I'm acquainted with a civil engineer who worked in the FHWA for several decades.
He spent a big chunk of that time trying to convince government agencies to build roads with pavement that had a better coefficient of friction. See for example
He estimated that they could reduce deaths considerably with more appropriate pavement.
In many cases, states refused to even allow pavement friction tests to occur, as they didn't want to be on the hook for paying for improvements if the tests showed poor friction. Also, requiring better friction would disallow certain road materials, which would adversely affect certain very large politically connected contractors.
In Europe, they take this much more seriously. The Germans have started using a concrete pavement that is both better for friction and is quiet.
It's interesting that if a government builds a substandard road that leads to people losing their lives, it doesn't seem to be a big deal, but if a car manufacturer produces a car that leads to a much smaller number of people dying, then it is.
If anyone else was really confused by the use of 'pavement' in this article it turns out that in American English pavement refers to the road surface. In English pavement refers to what Americans refer to as sidewalks.
It's super good if you have lots of rain (the rain sinks right away under the road surface) but it is prone to frost damage. Super quiet and great in the rain though, the difference is incredible when you switch from ZOAB to regular asphalt or the other way around.
I remember tests of a similar asphalt near me in the NE US. In the spring we had black banks of it all along the road, where it was scraped off by snowplows over the winter. What's left was packed with sand.
Interesting; I've always wondered about how different road surfaces affect grip, and how that affects accidents. It'd be interesting to see a study on traffic accidents on similarly-trafficked roads with similar speed limits where the surface is different.
It's also interesting but sad that many people don't even care enough to learn + practice super basic car maintenance as it pertains to safety equipment. I wonder how many accidents would prevented if everyone fixed their tyre inflation (there is a label on the driver's-side door frame, usually by where your butt or foot passes when stepping into the vehicle) and ensured they had well-performing brakes (a small mirror usually lets you see how much brake pad you have left, assuming you have 4-wheel disc, though the fronts are more important anyway).
Smog-testing is a thing, maybe we should have brake distance testing as well?
With "we" you presumably mean the U.S. Don't you have a roadworthiness test, something like the MOT test of UK?
Without digging up statistics, I'd say technical failures of vehicles are not a very common primary reason for fatal accidents in West Europe. Bad tyres surely are sometimes a contributing factor.
It's partially a social justice issue, as we've managed to build up much of our country in such a way that walking and public transport are geometrically impractical, so poor people would be trapped at home if we banned them from driving the ill-maintained car they're barely able to afford to own and unable to afford to maintain.
This is one of the reasons I'm excited about self-driving public transit vans. Of course, we'll have to figure out ways to keep women from being assaulted in them if they serve routes where 0-2 occupants is a common load.
Wouldn't those self-driving public transport vans be rather exposed to vandalism in deprived areas? And it's not just women who need protection from assault. I expect that in most countries, a majority of victims of violence are men.
We have emissions testing only in the state of Ohio, and I don't think that's unusual. That ends up being a bit of a general maintenance test as well, as a car cannot pass if it has any current OBD-II errors at all.
That helps, although an OBD-II readout does not see some essential risks, like bad tyres, or even some critical break failures.
It is interesting, though, that road safety and risks to other people in traffic are not a big enough thing to trump the social justice angle (right of poor people to drive), but the environment card (emissions) is.
I've never heard it discussed by anyone that a badly maintained car is a danger to anyone other than its occupants. I only very infrequently hear the "social justice angle" being discussed. If people gave a damn about that we'd have better public transportation.
There is a weird logic to all this. Air quality makes a noticeable improvement in everyone's lives and, paradoxically, driving is so phenomenally dangerous and so unavoidable that people don't worry about the very minor factors like the one in twenty who isn't paying attention to their brake pads when assessing that risk.
It might be that the high-pitched squeal built into brake pads to notify people of impending doom is actually doing its job, though.
> I've never heard it discussed by anyone that a badly maintained car is a danger to anyone other than its occupants.
That is surprising, because it should be fairly obvious that if a car has brake failure, it could be lethal to anyone who happens to be in its path. Same goes with catastrophic failures of the steering system, although those are perhaps even more rare.
* Sparse, mostly rural population (with an unique culture).
* "2+1" roads, which discourages meaningless overtaking or competing. (But I don't buy it as the single cause).
* Roundabouts instead of crossroads with traffic lights. (My bet this is one of the most important factors).
* Special reserved lane for doing left turns to secondary roads.
* Lots of street lamps (Sweden is famous for illumination and urban development).
* High percentage of expensive, very good quality cars (lots of Volvos) which kept well-maintained.
* 40 km/h speed limit in most small towns.
Together it works. Basically a complex phenomena is a weighted sum of multiple different causes - cultural (tradition), economical, social (current "normals"), technological, etc. with "random variables". Such simple model could explain it to some extent.
In the UK and France, the +1 was available for use by traffic travelling in either direction. It sounds like in this case, they're talking about one side being allowed to use it for a spell, and then the other. Similar to the overtaking lanes provided here in NZ.
"In the UK and France, the +1 was available for use by traffic travelling in either direction."
I live in the UK, and the only +1 roads I can remember seeing have clear markings showing which side of the road can use the extra lane (never noticed one that included both sides).
That is an improvement I would like to see here too. My earlier comment was more to address the idea that the current third lane in the UK is some sort of free-for-all, which I don't agree with.
Yeah, almost all the 2+1 roads in the UK have been converted back into two defined carriageways because they were incident magnets.
I can imagine low speed 2+1 roads being OK. It's the 50mph+ ones that lead to horrific crashes - human beings aren't great at negotiating closing speeds of 100+mph.
What do you mean by culture playing a role in fewer crashes in Sweden?
>* Sparse, mostly rural population (with an unique culture).
Moose kill a lot of Canadians in rural areas, dark brown fur in the dark countryside. Their legs are so long and moose are so heavy the crash through the windshield and kill the people in the front seats.
There are a lot of crashes and deaths in my small province due to drinking and driving as well as lack of seatbelt use and the two combined make fore even more deaths when crashes do occur. Plus everyone it seems drive 15 year-old cars that are not maintained.
When an old lady drives her car 80 km/h on a road with speed limit of 90, most of the drivers happily follow her instead of overtaking, and you could see such kinds of "caravans" very often.
After a hockey game, one could see a few kilometer long caravans of cars while not a single one is trying to move on the opposite lane to overtake which is absolutely unimaginable situation in social shitholes like Russia.
I'm genuinely curious: Do you consider overtaking evil, if the road is fine/the conditions are okay and the driver in front of you just .. likes to go slow (like the old lady in your example)?
For me that'd be a very good reason to leave her behind, IFF the conditions are right.
Of course not.) The idea here is that anxious rushing is not part of local tradition But if a hypothetical old lady would drive 75 or 70, she would've been overtaken mercilessly.
They don't have Darwin Awards for animals, but maybe they should start. It's hard to be sure because it's a short clip, but that moose seemed to be very nonchalant about what it was doing.
Maybe it's just that if they grow up next to a constant stream of moving cars (that have never hurt them before) they simply become inured to all the activity.
"Plus everyone it seems drive 15 year-old cars that are not maintained"
I had access to a study done in the 90's that basically talked about the condition of cars and relation to income. A lot of low income rural folks have a single vehicle that has not been to over half of its required maintenance visits. It also doesn't help that you can get high temperatures in the summer and really low temps in the winter. The range is pretty incredible for Northern US and Canada.
In cities:
40km/h on larger (roads designed to pass traffic through the town) and 30km/h on smaller (streets between blocks and inner-city) is the standard in Norrköping and several other parts of Östergötland. (Sweden)
This, among with _removing_ traffic lights, both in favour of roundabouts, right-side-rule, and raised plaza-crossings (cars have to give way to pedestrians&bikes) have effectively reduced the amount of person damage in collisions.
