? It's even sadder to see those homemade ones people put up on the boulevards.
Your city failed to properly design streets and enforce traffic laws. This happened because, over many decades, the voters in your city wanted it to be so, and voted accordingly. Unless the attitudes of voters change, and/or people who want this to change but don't vote in municipal elections start voting, no amount of "think of the children" signs will ever make a dent in the situation. And, while we're at it, slapping a 40 kmh (or whatever American equivalent) sign on a wide straight "residential street" where you can comfortably do double that speed without risking a trip to the body shop is about as effective.
Physical re-design and effective (preferably automated) speed enforcement. Nothing else works, no point wasting steel and paint.
Are "children playing" even effective? Do you think the dangerous problem drivers are actually giving a shit about them? Similar for speed limit signs unless you have strict and regular enforcement. Although at least the prudent drivers would obey those.
Your memory must be bad because I remember cars driving down my suburban street at highway speeds in the mid 90s. The lesson imparted as a kid was to always look both ways, assume no one sees you, and get in and out quickly.
If you haven’t taught your kids to not impulsively run after balls into streets, that’s on you. Even my 3 year old knows better than to walk into a street after a ball. I literally watched him stop and look both ways yesterday too before walking in to grab his ball.
Yes, drivers should slow down in neighborhoods but an ounce of prevention is always better than a pound of cure. You have more control over your kids than the crazies that exist in this world.
It’s not just bad memory: in the 90s, cars were considerably smaller and less powerful – yes, people had 70s barges but those had much lower acceleration than an SUV and the driver was less insulated from the road and had better visibility. The other big change is Google Maps/Waze/etc. — most people did not know every possible side street and tended to stay on major roads more.
To your other point, yes, people need to teach children to fear cars but that also means grownups should be thinking about how much public space we’ve taken away from everyone to remove responsibility from drivers. It’s not unreasonable to think that balance is unhealthy, just as most of us have decided that we shouldn’t have factories in neighborhoods any more.
I agree with this. I would argue that an even worse contributor to danger are the neighborhoods where everyone parks on the street, either because the neighborhood homes have no driveways or because it's such a high cost of living that most houses are rented out to 3+ individuals leading to overflow parking. I roamed the streets as a 90s kid and while I dont remember if people drove faster/slower then (I do remember there being less traffic, but that's subjective and fallible) I do remember being able to look down most of the block when I crossed the street. But in densely populated areas, going between parked cars (especially as a short child) greatly obstructs the view.
I hope for the sake of those around you that your child(ren) never run afoul of your expectations as "My children would never…" parents are a special breed of annoying, nearly as much as "I raised my obviously-better-than-your-children child to…" parents.
I think it's the mixture of a general lack of exposure to reality in addition to harboring the mistaken belief that their method of parenting is superior which makes them so annoying.
It's almost as if they think their advice is universally applicable and failure to implement it is somehow a personal failing in every instance, much like those pig-headed folk refusing to acknowledge the systemic issues behind poverty, insisting instead that every poor person is poor from a lack or work ethic or gumption.
Thankfully, many people grow up and eventually stop trying to use (not-so-)universally-applicable advice as a cudgel, preferring instead to interpret the complaints of those around them in the most charitable light since, after all, asking "Did you try raising your children right?" is as useless and demeaning as asking "Did you try turning the computer off and on again?".
You wrote several paragraphs when what you said could be summed up as, “I’m lazy and look to shift the blame of my circumstances onto others because I can’t be arsed to take control of the hand I’ve got and run with it.”
And PS, turning it off and on again solves almost every electronic problem. So yes, do try raising your children right.
Teaching every single kid to be cautious doesn't scale. Kids are inherently irresponsible anyway and it's not like cars only kill kids either.
> Yes, drivers should slow down in neighborhoods
They shouldn't. If they need to consciously do anything in the first place then the street design is unsafe.
Interestingly, humans have keen senses of danger. Think of crossing a wide and straight two-lane street with cars parked alongside it vs a narrow, winding one-way one with no street parking.
The ounce of prevention should be much earlier and much more preventative. It's the fundamental street design that needs to be changed so speeding is no longer an option.
