We will continue to have
pedestrian collisions until we start blaming those actually at fault: the politicians and engineers who design and build dangerous transit and automotive systems.
This approach is rarely useful in safety engineering.
Sure, if someone is grossly negligent like driving drunk, then we can blame the individual, but usually the best way to improve safety is to look at the whole sequence that led up to the incident, and that requires cooperation from all parties rather than arse-covering.
Why is it with rail and plane accidents that we investigate every safety incident, no matter how minor, no matter if there are no injuries or property damage? Yet with car travel, often we won't even look into a road design (or car design) unless there have been multiple fatalities in a short space of time. We just assign some blame, fine or incarcerate someone, and don't bother investigating it any further.
This seems like such an obviously wrong way to improve road safety.
Depends on your goal. If you want to reduce injuries and fatalities, you recognize that there are multiple contributing factors and you try to address all of them if you can.
Drivers are human, we cannot drive safely when mixing with pedestrians or a lot of other cars.
It isn't possible. Therefore if we are to drive the road environment needs to support it, which means keeping pedestrians away, or speed limits of 10mph when we must mix. To give us enough space Des Moines needs to expand to 20 lane freeways (that is Houston levels of roads in a city 1/3 the population).
You can't blame drivers and get anything done as humans are not capable of getting better.
pklausler|3 years ago
cameronh90|3 years ago
Sure, if someone is grossly negligent like driving drunk, then we can blame the individual, but usually the best way to improve safety is to look at the whole sequence that led up to the incident, and that requires cooperation from all parties rather than arse-covering.
Why is it with rail and plane accidents that we investigate every safety incident, no matter how minor, no matter if there are no injuries or property damage? Yet with car travel, often we won't even look into a road design (or car design) unless there have been multiple fatalities in a short space of time. We just assign some blame, fine or incarcerate someone, and don't bother investigating it any further.
This seems like such an obviously wrong way to improve road safety.
rootusrootus|3 years ago
bluGill|3 years ago
It isn't possible. Therefore if we are to drive the road environment needs to support it, which means keeping pedestrians away, or speed limits of 10mph when we must mix. To give us enough space Des Moines needs to expand to 20 lane freeways (that is Houston levels of roads in a city 1/3 the population).
You can't blame drivers and get anything done as humans are not capable of getting better.