Background: I am Dutch, in my fifties and recently moved to the US.
Mondermans ideas are only implemented in a very limited part of the Netherlands: only in one of the 12 provinces, and only in about hundred locations. And this is one of the least inhabited provinces..
So, the fact that the Netherlands has a 60% lower fatality rate can absolutely not be attributed to just his work.
In my personal view the real causes are:
- mandatory traffic lessons in elementary school
- standards for drivers licenses are much higher
- kids must be 18 to get a license
- less big cars
- smart road design, more lighting, better road quality
- narrower roads with more variety make drivers more careful, especially wrt bikers
- slower traffic must keep right on highways
- maximum speed for trucks is 15mph lower than other cars
- much attention to traffic safety everywhere
- stricter traffic laws and enforcement
So even though Monderman was on to something, many more things are needed, to keep the stupid and irresponsible from ruining lives.
It is terrifying to me as a European how easy it is to get a driver's license in the US. Everything I hear from friends beggars belief. No wonder speed limits have to be kept annoyingly low everywhere. I recently drove on some mountain roads in Californias[1] where I could safely drive 2x above the posted speed limit most of the time. Driving as slowly as the rules wanted would be no fun at all.
And, naturally, I will never understand why people are allowed to operate 2 tonne death machines before they are allowed to look at tits.
[1] the speed limit was 35mph, in the Alps we'd have the speed limit set at 55mph and the road would be about half the width with cliffs on each side right next to the road (no shoulder, just railings or even just stone pillars every few meters). For example: http://irena.blog.siol.net/files/2009/02/cesta.jpg
Were those posted limits on white or yellow signs? Just in case there's a cultural barrier (like right turn on red) you know the yellow signs are not mandatory in CA, right?
just beware CA has am absolute limit of 65 (unless marked up to 70) above which any speed is considered a priori unsafe, which means you can be cited regardless of road conditions.
And beware you can always be cited for unsafe speed (as determined by the cop) regardless of the marked limit and whether you were under it or not.
In my experience that means you won't be cited unless you are doing something truly outrageous compared to the indicated limit or conditions (eg 60 in a rainstorm at night around a turn with an advised speed of 35, >78ish, etc., 65 on a freeway in a blizzard), or weaving out of your lane, or in a speed trap at the edge of a small town.
General summary of color-coding for American highway signs:
- Black & White is an enforced regulation.
- Red is a vehicle collision hazard.
- Yellow is a single-vehicle hazard.
- Green is city and town locations/distances.
- Brown is national landmarks, parks, etc.
- Blue is all other information.
A few geographical signs, like city limits and bridge names, are also sometimes white but the text is much, much smaller. If it's important, you can read it from far away.
Simple, you don't go 55mph into blind curves because you aren't an idiot. Also you would have to drive quite a beast of a car to be able to even make a blind curve at 55mph. That's some rather impressive grip.
A lot of traffic is derived from people just looking for somewhere to park. In parts of London people will drive around a dozen streets just looking for that elusive parking space hoping they will catch someone just leaving. This driving is seriously anti-social. Yet planners see this as traffic to accomodate.
We also have one way systems to steer this flow of 'traffic' around so that it 'flows'. This means that even more traffic is generated. People just drive round and round. The distance seems absurd if you cycle and obey the signs yet motorists just go with it. It might be much better if we thought again about that and allowed for natural congestion.
I could build a spare room in the street, it would not take long though for the council to tear down that extra bedroom, studio or whatever it was that I built. Yet I could buy a £200 car, pay a similar sum in tax and park right outside my door to leave the £200 heap there in perpetuity just so long as I paid the tax, which is a fraction of a month's rent for a room.
Why do we have it so motorists have a god given right to park on the streets? We need to think whether we need our streets walled in by tin boxes. Fixing this is easy, we make it so that you cannot park within a distance of a junction, whether that be a junction on to a big road or a side street. Then we increase that distance year by year. In so doing we remove the tin boxes and those looking for that elusive parking space. We could then get back to natural streets where you can drive/ride/walk safely.
Reminds me of a situation in Brighton, where the council is forcing people to move bike sheds from their own front gardens, while allowing cars to continue to be parked willy-nilly. As a journalist writes [1]:
I suppose it depends on how you view a street scene. A small shed is, for me, considerably less intrusive than a parked car. And yet the residential streets of Withdean are full of cars. But that’s seen as normal. Bike stores are not.