Walking plazas have an interesting effect in that it can cause an increase in small bumper hits on cars, but they reduce the speed of traffic by a lot, and change the flow of the street.
In Leksand the local kommun put 40s everywhere. I think it is only in small towns where local municipality could rule on speed limits on the streets. In Borlange, for example, everything is fine - speed limit on main streets is 60. 30 near schools is a countrywide rule.
Regarding roundabouts I personally find them confusing since they are not common where I live but I wonder if the main benefit of a roundabout it that the curve forces people to slow down instead of gunning through a yellow/red light.
Roundabouts are absolutely fantastic replacements to residential stop signs.
They are horrible and frustrating with multiple lanes (the one around the Arc de Triomphe can be tough to naviate) and lots of traffic, though they might still improve throughput during heavy congestion.
My only accident in a rented vehicle in Europe was with a 2-lane roundabout in Manchester which had a mandatory outer-left-turn lane that the other car didn't notice - I turned left from the center lane into the side street and got sideswiped. The other drivers were also foreigners (Belgians - my UK colleagues were not surprised about that part).
I imagine that even if roundabouts were responsible for more accidents than busy intersections, the nature of the accidents would be less dangerous. Getting t-boned is the most dangerous kind of collision you can have in a regular car and you'd have to turn the wrong way to make that happen in a roundabout.
Having recently moved to America from Australia (specifically Canberra, which is considered the round-about capital), one of the biggest things I miss is round-abouts. They don't stop the flow of traffic like all way stop signs or traffic lights do.
One of the things I really like here though that I wish Australia would adopt is being able to turn right from (almost) any traffic light while it red.
Accelerating is the main danger for cars, whether that's making them go faster or slower. The benefit of a roundabout is that your acceleration is minimal: you slow down a bit for the turn, and you speed up as you leave it, same as any other curved road.
The danger of an intersection is that cars are stopping and starting at it. If a car stops unexpectedly, you have to react. If a car starts moving unexpectedly, you have to account for it. Accelerating to make it through a light before it goes red, or slamming on the brakes in order stop in time for a light, are simply well-known cases of this.
This is why highways and freeways are relatively safe: you largely don't accelerate, except at onramps and offramps. Most highway accidents come from a failed overtake: you're accelerating in order to change lanes, and then decelerating to return to the lane. This is also why rubbernecking is dangerous: it's a subtle deceleration that may be missed by the person behind you.
It's not actually different for anything else that moves; it's just that other moving things have lower consequences (walking, cycling) or stronger traffic control (trains are on rails; planes listen to air traffic controllers). The closest thing is boats, and boats are rarely both traveling at high speeds and in dense formations.
You're also guaranteed that all traffic to watch for is coming from one side only - you don't have to watch for cross-traffic in both directions, nor people coming from the opposite direction who are turning.
no its because it is far easier to run a dark-yellow/red light and then hit a car vs. a roundabout where you. will. slow. down. because you see an obstacle, not seemingly open road ahead of you.
Note that there are two designs of roundabouts, and they have pretty different safety outcomes.
The European design has roads enter from an angle (close to the tangent of the roundabout), which forces traffic to slow down. The other design (used here in Australia and I think the UK) has traffic enter at right angles to the roundabout. This increases traffic flow but is much less safe (especially for cyclists).
UK roundabouts enter at a tangent. That's a main point of their design, altering the angle of potential collisions, sometimes to the point of reducing visibility to force people to slow down. The curve also should slow people down.
Some roundabouts (most of them in my region, Sophia Antipolis, Ftance) are designed with a tilt to the outside, so that the car would be ejected if it takes them too fast.
The article ignores the single biggest reason Americans are likelier than Swedes to die on the roads, which is simply that Americans drive more. The death rate is nearly four times higher per capita in the United States, but only twice as high per mile driven [0].
(In fact, in America, the last few decades' worth of safety improvements to cars have been almost entirely offset by an increase in miles driven; despite their much safer cars, Americans are only slightly less likely to die driving today than they were in 1990 [1].)
The bigger mystery is why Americans are now far likelier to die in their cars than Europeans even after you control for the time they spend in them. That didn't use to be the case. Until the mid-1990s, Sweden (like almost every other country [2]) had a higher rate of traffic fatalities per mile driven than did the United States. Those rates have declined markedly all around the world, but much less in the United States than elsewhere.
My guess is that the divergence comes down to diverging patterns of living. Over the last few decades, American cities have sprawled all over the landscape, so Americans not only drive more, but their road infrastructure is built to facilitate daily travel at high speeds over long distances. A great many Americans drive 30+ highway miles each day between their suburban homes and city offices, but that sort of commute is rare elsewhere.
2. See, e.g., statistics showing that fatalities per vehicle mile were lower in the United State than in many European countries in 1991, https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/hs93/Sec7.pdf [PDF; see page 4]
As someone who's lived in Sweden and now America: The vast majority of Swedes drive small sedans/station wagons, not 4WD trucks. Ironically most Americans I ask about their unnecessarily large trucks cite safety as the reason they're not in a smaller car, while a significantly smaller portion actually got their truck to be able to pull others out of ditches, drive in rough terrain, etc.
If I had to guess, I'd say there being more metal involved is a significant factor in the number of deaths.
Two other possible reasons: 1. Manufacturers popular in Scandinavia, like Volvo and now Tesla, make much safer cars than their competition, and 2. It is ridiculously easy to get a driver's license in America compared to Europe. If you measured "graduates'" driving ability out of the gate, I'm sure Europe would come out on top. (Though, American roads being much larger and safer in general might compensate for this. I'm not sure what the article is talking about when it implies Swedish roads are safer -- they're a mess compared to America's in that respect.)
I would agree that getting a license in the US is significantly easier than in Europe. I'm American, but I lived in Scotland for 7 years and go my first drivers license there. I was told the pass rate was around 40%, which may or may not have been the truth. It was about a 45 minute test. Fast forward a few years to when I returned to the US for college and my drivers test was about 5 minutes long and an absolute joke.
As for the last point about American roads being larger and safer, I'm not sure the second part is true. They are definitely larger, but there's been research done to indicate that larger != safer. I'll try to dig up the article, but I'd tend to agree with the sentiment. I've seen significantly more accidents on large laned freeways in America with a 55 mph speed limit than skinny backroads in Scotland with a 60 mph speed limit, even with adjusting for the larger amount of traffic on the American freeways.
I guess it's possible that small and curved multi-directional roads are safer than larger, mostly one-directional roads (or in a grid system) simply because they force you to pay attention.
Also road rage, lack of practical public transit options, the slap-on-the-wrist of most traffic offenses compared to other countries where it's much easier to lose your license / much more expensive to obtain a license in the first place, the lackadaisical attitude toward safety, especially w.r.t. Intoxicated operation, etc etc.
Isn't most of the States 55mph? (Serious question, that's the figure I remember from playing Road Rash as a kid)
In the UK the limit is 70mph, most of Europe is similar and Germany has no limit on the autobahn.
You are assuming that the total miles driving is linear correlated with number of accidents, which is probably not a valid assumption. I don't have the data, but intuitively there would be more accident later on in a long trip. I know for sure that I am a much better driver in the morning commute to work than in the one back home after a long day.
Contrary to what the article says, Sweden doesn't have the safest roads per capita - the Vatican City has fewer road deaths. It has a few streets that get driven on, so it gets to play as well. Of course, claiming the Vatican-as-best in this kind of analysis is silly, because barely any driving is done there; the roads aren't really used heavily. Road-miles driven per capita shows up this kind of light or heavy use.
It is actually correlated. But not miles, but rather hours.
