Texting while driving, that's why.<p>From here I sit on the porch, I can see that about 2/3 of drivers text while driving.<p>I'm convinced that no amount of campaigning, punishment, or scare tactics will suffice to stop it.<p>It is just how driving is done nowadays, and everyone feels they can do it safely (but they can't).<p>There's no going back so if you're on a bike, or a pedestrian, watch out!<p>Driving is sacred in our societies. Whenever a driver kills a pedestrian or a cyclist in my town, there aren't even any charges laid 99% of the time.<p>Personally I think smartphones have been a net loss to society, for this and many other reasons.
Cars don’t kill pedestrians; drivers kill pedestrians. This is a case of lopsided stakes: pedestrians have everything to lose in case of car-on-ped collision, while drivers will merely have their day’s schedule derailed. The fundamental problem here is that drivers simply don’t care, and fail to operate their vehicles with due compassion towards vulnerable road users. An attentive driver who accelerates modestly and takes the time to become sure of his surroundings will not collide with anything: pedestrian, cyclist, another vehicle, or street furniture.<p>I believe strongly in robust mechanisms for keeping drivers responsible. Unfortunately, at least where I live, the justice system is completely impotent and unwilling to punish drivers for causing serious bodily harm or death. A system of heavy fines or imprisonment targeted at drivers would have resolved the inattention issue quicker than a typical driver can make a three-point turn. A year’s worth of income, or one year of imprisonment, for any car-on-ped collision would do the trick.
Almost daily HN covers some aspect of why everybody driving around in their own personal automobile is stupid. Cars kills and main people. Cars release particulate matter that's bad for our lungs. Cars promote sedentarism, that bad for our physical health. Car rubber washed off roads releases microplastics into the ocean. Cars are noisy, they cause congestion, and make our cities stressful, hostile and dysfunctional. Cars promote inequality. Cars and their associated sprawl cost us insane amounts of money. Cars are destroying the planet.<p>There are reams of research to back this stuff up. There were massive reams of research to back it up 40 years ago. There are demonstrably better ways to do this. Why are we so fucking stupid?
> And more Americans than ever are zipping around in SUVs and pickup trucks, which, thanks to their height, weight and shape are between two and three times more likely to kill people they hit.<p>It’s not such a mystery then.
For good reasons, parents thoroughly indoctrinate small children with the idea that it's their job to keep out of the way of cars; if they step into the road they're being Very Naughty Indeed, and cars are an uncaring force of nature that can't be expected to slow or keep out of the way.<p>It's a shame there isn't an equally strong indoctrination campaign in the other direction when those same children become old enough to drive, to say that it's their job not to hit people under any circumstances.
Somewhat related, and infuriating, news that this reminded me of:<p>US Diplomat's wife flees the UK and hides behind diplomatic immunity after killing 19 year old in a head on collision: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ddm5ia/us_diplomats_wife_flees_the_uk_and_hides_behind/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ddm5ia/us_diplom...</a>
I agree that texting while driving is a key part of it, no doubt.<p>But, I’d propose another one, too. New aerodynamic designs locate the A pillars in a place in most cars that eliminates huge swaths of my peripheral vision. Backup cameras also make up for increasingly awful side vision and rear vision.<p>I drive an 1990s land cruiser a few weeks ago and the visibility was amazing. You didn’t need cameras because the hood was low, the windshield was flat and upright and the side windows weren’t tinted black. Old land rovers and pickups were the same.
I am quiet driver. I have horror stories every single day with pedestrians who cross the street in the wrong spots, giving you 0 secs to react. I cannot tell how many guys could I be killed them because they've crossed the street texting and using headphones. Pedestrians go really in distracted mode, that's why when I approach some areas, I go really paranoid and try to foresee anything.
There was an interesting comment on this topic by gok two days ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21153030" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21153030</a><p>It cites a study [0] claiming almost all of additional pedestrian deaths happen at night, while daytime fatalities haven't increased much.<p>[0] - <a href="https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2019-02/FINAL_Pedestrians19.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2019-02/FINAL_Pedes...</a>
I think that vehicle designs have evolved in a couple ways over the last 15 years in negative ways:<p>1. More Vertical space on the front of the vehicle - making it harder to see pedestrians right in front of you, this is particularly the case for large trucks and SUV's.<p>2. Reduced greenhouses in modern cars (all the windows are smaller, meaning its harder to see anything around you)<p>3. Vehicles in general are taller, higher and wider in the front and rear.<p>There are also other human factors in play, like more distracted driving from smart phones, and more complex infotainment systems in the vehicle.
> The post-crash investigation indicated that she had probably been watching the singing contest The Voice on her phone.<p>It's not just the drivers that are being distracted by their phones - pedestrians are as well. Every time I drive downtown, I'm having to make allowances for people with a total lack of situational awareness because they're walking around heads-down.<p>I'm not singling out the pedestrians - the drivers are equally at fault. Like the guy in the GL450 on I-85 last night who couldn't stay in his lane at 70mph because he was checking his phone.
Pedestrians are very distracted (texting/phone/music) and drivers are very distracted (texting/phone/music). I’m actually amazed that I see people walk right into the street while looking at their phones <i>the entire time</i>, with either misplaced trust in their surroundings or dangerous obliviousness.<p>Worse, drivers “seem” a lot angrier in recent years, and much more impatient. They’re likely to just go through, crosswalks be damned, missing people by a hair.