More anomalous still is the fact that if you have a sufficiently big front garden and don’t live in a conservation area you can, in most circumstances, turn that garden into a driveway to leave your car, without the need for without planning permission. There are conditions on using water-permeable materials to avoid cumulative flood risks, but it’s fairly straightforward.
I don’t know about you, but when if comes to local impact I’d say a driveway containing a Humvee (or even something smaller) might be slightly more significant than a discreet bike shed.
I recently drove from my home near DC to Manhattan and back. Exiting the Lincoln Tunnel and heading north, my expectations of "normal" traffic behavior were shattered. I wondered why there aren't bodies littering the streets and hulking wrecks of naive visitors' cars abandoned, leaking, everywhere. It was truly mind-expanding. NYC pedestrian deaths are on the rise, says Google.
Meanwhile, I look out my window as I type this and see the suburban road adjacent to my group of homes being resurfaced. It's a beautiful expanse of asphalt they're laying down. It's smooooove, and fast. The neighborhood toddlers want to cross that road, and parents have trouble explaining to them that this road in sight of their homes is just too dangerous. We live in a town renowned for its planning and quality of life.
I don't really have a point, but something is obviously amiss.
Commonsense dictates that you would have more people on foot rather than in their cars ( especially single-occupant driving cases ) if cities actually paid attention to the plight of persons on foot, on sidewalks.
It has to be said that I am uniquely referring to cities like SF known for their less than splendid sidewalk conditions. I am discounting the fact that SF is quite hilly and thus not very conducive for walking, unlike other flatter cities.
SF is notorious for its grubby, thrash-discharged, excrement-laden and generally deplorable sidewalks.
Anyone familiar with SF knows that whether you are on the sidewalks abutting the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society and right next to an upscale mall or in seedier parts of Inner/Outer Mission, you can never take a pleasant walk for granted.
Prominent sidewalks are openly defecated on.
Casual violence of vagrants and the professionally-homeless is quite common.
Entire sections of neighborhoods are poorly-lit, with dodgy surfaces to boot.
All this not even accounting for the unenthusiastically enforced sit-lie ordinances [2], a thriving homeless industrial complex supported by the city's SROs and rising crime in parts of the city [3]
This irks even otherwise civic minded, forward-thinking residents who have all but given up on the city's frowziness and its celebration of the unhygienic and unsanitary.
I think there is a strong Well that is SF for you. If you don't like it, go live in Marin ethos prevalent here (and in other cities like SF). And that is not one bit helpful.
On that note, I run barefoot barefoot (no vibrams or such) in SF a couple of times a week and it is perfectly fine. I don't know what everyone is whining about.
The real issue with SF sidewalks is that they are made with those cement slabs and thus have giant cracks that make it extremely unpleasant to longboard.
Increasingly I think cars are the core problem. We need to decrease car use much like we have with smoking. It's just not healthy for our society. They're too dangerous.
There's many very valid uses for cars, but most people shouldn't need to use them every day and we should be building cities and towns designed such that you rarely if ever need to use a car.
While I think your statement may be hyperbole, I do agree that bicycles would help. In particular, I'm very hopeful to see more electric bicycles on the streets soon.
Even if bicycles didn't exist I'd feel the same way. Why not walk? We can build trains for short and long distances. Cars are only necessary because we've made it so.
Can someone explain to me why pedestrians are being hit in NYC? Are they wandering onto the roads? Are the cars driving onto the pavement? Are pedestrians stepping in front of cars? Cars running red lights while pedestrians assume that "green" means they can go?
I'm honestly curious what sorts of "pedestrian accidents" people have seen in NYC?
The number one cause is the "left hook". This is when someone is turning left and doesn't notice pedestrians in the crosswalk moving across the street the driver is turning onto. Unless there is a dedicated left-arrow green, these pedestrians almost always have the right of way, but the driver doesn't notice them because they are too focused on the oncoming traffic or other hazards, and completely forget to check. I've attempted a crude ASCII diagram. C is a car with a green light, attempting to turn left, P is a pedestrian walking up
Bought an (almost) new Sonata a few months back and it's been great. But the A-pillars are pretty thick and sloped in the perfect was to block my visibility. I have to often lean up a foot or so and turn my head if I want to see to my left clearly. It can actually be rather scary at times to not have that line of sight, recommend checking that out on any cars you buy. It's not a complete deal-breaker, but if I did a lot more urban driving it might be.
I think I'm a careful driver, and I (see other comment) recently drove into Manhattan from out of state. I almost killed several people. I don't live there, but my impression is that the expectations are so fine-tuned, that one small miscalculation and it's OH MY GOD MY LIFE IS CHANGED FOREVER.