To the point that people joke that the best way to reduce traffic deaths is to increase the speed limit, since that means people will be on the road for less time.
This is of course only remotely possible on limited access highways, because there are squishy human beings that are easily killed by large speed differentials on urban and suburban streets.
The link [1] cited in my post above includes a chart showing fatalities per mile driven plotted against fatalities per capita for a dozen countries. The relationship looks pretty linear.
Europeans and americans may have diverging patterns of living, but sleeping in suburban areas and working in city centres isn't one of those patterns, as it's becoming the norm everywhere...
Few or no European suburbs are as vast as your American suburbs (think Houston, Atlanta or the Bay area). In my home country (Denmark) young families now tend to stay in city centers rather than moving to suburbs so the trend is reverse.
Also, European cities generally have much better public transportation such as really decent busses, trolley busses, light rails, subways, trains, and trams.
Finally, I suspect a mile driven by 30-60 year olds are generally safer than a mile driven by teenagers. Europe has older population and few teenage drivers.
There are certainly Europeans that engage in long commutes. In the UK, many people who work in London commute from outside, sometimes multiple hours each way, but you're right, public transport is widely used, those aforementioned London commuters tend to rely on trains. Perhaps London is a special case because it's so expensive to live there, but in general it's easy to get around the country on trains.
Living in the Chicago area for most of my adult life, but visiting Houston frequently, I find myself longing for the long access roads / frontage roads that are prevalent around the Houston loop. It's a nice buffer between long-haul highways and shorter-haul-but-not-quite-local roads.
There is a big difference in commuting patterns, which is the difference I noted. Even comparing only suburbanite Americans to suburbanite Europeans, the Americans are likelier to drive, and when they drive, they drive farther and faster.
See, e.g., a study comparing commuting habits of American workers with their British and Irish counterparts [0]. Aside from the more well known differences, the study points out that the average commuting speed is over 45mph in the United States compared to under 30mph in Ireland.
Typical European cities and suburbs are not like typical American cities and suburbs.
I commented elsewhere in this thread: Americans drive .. faster?
So I commuted (I tend to work from home) today, 31th of December, about 90km to the office of my company. Vmax was 200km/h. Tires are cleared up to 210, car can go ~230, but the weather wasn't nice and it's winter.
I don't think that you can bring up 'fast driving' on the US side of things, if you want to compare yourself to Europe. What am I missing?
France allows 130km/h. What's the limit (or what's the average speed over the limit, if you refer to that) for you?
> I don't think that you can bring up 'fast driving' on the US side of things, if you want to compare yourself to Europe. What am I missing?
I think I made it clear that I am talking about population averages. Average speeds depend substantially on how much driving is done on slow city streets versus high-speed arterials and highways, not on how fast the top-end highway speed is.
Americans drivers spend more time on highways, and especially on fast suburban arterials, compared to their European counterparts. Your 90km commute at 200km/h is atypical.
I always fail to understand the word 'highways'[1]. I _think_ Autobahn, and compare it with that in my post. Sweden, according to the infallible Wikipedia, seems to have a speed limit on their version of the highway/Autobahn of 110km/h, in exceptional cases 120km/h.
So I still think the GP is wrong, at least in terms of 'driving faster'.
1: I'm unsure what constitutes a highway, what is the difference (if there's any) to an interstate and .. what you'd call the 'normal' roads between cities.
> 1: I'm unsure what constitutes a highway, what is the difference (if there's any) to an interstate and .. what you'd call the 'normal' roads between cities.
Very generally speaking, interstates are federally-funded/built longer roads (I-10, for example, spans from Florida to California, but there often shorter offshoots) that are usually at least four lanes total (almost always much more in metropolitian areas) and do not have stoplights, stop signs, or any cross traffic at all. Access is controlled by marked exits. The usual speed limit is 70 mph, sometimes lower or higher, often much lower in metropolitian areas with lots of exits and therefore merging. It really depends on the area, congestion, and the actual speed limit but in my experience people more commonly drive ~80mph on the interstate, at least where the speed limit is 70mph.
Highways are pretty much a broad spectrum. They are usually paid for and maintained by the states (although federal grants are common). Sometimes access is controlled for short stretches, but in general they have stoplights and stop signs. They are usually multi-lane and often the major throroughfares through a city are a highway. Speed limits vary wildly. There are two lane country-road highways with few stops and 10 lane metropolitan highways with stops every 100 feet. They tend to be fairly long but not always.
"Other" is pretty much the final category, which includes city streets and country roads. They usually aren't very long; any sufficiently long road is usually transformed into a highway if it isn't already.
The "normal" roads between cities are almost always interstates and highways.
Interstate highways were built as a system of highways with no stops to anywhere in the country. I think in theory they are maintained by the federal government, but in practice, the feds give money to the states because the states each have agencies that deal with roadbuilding contracts etc.
I think in contemporary usage, "freeway" and "highway" mostly mean the same thing: no stops.
Autobahn = interstate highway. There are different kinds of highways here: interstate (numbered highways that cross state lines, with the exception of I-4, which is entirely within Florida), state, county, and municipal. The concept is the same throughout: a highway differs from other roads (sometimes we call those "surface streets") in that it has controlled or limited access and is "maintained" by a government agency of some kind. They're intended for non-local travel, just like the Autobahn and the other federal/state motorways.
I drove on the Autobahn once (A13) going from Berlin to Dresden when teaching a class there. I remember distinctly feeling that it was all familiar to me. Just like an interstate highway here in the US, only the drivers around me generally seemed like they were attentive to their driving. :)
I'd guess the German equivalent to our other highways would be Bundesstraßen and Landesstraßen?
> There are different kinds of highways here: interstate (numbered highways that cross state lines, with the exception of I-4, which is entirely within Florida),
There's actually a lot of interstates that aren't interstate. Not quite sure how that got started. Aside from perhaps a dozen "primary" interstates that aren't interstate, most of the "auxiliary" interstates are not interstate.
> a highway differs from other roads (sometimes we call those "surface streets") in that it has controlled or limited access and is "maintained" by a government agency of some kind.
I am a little bit curious as to where you're from. :) In my experience (a little bit of California, a lot of the south and eastern seaboard), controlled access on state highways is the exception rather than the rule. Usually the best case scenario is that you get no stops for the non-highway intersecting roads (they simply stop and make a turn or cross the highway when there's no traffic - obviously this only works on the rural sections) and interstate-style merges on major state highway intersections. In more built up areas stops tend to be frequent. I'd like to drive where you are!
Loops (three digit Interstates beginning with an even number) and spurs (three digits beginning with an odd number) are not considered separate from the interstate off which they branch, semantically speaking. So I-4 it is. And maybe one in Hawaii? I can't recall. :)
I'm from Chicago area, grew up in Southeast, many years all over eastern seaboard up to upstate NY. Limited access just means no intersection with every possible side street, basically. Was just trying to simplify it a bit for the comment. :)
When talking about climate change, Jean Marc Jancovici (our local Al Gore) never fails to mention urban architecture takes time to reorganize. Given your petrol is so cheap (low tax and high foreign... let's not say it), US builds cities accordingly. In France, taxes more than double the petrol price [1], so you only see suburban designs in very rich places (namely, Sophia-Antipolis). Those areas where cars are mandatory are not kind to lower-income people, and the voting is accordingly very right-wing.
So the first step we should take for climate change is to organize our cities so that public transport is useful, where we can walk to work. In this matter, US has no chance of improving if they keep low taxes per gallon.
(I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but) City centre is not the only location to which one may be heading. I live in the capital of my country, and I save three quarters of an hour of my daily commute with a car – and I hear people saying the capital is the only place where public transport really ”works”.