As little troublemakers in California, a friend and I used to play a prank. We would stand next to light poles on opposing sides of a neighborhood street, at dusk, pretending to pull an invisible line between us. The faster a car would drive through, the farther we would throw ourselves onto nearby lawns. Some of the cars were VERY fast (50mph) despite the short runway from the corner, a few houses down.
Distraction plays a huge part these days. When I was growing up in the 80's and 90's, drivers drove. Now they're watching TikInstaXFaceTube and relying on lane departure warnings and brake assist to do the driving for them.
There's a great video by the urbanist youtuber Not Just Bikes about this very topic - he ended up moving to the Netherlands so his kids can safely play on the street and independently meet up with friends: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw
I live in Brooklyn in Bed Stuy, and my neighbor who has lived here his entire life told me how he used to play football in the street everyday in the summer when he was a kid. There was always a pick up game, and when I asked he said occasionally a car would need to get past and they would finish the play, and then wave it by.
Today, I don't let my daughter step one foot into that street for fear she'll get swiped by an Ebike or an Uber driver in an Escalade doing 40.
Drivers today have an expectation of complete ownership of the streets, and kids lost one of their few play spaces.
It doesn't even take terrifying drivers; really, it's all cars. It wasn't until I got to know some four year olds that I realized how little regard they have for cars. Squirrels have more respect for the hazard of moving automobiles.
Well yeah, they're 4 years old. They need some level of supervision if they have little survival skills or common sense. There has to be some level of supervision until a minimal level of survival is possible (assuming we want near zero losses).
I live in Denver proper. And there are three middle aged men in pickups that essentially terrorize the neighborhood in their lifted Ram pickups. Constantly doing 45+ in a 20, if a car tries to park or pull into a driveway they curb hop and freak out. Cops refuse to do a thing about it, probably because they're clearly on the same team (white, male, wraparound Oakleys, tan hoodies with flags on the shoulder, gun stickers on the truck, etc...). But I'd be insane to let my girls run free in the neighborhood with that threat. I'm a competent cyclist and I've nearly been killed by two of them.
Ironically, the presence of lots of little keyholes results in a sprawlier urban form that results in things being spread further apart and funnels traffic into massive, wide arteries, which encourages in-city speeding habits.
Not blaming you for picking what works for your family, it's just a "tragedy of the commons" scenario. Old fashioned streetcar-suburb cities that are just dense, gridded traffic are safer.
So basically, at least in the case of Toronto, postwar suburbs with winding and dead-end residential roads with wide, high-speed corridors produce dangerous intersections.
I'm house sitting in a gated community area of Irvine, CA for the week. I was walking down the sidewalk and watched a woman drive past me, staring down at her phone. I thought to myself, she's going to get into an accident. 10 seconds later, she's up on the curb, luckily misses a tree, corrects and keeps on driving as if nothing happened. F'cking nuts.
I've found even living on a dead-end street is not enough. I live about 3 doors down from the end of my street, and people still fly down the street at 50+MPH, turn around at the end of the dead end, and then fly back the other way at 50+MPH.
- They aren't even going anywhere, but still have to speed while doing it! -
My only explanation is that they're just idiots. It doesn't make any sense to me.
some time ago i crossed a street that was no longer than 200m. both ends had buildings forcing you to make a turn, yet an idiot managed to race down that short piece of road at full speed. his rear view mirror slammed into my backpack. nothing else happened. luckily the street was otherwise empty at the time. it usually isn't.
when i see someone speeding like that, i imagine myself with a bazooka... (well, actually i'd rather have one of those guns from scifi movies that just vaporize the target, or better yet, just vaporize the car, leaving the driver sitting on the street dumbfounded.)
I live in an NJ suburb. If I see a car speeding around I’ll ring their doorbell and ask them to stop. If they don’t, first warning is air out the tires and second warning is losing your windshield. I’ve never had to ask three times.
I've seen so many incidents of (young?) drivers tearing through sleepy suburban streets at highway speeds here in Maryland that I specifically chose a house on a dead-end street full of retirees in order to lessen the danger of one of my children impulsively running into the street after a ball.
It's nuts. I grew up in an NJ suburb in the '90s and I don't have memories of insanity like what I've seen here.