Edit: Most of the close calls were straight on, no turn. Some son-of-a-bee-biscuit suddenly decides he needs to stop his car right in front of you for some important business, you end up in the middle of an intersection. In your eagerness to get you and your family out of harm's way, you inch around the car in front, and the pedestrian pops out of nowhere. They thought you weren't moving when suddenly you realize you need to get the heck out of the middle of Madison Ave and accelerate like a mofo so you don't get rear-ended by that bus.
The secret to driving in Manhattan is not worrying about the people behind you. The busses won't rear end you, and if anyone else does, big deal its low speed traffic anyway.
Traffic flow in Manhattan is geared around pedestrians and cabs (i.e. sudden stops). You just have to concentrate on what's in front of you and trust the guy behind you is doing the same.
One thing of interest when we compare driving in NYC to elsewhere: in NYC you are not allowed to turn right on a red light. Same goes for Montreal. This definitely changes the car-pedestrian dynamic, but I have no idea how it might factor into safety issues etc.
I suspect it's only a small part of the big picture why driving in NYC is categorically different than suburbs.
I haven't seen anyone get hit, but all forms of traffic in NYC (especially midtown Manhattan) are very aggressive.
Pedestrians do regularly walk out in front of traffic against the light. Cars, especially taxis, will speed up to run yellow/red lights, even when there are crowds of pedestrians at the corner spilling onto the streets. Bikes often run lights and ride against traffic. Cars and pedestrians block bike lanes constantly.
It's remarkable so few accidents happen, really. I think part of it is, although NYC drivers can be annoying and aggressive, they are also skilled and attentive.
I totally agree. I now live in NYC and have a car, which I use exclusively to leave NYC every month or so. I haven't had any real close calls, but still I can't help but become aggressive after about 15 minutes when driving through the packed streets in Queens, Brooklyn, or Manhattan. You have to take every inch you can as soon as you can, or you aren't getting anywhere anytime soon.
Additionally, the shoulders are always packed with parked and stopped cars, and cars or trucks are always stopping in travel lanes because there's no room on the shoulder and they have to stop to drop off or pick up. It's amazingly frustrating. It leads to the perplexing saying "no one has a car, the roads are too crowded" or something like that.
It's probably also due to near-gridlock at times which "forces" cars/trucks to force turns when they really shouldn't be--but if they really played by the rules they'd be stuck there. The last time I was in NYC I saw at least a couple of occasions of pedestrians almost being hit (with lots of shouting involved afterwards) for this reason.
It's also true that many NYC pedestrians tend to cut across streets whenever they perceive an opening.
I was walking up one of the avenues in Manhattan once, and came to the next intersection. The cross-street had the green light, and no traffic just them. But a van was parked on the corner, obstructing the view. I peered around, saw a car approaching at 30 mph, and shouted "Stop!" just in time to keep some people next to me from stepping out in front of it.
I cross against lights quite regularly, if I can see that it is safe. Some people drop the condition.
I just visited Sweden where I learned that cars are not allowed to park 10 meters from the corner. I could be wrong on the 10m (someone on the street just told me when I was parking) - but the idea that cars should not be parked adjacent to the intersection is great.
There are rules in much or most of the US on distances from corners. They just happen to be violated, a lot. I live in Washington, DC, where one does find signs explicitly setting the distance, but it seems to me from long ago driver's tests that jurisdictions do have a standard distance.
In addition to the many other reasons people have given, there actually is a fairly regular stream of news stories from NYC about drivers driving onto the sidewalk and/or into buildings and hurting/killing people walking on the sidewalk or even inside!
1. tourists everywhere
2. tourists staring up at buildings (big no no)
3. NYPD has better things to do than go after speeders. everybody is flying
4. culture of impatience...people are in too much of a hurry to cross safely
I've never understood why pedestrians seem to be given the right of way by default in many countries - pedestrians can see cars, stop, and change directions far easier and faster than vice-versa, so this makes for a more dangerous situation. If you slow down the cars to compensate, doesn't that somewhat defeat the purpose of having cars in the first place?
As anyone who has experienced the traffic in Beijing probably knows, having a mix of pedestrians, cars, bicycles, and other vehicles of various construction in the same space is not efficient nor particularly safe at all.
If somethings got to go, the obvious choice is cars. Indeed, that's what cities like London have aimed to do with initiatives like congestion pricing, which attach a prohibitively heavy cost to driving during the most congested times of day.