.. Accidents happen because on narrow, inadequate roads, full of blind corners and surrounded by dwelling houses, vehicles and pedestrians are moving in all directions at all speeds from three miles an hour to sixty or seventy. If you really want to keep death off the roads, you would have to replan the whole road system in such a way as to make collisions impossible. Think out what this means (it would involve, for example, pulling down and rebuilding the whole of London), and you can see that it is guite beyond the power of any nation at this moment. Short of that you can only take palliative measures, which ultimately boil down to making people more careful.
But the only palliative measure that would make a real difference is a drastic reduction in speed. Cut down the speed limit to twelve miles an hour in all built-up areas, and you would cut out the vast majority of accidents. But this, everyone will assure you, is ‘impossible’. Why is it impossible? Well, it would be unbearably irksome. It would mean that every road journey took twice or three times as long as it takes at present. ..
There have been experiments in the UK where all road markings and signs and lights and pavements have been removed. Vehicles and pedestrians are free to move as they wish. These areas tend to be safer for everyone because the uncertainess forces car drivers to slow down and look out.
An average speed of 12MPH seems high for central London!
> Transport for London's latest figures state that for the first quarter of 2011/2012 the average traffic speed on major London roads for the 12 hours between 7am to 7pm was 19.33 mph and over the same period was 8.98 mph across Central London.
This makes me wonder though, do they slow down because the signage that used to be posted has been taken down and they're now unsure of what to do in that area?
Many of the "driving problems" I've seen involve drivers in areas where they feel comfortable. Eg, the last bit before home. Part of me wonders if after a period of time, the same behaviours would resurface as people became acclimatized to the lack of signage.
Well, yes, roundabouts reduce fatalities for the same reason. Unfortunately most people's intuitions about what is safe on the road are out of sync with reality.
I don't think city centers are very prone to deadly accidents..
Edit: I'm talking about potential car-less city centers, which are limited to a very small section of most cities. City centers are generally less prone to deadly accidents anyway as shown for example here for the US: http://www.cdc.gov/Features/TeenDrivingDeaths/
No. Well educated and innocent pedestrians who cross at crosswalks but are clobbered by hurried drivers who don't recognize that they actually need to look out for pedestrians in between gawking at their cell phones and eating an Egg McMuffin.
They said at night. That's not early in the morning when they're eating a McMuffin and too busy to be doing their real job of driving around. This is at night.
There's probably an equal number of:
* giggling drunkards crossing the street
* jaywalkers who think it's the middle of the night
and obviously no car would be coming
* people who think black is reflective as they walk
into the road to cross a street on a dark road
* giggling people not paying attention
* pedestrians staring at their phones crossing the
street without looking
And
* inattentive drivers
* sleepy drivers
* drivers looking at their cell phone
It's not always the driver's fault, especially in cities where speeds tend to be lower. In some cities, people meandering around inattentively are VERY hard to predict movement of.
Please note, I'm not saying that it's never the driver's fault either; but, the whole situation is a give and take for everyone. No cars in city centers except maybe public transit of some description would be pretty great, I think, in general.
Note that "jay-walking" is something that the US car industry came up with in order to drive pedestrians off the road and clear the way for vehicular traffic so that they could sell more cars.
In much of the rest of the world, the concept barely exists & many people find the idea that pedestrians are somehow automatically at fault simply for being on the road when someone drives their vehicle into them almost offensive. Why should the driver's right of way be preferred to the pedestrians'?
> But the only palliative measure that would make a real difference is a drastic reduction in speed. Cut down the speed limit to twelve miles an hour in all built-up areas, and you would cut out the vast majority of accidents.
That is not actually true. It would reduce injury and death, but it would increase accidents.
Every bit of statistics has shown that accidents are correlated to time on the road, not miles and not speed. Half the speed limit, double the time, double the accidents.
Injuries are different, those are correlated to speed.
At the time he was writing, cars dominating traffic was relatively new. He was talking about the next year, not the next hundred years.
The greater purpose of the article is (IMO) to point out bullshitting, "our unwillingness to face facts and our consequent readiness to make gestures which are known in advance to be useless."
People talk about reducing road deaths. One life when it is a specific person is supposedly worth any cost but in practice we agree to a system that strikes a balance between death and convenience. All sorts of things are possible at a cost, but we often BS because we don't want the cost and we also don't want to know that we weren't willing to pay it.
>in practice we agree to a system that strikes a balance between death and convenience
Not necessarily. Being unable to travel also causes deaths. Even if you value lives infinitely higher than convenience itself, you end up in a similar spot.
Well, we introduced the VSL(Value of a Statistical Life) for a reason. I would quite say that the government openly says saving a life if only worth a certain amount, if you read real policy documents.
Who supposes that one life is worth any cost? Clearly no one even values their own life infinitely. If they did, for every decision they would choose the least risky option.
> I get the point, but that's not entirely true; improvements in car design have also reduced accidents in ways other than forcing people to slow down.
The US saw a huge advertising effort trying to convince people that pedestrian fatalities were not an issue with either cars or drivers. Realistically, while it costs more and be less convenient for drivers a better separation between cars and people is going to save plenty of lives.
You haven't included people who aren't in cars being fatalities. For example there have been two deaths of cyclists in the last week here due to hit and run. The cycle lanes where they exist are a joke.
To state my European prejudices, you also seem to value being allowed to drive without proper training, and driving around in bulky vehicles that are basically designed to use the other car as their crumple zone. Those two things are possibly related.
These two factors are definitely a huge part of the problem in the US. Our driver education system is a joke, and our driver testing is even worse. Combined with police department cutbacks all over the US, meaning that proper enforcement of the existing lazy laws is low.
Many or most people in the US also mistakenly believe that these giant vehicles are safer than smaller ones, since again, they are totally uneducated about the realities of vehicle safety.
The state of driving in the US is truly horrendous.
Well it sounds like they are pretty baseless prejudices. You must pass a skills test, even if not as rigorous as some countries. Additionally, the idea that the other car is the crumple zone was valid maybe 50 years ago. Safety tests are conducted by smashing cars into walls that don't crumple.
Everyone I know who has been in a crash hasn't been due to improper training, it been because of ignoring rules that they knew very well (speeding, texting and driving, etc). I don't know anyone that has crashed because they didn't know how a stop sign worked.
1. If you are involved in an accident.
2. If you violate the law.
3. If you drive recklessly or dangerously.
4. If you fail to cooperate with the examiner.
5. If you make several errors in safe driving practices because of habit or not enough practice.
> Everyone I know who has been in a crash hasn't been due to improper training, it been because of ignoring rules that they knew very well (speeding, texting and driving, etc)
How can anybody not know that texting and driving is a bad idea? That's just stupid.
But people do stupid things every day. Smoking is stupid, binge drinking is stupid, not wearing your seat belt is stupid... all have consequences. The point still remains, it is a choice people make to not follow the rules that causes most of the problems. Now, how do we get people to follow the rules better?
This is the third time I'm commenting on the same issue in this thread.
Speed? What's the limit? What are you actually driving, if you're ignoring the limit?
Because Sweden allows 110-120km/h and other places in Europe might even allow more (France w/ 130km/h, and .. I'm from Germany).
You are NOT going fast in the US. You might drive a lot. You might commute more than anyone else. I don't know about these things. But fast? I don't buy it.
Around Boston for my 15 mile commute on the Interstate the fast lane is nominally at 110-120km/h.
No it's not as fast as the autobahn but it's on a par with Europe and far from slow. (I'm British, lived in Germany for 10 years, US for 5 years)
I'm sorry, 110-120 in the fast lane isn't "on par with Europe".
If you look at Germany, 270 is more like it...
If you look at Austria/Italy, the fast lane rarely ever goes as low as the speed limit and going as fast as 145 kph usually meant we had to go out of the lane to let others through.
Whoever is driving 110kph on an European highway is more or less a deadly road hazard. At such low speed it is nearly impossible to overtake lorries without having somebody nearly ram you from the back and it is guaranteed to cause a massive pileup of angry cars behind.
Source - I've been traveling Europe both on motorbike and by car
Some of the designs are advantageous even for speed and convenience. Modern roundabouts reduce intersection fatalities by 90% and increase throughput in most traffic conditions. They were much maligned as complicated and hard to understand when they started being built in the USA, but the rate of their construction is going up and eventually they will probably be as common in the USA as they are in Europe.
I think this is part of it, but there are also issues of infrastructure as well. Many aging eastern cities, with their challenging (read: hilly) topography, make it prohibitively expensive to radically redesign roads.[0] Additionally, I think it would be "federalize" such efforts, as it would be easier gradually redesign roads in a city, or even a part of a city, rather than attempt to broadly dictate policy for the entire country.
[0] That said, it is possible to make the streets safer, even when geography and economics are obstacles. My own town has been doing this, though often it is piecemeal.
Great point. It's made more complex by artifacts of state law and home rule for political subdivisions.
For example, in New York, state and US highways (ie. State Route 5, US Route 20) are maintained by the State DOT -- unless you're in a "city". Areas that are organized as towns (think Hempstead, NY on Long Island with 300k+ people) get state services, areas organized as cities (Albany, NY with 90k people) typically do a lousy job at it.
The Federal government has been able to update things like street signals, etc. But fundamental things like road conceptual design, breaking out bike lanes, etc are going to be very difficult issues to handle without local control.
There are more people in NYC than Sweden, so the size and scope of the problem in the US is several orders of magnitude more complex.
Hilly topography doesn't really make it prohibitively expensive to make 2+1 roads, or at least they're relatively common in Finland. (Although 2+1 roads are rarely separated by fence here).
Even hilly roads tend to have straight sections that can serve as the 2+1 area.
Parts of Highway 17 in South Carolina were recently upgraded to exactly this type of road. I've noticed many other highways (not Interstates) using this exact design. Admittedly, they do not always have a steel barrier.
Traffic circles are another thing going in all around where I currently live. Unfortunately many people still do not know how to use them, but they are learning.
"Building 1,500 kilometres (900 miles) of "2+1" roads—where each lane of traffic takes turns to use a middle lane for overtaking—is reckoned to have saved around 145 lives over the first decade of Vision Zero."
I'm no expert in roads, but can anyone explain how that shared middle lane is not the recipe for disaster?
The 2 or 1 lanes are separated by a metal fence. You can only overtake at the stretches of road where your direction have 2 lanes on one side of the fence.
They did feel a bit terrifying and constrained when we first got them. But now we're used to it.
I did nearly have an accident once when I tried to overtake a truck too close to the road switching from 1+2 to 2+1. Though that was due to me being really really stupid.
Meh, in Australia we have plenty of these 2+1 roads with no fence, just road markers. We don't have an epidemic of head-on collisions. All you need to do is at the end of the '+1' section, have the outside lane merge into to inside lane. There's no 'sudden switchover' where traffic in the middle lane is coming at traffic going the other way.
Sometimes dysfunctional state politics plays a major role in US highway fatalities. E.g. I-5 [1] in Oregon. It has had numerous head-on crashes over the years because there are no barriers on large stretches of the road.
This isn't a "farm to market" road which some local hicks use to bring their vegetables in to the city to sell. This is the primary Interstate highway that goes North-South from the state of Washington thru the state of Oregon to the state of California. It's heavily used by both local commuters and long distance travelers.
Ah that makes sense. I have seen those roads before.
However I've also heard that in crowded situations it's actually faster for everyone to have just two separated lanes (no overtaking). Because the constant lane merging slows everybody down.
Well, in this case the slow vehicles are mostly trucks, which have a lower speed limit. So if you didn't provide a way of overtaking, a single truck would drop the speed for everyone from 120km/h to 80km/h or whatever the speed limits are now.
"It turned out that not only did safety improve, but it was also easier to overtake than before as the 2-lane sections provide safe overtaking opportunities."
"After some good experiences with test roads the system has been used often in places where the amount of traffic does not justify construction of a dual carriageway expressway but remote rural areas should be connected to major towns with a high speed road."
My experience with this type of road in america is that slow people go slow when they have one lane and then they speed up when their direction has two lanes, making it harder to overtake them in the designated section. This is infuriating, of course. In America drivers aware not trained in throttle control, speed control, or lane discipline so their behavior in these situations is usually a combination of the worst possibilities.
That's so incredibly true! But, I'd rather have the passing lane appear periodically than not.
One of my favorite roads in Washington State is Highway 2. On this road, we have the periodic passing lane, at least when we're going Eastbound, we do. Westbound has fewer of those passing lanes; though, I think the lane in the Eastbound side is dashed, so you can actually pass using it if there's not much traffic going Eastbound. Nevertheless, when stuck behind someone who is clearly not following the "more than 5 people behind you: pull over" rule, I long desperately for the passing lane to come, as it appears all the time for the Eastbounders.
I have seen exactly the problem you're describing on /several/ occasions; but, I wouldn't give up the double-lane road, because sometimes people do stay their previous speed and you /can/ pass them. This road is a mountain pass, and so there are several curvy sections, all of which are too dangerous to pass in because you can't see far enough to confirm no cars are coming. When the road grows to 2 + 1 again, you'll see several people enthusiastically pass the slow person and from their slower speeds.
tl;dr: live in the US, love the 2+1 lane when it's around.
Wikipedia did not mention a big drawback with these roads, though: If there is an accident, a vehicle breaks down, or a truck gets stuck in snow (this is Sweden, after all), there is no way for emergency personnel to get to the scene except by going the opposite way. And there is absolutely no way for traffic to get around an obstacle until the center cables are removed.
Apparently, 2+1 roads are often separated with a barrier in Sweden. That said, while counter-intuitive, it probably just works anyways. I have the following reasons in mind:
- driver attention is higher
- road signs tell drivers when overtaking will be possible
- overtaking is possible without occupying the other side of the road
- distance and speed judgment not needed (and thus not impaired by lack of sleep or alcohol)
A bit of googling would have helped, but the wording in the article is admittedly misleading. The third lane is not shared, but owned by one of the two directions, taking turns. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2%2B1_road
One direction (eastbound in this example) has priority as dictated by road markings, and those traveling westbound can use the lane for passing if and only if it is safe to do so. The onus is on them to ensure a safe maneuver.
With a fairly high standard for the driving test in the UK this is totally normal and as far as I'm aware has a similar low rate of accidents to normal 2 lane traffic.
These exist on many highways in the US. However, if you're behind a slow driver waiting for the passing lane to open up, it's normal for the slow driver to gun it when the passing lane appears and race you to the end of it, then resume driving 15 mph below the speed limit.
There must be some sort of psychology that kicks in when somebody tries to pass you, that more or less forces you to speed up. It's like, "oh, I didn't realize I was going slow until I saw you try to pass me...let me speed up a tad." This seems to happen in any passing situation, whether on a two lane road with a passing lane or an eight lane highway.
I drove on a highway like this (in America) this weekend. It's not really shared. It's just that your side will get two lanes for a while, then merge down to one. Then the other side gets two lanes for a while. There are frequently signs saying how far until the next two-lane section, which presumably pacifies impatient drivers.
The middle lane is not shared, it will only be used by one direction at a time and a middle barrier is usually separating these two. Wikipedia has an article explaining it further: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2%2B1_road
It's not shared. It replaces single lane roads where you overtake into oncoming traffic. Driving is one of those things that lots of people thing they are better than average at.