Rather, they attach an accurate price, forcing drivers to pay some of the costs that they generally impose on the public. I mean, the amount of space required per driver is wildly disproportionate with the demand on a public resource that every other form of transportation requires. Then there are the environmental costs, which include both noise and pollution. Again, these are way out of proportion in terms of the number of drivers vs. non drivers. They also do damage to commerce, in that pedestrian friendly zones are far more amenable to shopping, dining, etc. than streets that give preference to the needs of drivers. And of course, cars are basically lethal, whereas pedestrians, bikes, and even busses (especially when they have their own lanes) generally aren't.
Basically, cars are a bad deal for cities, and the 21st Century is going to see a sharp and concerted effort to push them out. Letting them in was a mistake. It's time to undo that error.
Cars are a vital part of most people's lives and the economy. Most people don't want to be a slave to public transportation, including me. Getting rid of cars would be ridiculous.
Car use is heavily subsidized in many ways, so no, you really don't.
Extra fees for congestion make sense, because the land that roads and parking use in the middle of cities is much more valuable than the land in suburban or rural areas. Gas taxes don't account for that difference. They treat every mile the same (or similarly), even when the cost of that infrastructure differs drastically.
Part of the reason that public transit is so bad is because it's having to compete with cars in areas that cars really don't belong. In cities where cars are not such a big part of the mix, public transit gets a lot better. And of course, where density drops sharply and public transit becomes unviable, cars make sense.
In any case, this is not about "getting rid of cars", so it's dishonest of you to reframe the argument in those terms. As very specifically noted, this is about sharply limiting to getting rid of cars in dense urban cores. Big, big difference.
Yes, as in I don't get to choose when I go or exactly where to, can't just drive around, and I don't control the radio, among a multitude of other reasons that using your own car gives you more freedom. I'd rather not revolve my transportation around someone else's timetables.
Yeah, that's not being a slave. In fact, the argument can be made that by insisting on driving to avoid any real - or perceived - inconvenience, you're making everyone else's journey that little bit less slick (I.e. Asserting your "freedom" impinges negatively on everyone else's ability to effectively do the same).
Also,cars are an important part of most economies, but less so in bigger cities - and it points to the fact that a)they weren't always so and b) might not always need to be, maybe there's a better way, which is what some posters are suggesting. If you Remove the necessity of a car for some people, and make alternatives better, then there are probably a lot of benefits (pollution, construction costs, congestion, safety) to it. But no one (or very few, I guess, since this is HN and lots of opinions) is suggesting arbitrarily and unilaterally getting rid of cars.
Um, that's not the definition of "slave". It's not even in the same ballpark as the definition of "slave".
This is free advice, so you can take it for what it's worth, but if you've ever found yourself suffering from a limited amount of trust or respect from others, consider that it may be due to your apparently limited respect for the truth. Or basic English.
I think you are the one with deficiency in the language. "Slave" is used in that kind of nonliteral sense all the time. Slave to gas prices, slave to the weather, slave to fashion.
I don't own a car, so I don't know this, but does the privilege of right-of-way come in the glove compartment of new cars or something? In all honesty, what are we creating things for? People, or cars? Which one should we be optimizing out shared space for?
The privilege is a subconscious process which springs from having spent a lot of money on the car. One begins to believe one is entitled to things in return. In fact antisocial behavior of drivers is directly proportional to the price of their cars.
"If you slow down the cars to compensate, doesn't that somewhat defeat the purpose of having cars in the first place?"
Hmm, well, requiring cars to give way means that they're less likely to kill someone. Which is kind of the point, outweighs slowing cars down a smidgen. Although pedestrians have right of way it's only an insane pedestrian who would rely on that to stay safe: whether they have right of way or not, pedestrians need to be fully aware of what cars are doing.
I was in Shanghai last summer and started crossing the cross-walk with cars approaching from both directions. Instead of slowing, the cars just started honking and racing towards me. Had to play some hardcore frogger to cross the street. Just goes to show that driver opinions really are different in China. Oh, and don't use the crosswalks.
When road utilization is high enough, if cars get right of way, it is simply not possible to cross the street because cars will just continue flowing through the intersection the whole time.
There are lots of old videos of people trying to cross busy roads in the early-to-mid 1900s and having difficulty doing so safely.