This removes drivers having to judge when it is safe to overtake, you just have to sit back and wait for the middle lane to switch back.
They usually have a barrier between them. So it's not really shared. Wikipedia has some pictures and videos, conveniently enough they were taken in Sweden.
In addition to the road quality I would say the driver's ed is also a big factor. Getting a license in Sweden is much tougher than most other places, especially the US.
I don't think the difficulty of getting a driver's license has that much to do with it as one would expect. In fact, sometimes you'll see the opposite result.
South Africa has one of the toughest driving tests (the K53). Not to mention that even applying and qualifying for one is an ordeal on its own. And yet, the fatality rate is around 32 per 100k. If you make it too hard for people to obtain a license, they'll get one illegally. If you make the test too hard, they'll do the same. If you make the test impractical, it becomes worthless.
I should point out, that EU has standardised driving licence education. So despite Denmark having almost no tunnels (no mountains to speak of), we still have to learn about tunnel driving. And that's good.
These tests also include driving at a facility.
However, the EU requirements are minimum requirements, countries are allowed to make the requirements tougher, such as Finland (which I think requires at least 3 days at a facility).
> such as Finland (which I think requires at least 3 days at a facility)
Actually, in Finland the requirement is 3 hours (3 * 50 minutes, to be precise) driving in a track, practicing maneuvers in slippery conditions.
Wintertime they of course have proper ice conditions in the tracks. If you do this practice summer time, they try to make the track slippery using water or oil, but the achieved level of slipperiness can vary.
A driving facility, where you experience driving through water, surfaces with low friction, as well as attempting avoiding obstacles, rescuing skidding (both front and back end) out and so forth.
So I suppose in Finland these would be driving on ice x2, and the night driving simulator (at least in my case). Are you sure that tunnels are a part of the standard? I didn't need to do that ~5 years ago.
Is the education split into three seperate parts in all EU countries (first gives a temporary license, and there must be a few months before the others (to get real world driving experience), but all must be done withing 2 years)? When I got my license, the education cost about 2500 euros (I think it's higher now). Is that about the same as elsewhere in the EU?
In Denmark you get a full licence the first time you pass. But in practical terms, authorities (and insurance and car rental companies) look 'harsher' on newer drivers. But legally there is no temporary licence (except the licence you get the day you pass, which is just temporary until your actual licence is delivered in the mail).
I know tunnels was required in 2011, but the teacher also seemed to indicate that it was a recent change.
I never used a simulator, night driving meant driving at night. Taking a bus driving licence was mostly the same ordeal, although there is some extra focus in the theory about how a bus works and what requirements it has.
When I took my B-category driving licence, it cost about 6500 DKK (about 880 euros). But that was a big driving school, I also see prices at 8000 DKK (about 1075 euros). Fortunately, my bus driving licence was subsidised (so I only paid 3600 DKK (480 euros)), otherwise it would have cost 31000 DKK (4180 euros).
Perhaps "unbelievable" is an exaggeration, but Finland is more expensive. A license to drive a normal car ("B" category license) costs between 1500 and 2000 euros in a driving school (for the initial phase, which gives a temp license valid for 2 years). Then around 400 euros for the second phase which must be done after 6 to 24 months.
But fortunately a family member (or similar) can also teach, with just a few mandatory lessons at "facilities". This way, the cost is around 500 euros (if you don't include the car and fuel costs when driving the mandatory 20 half-hour lessons.)
(License categories are the same in all of EU I think: A is for motorcycles, B a car, C a lorry, D a bus, E a trailer, with sub-divisions like A1 and A2 for different power classes of motorcycles etc; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_license#mediaviewer/...).
In Finland, licenses were about to become very expensive last year after a law change that was lobbied by driving schools - that effectively made it impossible to teach your own family members to drive. But after seeing the ripping-off by driving schools, and also after extensive protests by the public, the government (unbelievably) backed down and changed the rules back so that teaching a family member is again feasible. My third kid is soon ready for the driving test...
BTW people say that it's a great test of trust and co-operation between a parent and a teenager to try to teach a young one to drive. For me this has fortunately gone very well.
Germany:
My wife got her license rather late, recently. The costs were roughly the same (for "B"). You're on a two year 'probation' period. Any offense that would lead to an entry in our "You did something wrong and we're awarding you points for that" database means that you'll lose your license - with a well-defined process to restart / try to recover it. This includes speeding over a certain limit (say, 20km/h over the limit in towns for example) or running a red light, ignoring a stop sign etc.. All of these are - in theory, if you're caught, instant reasons to lose your license.
We don't have costs after the 2 years though, the license just graduates and becomes permanent. Now you'd receive a certain number of points for the offenses listed above and there are limits that might require you to take driving lessons again or - in bad cases - might again lead to the loss of your license.
In EU, there are specific rules for tunnels, for instance: parking is illegal, U-turns are illegal, you must use headlights. For transporting dangerous materials there are of course more rules, but those are relevant for lorry/truck drivers.
Interesting. In America we don't expect anyone to know anything so there's just signs all over the tunnel such as "Turn on headlights" and of course at the end of the tunnel "Check headlights" in case it's not night time, and "No Parking" every 100 meters, and "No hazardous materials in tunnel" and so forth. Maybe we spend a lot more money on our signs.
I found this part particularly interesting, for strange reasons: "now less than 0.25% of drivers tested are over the alcohol limit"
Why are they testing those other 399 people (0.25% = 1 in 400)? Driving while drowsy? drunk driving checkpoints? Someone's a little swervy and gets noticed?
In most small (>100K people) US cities I've lived in there are many mandatory checkpoints on "notorious" nights - like New Year's Eve. They don't block all the roads - you can circumvent them. I've never actually been required to do the breathalyzer so the police are probably just stopping obvious over-the-limit drivers.
The road is not actually physically blocked, but every vehicle that comes on that road is hailed to stop for the test. If someone takes a U-turn to avoid the test, there's typically a motorbike or a patrol car ready to chase.
The U.S. does this too. Happens maybe once a month around San Jose, for example. Usually you can avoid it because Google Maps detects the huge back-up and routes you around it :) if you know what to look for (half-mile stretch of red traffic in a place where that's not the norm on a week-end evening), it's generally not hard to spot.
At least in Illinois, they're euphemistically called "road-side safety inspections". I had a limo driver once get caught not wearing his seatbelt by a spotter at the beginning of a backup leading into one. The car was radioed in and, even though he put on his seat belt while in line (in his mind, well before any officer could see he wasn't wearing one), he received a citation when we finally made it to the actual inspection point.
I never even noticed he wasn't wearing one. On the rare occasion I have a driver who doesn't use it, I tell them that story.
I don't know the answer there, but in Australia I regularly get breath tested for drink driving at 'drunk driving checkpoints'. The basically just stop and test as much traffic as they can. Othertimes they will just randomly pull me over and test me.
I don't know about other countries, but in the US, police sobriety checkpoints are only legal if the cops have no discretion about whom to stop.
http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1935
National mentality has to do with it. For instance, you see a night-and-day difference in driver behavior when you cross the border from, say, Switzerland to Italy.
Why poor countries have lots of deadly car accidents probably has something to do with corruption, in part. People won't respect order, such as traffic codes, when their government isn't respectable. If I imagine I'm a citizen of a poor country, why would I stop at a red light if my president gave a contract to some foreign company in exchange for bribes. If he can do as he pleases, so can I.
There is also driver licensing. Here in the provinces of Canada, for instance, if you have a measurable pulse and/or your breath can fog a cold mirror, you can get a driver's license. I can't imagine that the same is true in Sweden.
A learner's permit can be obtained by passing a written test. After that, a very brief and easy road test results in a driver's license. No formal schooling is required; a friend or relative can teach you, for instance.
Furthermore, driver's license renewals do not require any testing. I got my driver's license in 1987. Since, then, I have renewed it every five years simply by paying the fee, signing a paper, and having my picture taken. I've never been required to take any additional training or testing.
Imagine if it was like that for, say, commercial airline pilots.
Regarding "Vision Zero": I find it unrealistic, for the simple reason that you can't stop people from dying. I think Sweden must share the same way of counting as my country (Finland) where the traffic death statistics include suicides and "natural" deaths.
We have around 250 road deaths per year in a country of 5 million, and about 50 of these are suicides.
This means that practically every week there's someone who kills him/herself by an intentional act in traffic. For instance, a couple of months back a mother killed herself and her three children by driving 100 km/h head-on at a bus where his husband was travelling. This was just an act of defiance, desperation and hate.
When suicides count for about one fifth of traffic deaths, it is not insignificant and leaves the number of traffic deaths well above zero. Also, natural deaths - people dying of a heart attack or a stroke while driving - account for a significant part of the statistics (somewhere around 10-15 %). They're counted as traffic deaths even in cases where no one else is hurt and even the vehicle is unscathed.
I wouldn't say that throughput is the priority. The typical speed limits on interstates were optimal for fuel efficiency. Convenience highways are revenue generating through the use of automatic toll collection, but in my experience, only have higher speed limits when they have more limited access (read: fewer exits/on-ramps).
Whenever I'm in Sweden i just drive one road. The E4. I bet the asphalt per capita is probably pretty low compared to any other country. But still the quality of the roads don't compare to Denmark or the Netherlands for example which feel even more thought out and structured.
As an aside, the bicycle roads in the Netherlands are extremely well-organized. The U.S. and other countries should borrow this format for inter- and intracity cycling. Most U.S. bicycle paths are like road signs in rural Germany: few and far between or hidden behind an overgrown hedge.
>Planning has played the biggest part in reducing accidents. Roads in Sweden are built with safety prioritised over speed or convenience. Low urban speed-limits, pedestrian zones and barriers that separate cars from bikes and oncoming traffic have helped.
This is big. Cities in Sweden have the ability to cater much faster to bikers because biking is a much more prevalent way of trasport than in the United States. In fact, that is one of the larger causes for deaths in cities like San Francisco. [1]
Don't forget mandatory practical training in driving in wet/icy conditions as well as mandatory winter tires in such conditions. This probably causes some deaths in countries where such conditions occur less frequently. On the other hand, several months of snow/ice is likely adding to Swedens death toll. Training looks like this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6AJ1J5wVpMY
I've seen 2+1 in Minnesota (cannot remember which road, but it is a highway off I90 and headed to the cities). In SD and ND, I've seen the added lane for slow traffic to move to so the normal traffic can pass. Same effect, but probably an acknowledgement of the number of slow vehicles found on rural highways (e.g. combines, tractors, heavily loaded grain trucks).
Can someone with knowledge or experience on the subject explain how the "2+1"[0] road is better than a standard 3-lane highway?
[0] FTA "Building 1,500 kilometres (900 miles) of "2+1" roads—where each lane of traffic takes turns to use a middle lane for overtaking—is reckoned to have saved around 145 lives over the first decade of Vision Zero"
(not sweden but Netherlands but it works for the example.)
Overtaking is not allowed (except for farm traffic), in a 2+1 situation there would be three lanes all the time, alternating between directions. This means that there will always be a legal spot to overtake within a few minutes. (usually the climbing direction would be two lanes so you can overtake slow trucks e.d.) Therefore you don't have to overtake a slow driver by using the oncoming lane.
By a 'standard 3-lane highway', I assume you mean three lanes each way, these roads have nowhere near enough traffic on them to explain all that extra tarmac.
Yes that is what I meant, the main highway I drive to work on is 3 lanes each direction. Bumper to bumper < 40 MPH (65 KPH) in rush hour, sporadic traffic going 75-85+ MPH (135+ KPH) at other times.
We have a few of these roads in my area but not very many, and you can easily go many many miles on a road similar to the one in your picture with no passing lane.
I don't know what a 'standard 3-lane highway' is. But a 2+1 highway means one lane in each direction, as well as a middle lane that changes direction at certain points.
The advantage of these is that rather than forcing drivers to overtake into opposing traffic, they can wait until their direction gets the overtaking lane. These sort of roads are very common in Denmark. And I've seen a few of them in Germany as well.
(This is not to be confused with 2+1 highways where the middle lane change direction depending on the time of day, these have been phased out. There are usually clear markings on 2+1 highways when the direction change.)
A three lane highway is similar to a UK motorway. A road has six lanes, three (plus an emergency "hard shoulder") for each direction seperated by a central crash barrier.
A 3-lane highway is like 3 lanes in each direction though, isn't it? A 2+1 road has 3 lanes in total, and no central reservation (or just a fence), so it's less than half as wide.
I certainly know why Dominican Republic has such high death rates on the road. The people that drive there are freakin' insane. They have no regard for road rules, traffic signs, pedestrians... Driving in Santo Domingo is like driving in the demolition derby. It was absolutely terrifying.
They're not exactly common in the Boston area, but they're here, and new ones are getting added (mainly in Cambridge, as far as I can tell). At least one even has separate traffic lights that turn green for bikes a few seconds early.
FWIW I tend to stick to the roads anyway, though, because the segregated bike lanes often have pedestrians and runners in them regardless, and the paths often get cracked from tree roots and whatnot. Most drivers don't seem to care if I'm not on the dedicated path, so long as I'm hauling and not riding crazy.
New York added an incomplete network of 'protected bike lanes', as they're called, a few years ago that we are working to expand. Chicago has likewise started building them, and after that they've been filtering down to places like Pittsburgh and Austin.
If you had the choice between getting to your destination in 20 minutes, with a 11.4 in 100,000 chance of dying, or arriving in 25 minutes with a 3 in 100,000 chance, which would you choose?
Assuming you had 40 years remaining in your life, and no one else was in the car with you, and the cost of fire/rescue services is ignored, and the chance of serious long-term injury instead of death is also ignored, then:
Option #1 takes 40 * 365.25 * 24 * 11.4/100000 = 40 hours off your life.
Option #2 takes 40 * 365.25 * 24 * 3 /100000 = 10.5 hours off your life.
Statistically speaking then, option #1 takes off about 30 hours of your life compared to option #2.
In fact, with those numbers you shouldn't take option #1 unless you only expected to live for another 1-2 months.
On the other hand, logging workers have a highest occupational rate of death, at 127.8 per 100,000 full-time workers per year. Assuming 2000 hours per year gives a much fatality rate per hour than what you've posited, so I don't understand your point.
You do realize that a large chunk of road deaths are pedestrians, people that explicitly did not choose to use a car and insted walk to their destination, and that are overwhelmingly killed by people that did choose a car?
I sure hope you do not drive if that is your attitude to safety.
This description of the problem is very susceptible to framing. i.e. how you ask this question will determine the response you receive.
A couple of reframes for example:
Would you rather drive a road where you gain 5 minutes and increase your chance of death by 4?
Would you rather drive a road where you lose 25% of your travel time to obstacles and change your chance of dying from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 30,000?
I believe the US government does have guidelines for how much a human life is 'worth' (~10M I had thought...) [0]. It's one of the 'objective' calculations taken into account when analyzing these types of projects.
Would you say that again while considering your spouse is a travelling salesman? It's not about one-time trips, it's about the aggregated death toll over years or decades.
My comment was actually incorrect, since it's 11.4 in 100,000 per year. I think I'd want my spouse to spend 1/5th less time driving for the increase in risk.