The very old common law precedent is that if you're benefiting from a practice that accidentally causes someone else harm, you're liable for any damages regardless of whether or not there's any negligence. For example, blasting at mines on occasion resulted in people many miles away getting hit with high speed pebbles that hurt them. The miners are liable for damages even if they took careful measures to reduce risk. There is zero reason to alter this concept for cars, trucks, or trains. If you want to speed around in two tons of steel because that's easier for you, then you should be fully liable for any consequences that flow from speeding around in two tons of steel. Trying to walk across the street is not an activity that creates the risk in the first place.
According to the Department of Transportation Commissioner, “the chances of a person being killed is cut in half when you reduce the speed limit of the moving vehicle from 30 to 25.”
Yep. The flaw in the plan is right there in the quote from a NYC resident: “We live right up by 96th and people are getting killed left and right by cars going too fast". Lowering the speed limit from 30 to 25 has no effect on people who ignore speed limits and drive too fast.
I once read about a city in Europe - maybe it's the one in the article - which ripped out half of the signs along the roads, and found the drivers paid much closer attention and drove more carefully. I heard of another city in England which removed its street lights (and didn't install stop signs / roundabouts) with the same result.
It's fascinating to look at some 3rd world locations, where there are far fewer rules, and many modes of transport sharing the same street.
This YouTube video really drives the point home. Scooters, walkers (some heavy laden), and cars all chaotically (at first glance) going every direction on a piece of asphalt.
As the veteran of many a Third World traffic jam, I think the vehicular flow situation is a little more complex than Economics with a Face suggests. But he may be correct in thinking that under certain circumstances and in particular cultures fewer rules or perhaps the appropriate rules make more sense than the overly regulated forms the First World is used to.
It reminds me of that old Artificial Life program "Boids", which implemented just 3 very basic rules, and from this produced very organic flocking and obstacle-avoidance behaviors.
This business about taking out the road signs and so on is called "naked streets", and is part of a broader "shared space" theory. It is far from settled that it is a helpful tool in any situations, let alone all situations.
We have to be very careful in interpreting the outcomes of experimental applications of naked streets (or other large interventions). Firstly, because of a Hawthorne effect - when a road is changed, drivers become more cautious because it's different, so safety improves, whether or not the change itself improves safety. Secondly, because it's a change that is very context-specific; naked streets seem to work well if the motor traffic level is intrinsically (or is engineered to be) low, but that doesn't mean they're a good way to handle a flow at a higher level.
The English example you may be thinking of was Exhibition Road, in Kensington, London. This rather long blog post takes a good look at it:
I was in Damascus around 6 years ago, and I noticed that most major downtown intersection are basically "shared" roads for cars and pedestrians alike. In my head, I was making a joke about how North Americans should learn "co-existence" from these streets where everyone has equal rights to access the street.
I have no stats about accident rates, but it seemed that somehow everyone manages to make it "work out".
I don't think this was due to any vision about how to make roads safe ... it was just ad-hoc city planning.
It was only a very deliberate and expensive efforts that created car supremacy in America. Drivers who killed walkers were at first tried as murderers, as makes perfect sense. Of course people should be free to walk over public thoroughfares. Only well funded measures created the legal idea that a driver is not in all circumstances responsible for injuries and deaths.
I don't know what percentage of cars on New York City streets are cabs, or how many deaths are caused by taxis, but could a potential solution be to raise the slow-speed fare to incentivize drivers to slow down?
A cab driver makes $0.50 per 1/5 of a mile if going over 12 mph or $0.50 per minute if going under 12 mph. The average speed of a taxi hovers around 13 mph[1], but I bet most cab drivers think its higher, meaning they think they make more by getting to their destination quickly (e.g., if they think they average 15 mph, they think they're making $37.50/hour instead of $30 using the timed rate). Suppose the slow-fare rate was raised to $1-$2? Would that help reduce cab-involved accidents (at the expense of longer cab rides)?
Further, introducing traffic signal patterns with dedicated turning periods would help a lot. Without fail, I get dirty looks daily from drivers turning onto a street I'm crossing because I'm not scampering out of their way, despite having the right of way (even still, more pedestrians were killed in 2010 when crossing with the signal than against it[2]). I've been fortunate to never been hit, but it is a significant problem.
Mondermans ideas are only implemented in a very limited part of the Netherlands: only in one of the 12 provinces, and only in about hundred locations. And this is one of the least inhabited provinces..
So, the fact that the Netherlands has a 60% lower fatality rate can absolutely not be attributed to just his work.
In my personal view the real causes are:
So even though Monderman was on to something, many more things are needed, to keep the stupid and irresponsible from ruining lives.