25 minutes. Actually, no, I would just take the bus and arrive in 30 minutes, but having had spent the time doing something enjoyable rather than driving. :)
Someone can check the math, but in my head I got about ten year crossover to about one sig fig (unless I really messed up it'll be between 2 and 20 years), so it would be far more economical in terms of wasted lifetimes with those made up stats to take the slower route.
"Sweden has 264 road deaths for 9.5 million people. Britain has 1730 for 62 million people. The deaths rates, at 28 per million people, are virtually identical in both countries and way below every other European country.
Britain though, has impossibly crowded narrow roads laid down hundreds of years ago, full of bends and hazards large urban conurbations with lots of people, including pedestrians, using the roads at the same time, and almost no new roads designed for safety or anything else.
Yet Britain has no more per capita road deaths than Sweden. Perhaps the Swedes have technical solutions in road planning, design and all sorts of legal restrictions on drivers to aid road safety. Perhaps the British are just more considerate and more aware, that, as their roads are much more hazardous, they have to take a lot more care when driving."
While it's surprising the Economist failed to mention this maybe the UK's and Sweden's approaches are actually not that different? We have lots of speed bumps, traffic calming techniques, cameras, average speed checks, high vis signing, smart roadside warning stuff, railings at many pedestrian crossings etc. Most modern cars you can buy now come with beeping alerts if you don't plug your belt in and our drink driving rules are tough and enforced.
Also, depending on where in the UK you live, it's difficult to drive at a speed that could do any serious damage due to the horrendous congestion! Whenever I'm on the M6 I seem to spend most of the time stationary :/
Anecdotal Edit: I also think there's a difference in driving mentality/culture between British drivers and those from some other EU countries e.g. France. I lived there for 5 years and noticed that drivers there were much more willing to overtake on blind bends (which used to scare the shit out of me) and much less inclined to make way for other road users merging. Their attitude to driving seemed a lot more focused on their individual needs rather than the collective. My French girlfriend (who now lives with me here in the UK) agrees FWIW.
And yet (anecdotally) when I was in France cycle the drivers were so much more polite to me. I saw bad driving in terms of lack of consideration of other drives, but when it came to cyclists they were generally extremely friendly, indicating and passing very wide and only when it was safe to do so. This was for both country and city cycling. In the UK most drivers seem to treat cyclists pretty poorly.
Britain drives on the left. Most people are right hand and right eye dominant, so driving on the left is inherently superior. This is why racing drivers use a gear stick on the left, for example.
I simply attribute Britain's improbably good driving safety record - in spite of having a road infrastructure that is not any better than that on the continent - to driving on the left and not having people constantly take their dominant hand off the steering wheel and put their dominant eye at a disadvantage.
Narrow roads are actually one of the best things you can do to increase road safety. People naturally want to slow down on narrow roads and speed up on broad ones.
I would guess, narrow roads in medieval towns would lead to slow driving speeds, and with slow speeds accidents are less fatal. Perhaps you can still kill a pedestrian when driving at 30 km/h, but a collision with another car at such speed is probably not fatal.
I suspect you are overestimating the extend of "medieval towns". Even places, like here in Edinburgh, that do have a core of medieval buildings have surrounding areas built in later centuries that generally have much wider streets out to the suburbs that were probably mostly built in the last century and have "modern" roads.
Most of the towns are built with roads wide enough for two wagons to past each other, and pedestrians around the wagons. All in all, not too different from smallish cars.
In metric deaths per kilometer Britain is about 15% higher than Sweden.
Something that has to be considered is only weirdos live to drive, most people drive to live. This will be contentious much like work to live vs live to work. None the less, its quite mathematically possible to have a situation where fewer societal lifetimes are lost overall, yet more lives end in a car crash. Obviously re-implementing feudalism and never allowing serfs permission to leave their lords land would have very low car death rates, but the total amount of wasted lives would be enormously higher.
Its quite possible that in terms of "lifetimes lost commuting per million people" that the USA is lower than Europe, what with our lack of public transit and seemingly everyone owning a car. For political reasons this statistic cannot be compiled because the result may not match predetermined journalistic goals.
Drunk driving has become a huge social stigma in the UK over the past few decades. People will report drunk drivers, even their friends and relatives, as they see it is a social good. They still exist but the incidence of it has deceased rapidly.
Scotland has just reduced the drink drive alcohol limit even further to the point where you effectively can't have any alcohol all day if you're driving.
Given the mention of the Swedish rate between tests and positive results for breathalysers I imagine they have the same laws as the UK. The police in the UK can breathalyser anyone:
a) who has committed a moving traffic offence
b) involved in a road traffic collision
c) who the officer suspects of having alcohol (any) in their system
Most police forces require their officers to breath test if they have grounds, and while many police officers don't like dealing with traffic offences almost all of them will go out of their way to stop drink drivers. Given almost every driver commits a moving traffic offence every so often there is pretty much always grounds to test anyone (you don't have to actually prosecute for the offence, i.e. crossing a mini roundabout, just over the speed limit etc).
There is very much a social stigma. I remember being quite shocked when I lived in Canada a few years ago, and people would tell stories that would end "I don't even remember driving home that night". That just wouldn't be acceptable back home (or at least in equivalent social circles).
To get onto wild speculation and anecdote, I noticed that anti-drink drive adverts in the UK tend to focus on how horrific it would be to be responsible for killing someone, whereas in Canada they focused on what the penalties would be if you were caught.
Britain discurages driving, sweden makes roads safer. There both going to reduce fatalities, but britain ed:(approach) can't really make much progress without removing cars from the road where Sweden can make things safer and still use cars.
Yes it can - the roads here (as in most countries) are constantly being upgraded to improve capacity and safety. e.g. The dualling of the A9 (the main route to the North of Scotland) will hopefully make a huge difference to this notoriously dangerous road:
[NB At the moment the A9 switches from single lanes in either direction to dual carriageway and back again numerous times - people get mixed up as to whether they are on a single or dual carriageway with unfortunate results].
I'm sure there are examples throughout the UK of this kind of thing happening.
Granted, I did not mean to say Britain is not using the full set of tool to reduce road fatalities (Road Design, Signage, Licensing, Enforcement, etc.). Just that discouraging driving especially around London significantly reduces their fatalities, but it’s not really scalable.
>Building 1,500 kilometres (900 miles) of "2+1" roads—where each lane of traffic takes turns to use a middle lane for overtaking—is reckoned to have saved around 145 lives over the first decade of Vision Zero.
Basically translates to: "this substantial increase on costs (3 lanes instead of 2, +50%) is going to save the lives of 15 people per year". It is really praiseworthy for a country to just go for it and put people first. A human life is truly invaluable but very few countries actually account for them as such; on most other countries "15 dead" would simply just not be worth the investment.
Conversion to 2+1 isn't very expensive as the starting point is a 1.5+1.5 road without dividing fences, where overtaking takes place at least partly in the incoming lane. There is normally no need to widen the road to convert to 2+1. The lanes in the 2+1 is just narrower and it has less shoulder.
He spent a big chunk of that time trying to convince government agencies to build roads with pavement that had a better coefficient of friction. See for example
http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/roadway_dept/pavement/pavement_fr...
He estimated that they could reduce deaths considerably with more appropriate pavement.
In many cases, states refused to even allow pavement friction tests to occur, as they didn't want to be on the hook for paying for improvements if the tests showed poor friction. Also, requiring better friction would disallow certain road materials, which would adversely affect certain very large politically connected contractors.
In Europe, they take this much more seriously. The Germans have started using a concrete pavement that is both better for friction and is quiet.
It's interesting that if a government builds a substandard road that leads to people losing their lives, it doesn't seem to be a big deal, but if a car manufacturer produces a car that leads to a much smaller number of people dying, then it is.