So, it's an important problem, but the first thing I thought was, "are people walking more or less than they did 20 years ago?" Certainly where I live, there are more cyclists than there were 20 years ago, and while I could believe that pedestrianism does not necessarily go up or down in tandem with cycling, I cannot believe it has stayed exactly the same. Do we walk to places more than 20 years ago (perhaps because more people are unable to afford a car, as wealth inequality grows)? Or do we walk less, such that the increase in pedestrian deaths is even worse than this article suggests, indicating a downward spiral in which people walk less because it seems too dangerous, which makes drivers less aware that there are pedestrians to look out for, which makes people walk even less? This article doesn't say. It seems a pretty fundamental point to be leaving out of a discussion of pedestrian death rates. They don't even mention whether these rates represent an increase in per capita deaths, or just reflect population increases. Without turning pedestrian death rates into per-person-per-mile-walked kind of rates, I don't see how you can draw many conclusions at all.
Design of cars can be as much a safety issue as design of roads. The Honda Civic I drive will auto-play whatever audio my phone was last playing when it syncs via Bluetooth. It does so inconsistently, and somewhere between 30 seconds and 2 minutes after successfully syncing.<p>Talk about a sudden and needless distraction. What engineer thought this was a good idea?<p>I've taken to using a 5mm cord to connect my phone to the car speakers so <i>I can control what plays and when it plays</i>. Thankfully my phone still has a 5mm jack.<p>Trying to anticipate what the user wants is obnoxious, but it becomes dangerous when the computer doing so is installed in a heavy metal box with an engine and the ability to move fast.
As a thought experiment, imagine that you could design a city from the ground up and try to invent a transportation network that doesn't have pedestrians and cars next to each other.<p>- - - -<p>I imagine you could have five separate interconnected networks:<p><pre><code> 1 Pedestrians
2 bicycles
3 personal cars
4 trucks and buses
5 light rail and inter-urban trains
</code></pre>
Add in e.g. Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language (like "Country City Fingers), and I think you would really have something.
Cars aren't killing people though, it's the drivers of those cars. Such an odd headline.<p>Better title: "Why are drivers killing more pedestrians?"
Normally I'm the first to blame suburban sprawl for unsafe roads - an environment where you have to drive everywhere all the time breeds complacency...<p>however,<p>The fact that we're talking about decidedly non-suburban Europe, and that 2010 is identified as the local minimum, pretty strongly implies that the rise of smartphones and other touchscreen-based devices is the culprit.
I don’t drive but I was referred this app by a friend called OnMyWay [0]. The premise is they pay you to drive and put the phone down.<p>[0] <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/onmyway-drive-safe-get-paid/id1436132657" rel="nofollow">https://apps.apple.com/us/app/onmyway-drive-safe-get-paid/id...</a>
I'm really disappointed to see all the one word or low effort answers here. It looks like most people didn't bother to read the article and are instead just trying to post their anecdotal responses to the title. Perhaps it's the title as a question which causes such poor responses.
Visibility, visibility, visibility.<p>All new cars, trucks, etc. are tall with very narrow windows for better collision safety. Not to mention American's latest obsession with hideous "cross-overs." As a result, its much harder to see in front of you and the extra clearance means you actually suck someone underneath the car instead of over.<p>Also, is it just me or are cars just plain ugly these days (yuck)<p><a href="https://www.motortrend.com/cars/land-rover/range-rover-evoque/2017/2017-range-rover-evoque-convertible-first-test-review/" rel="nofollow">https://www.motortrend.com/cars/land-rover/range-rover-evoqu...</a><p><a href="https://www.diariomotor.com/2010/05/09/el-morris-mini-minor-original-frente-al-mini-countryman-david-y-goliat/" rel="nofollow">https://www.diariomotor.com/2010/05/09/el-morris-mini-minor-...</a>
This must be the fourth or fifth article/discussion against cars that I've seen on HN in the last couple days, and the second on the front page right now. Is someone trying to push something here?
Our current vehicle are great for many things and the improvements to them have increased safety and reduced deaths of occupants, blah blah blah.<p>Let's regulate these death machines to roads where they can be death machines, like highways, in the city you switch to driving an open air buggy whose seat belt is there to help you not slide out of a slippery plastic seat.
Am easy start here in NYC - demand that serial driving offenders lose their licenses and face serious penalties if they violate than ban. If you systematically run red lights in this city you should face consequences. Until that happens a subset of awful people who don’t care will be deadly threats.
Conjecture: the obsession with "safety" cams has led to a massive decrease in road policing by officers and a corresponding decline in the correction of poor and unsafe driving.
I'm surprised that hardly anyone mentions pedestrians that cross roads without a care in the world. Pedestrians wearing earphones or just not paying attention. Easy to blame vehicles but there are multiple factors.
Good grief. Another tired, lengthy article attacking cars. Sorry but cars provide a lot of benefits, and are well worth the trade-offs in deaths. If you want to avoid deaths entirely, stay in your house. And even that might not keep you fully safe. But vehicle-related deaths are not even in the top 10 causes of unnatural death in the US, and making such a big deal out of it without considering the positives is absurd.<p>Cars are fast, and in areas that are not ultra high-density, they save time relative to ANY alternative (walking, biking, buses, trains) and therefore drastically improve your quality of life. They don't require you to wait on someone else's schedule, especially given the often inconsistent timing of buses. They don't require you to risk sitting down on dirty seats (6-year-old girl stabbed by uncapped needle on bus: <a href="https://metro.co.uk/2019/06/08/girl-6-injected-needle-hidden-two-bus-seats-9873386/" rel="nofollow">https://metro.co.uk/2019/06/08/girl-6-injected-needle-hidden...</a>). They don't require you to expose yourself to violence (40 to 60 teens rob BART train: <a href="https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/BART-takeover-robbery-50-to-60-teens-swarm-11094745.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/BART-takeover-robbery-5...</a>). They let you travel all over the land, including away from cities, and therefore give you a greater degree of freedom than the reach of fixed rails or transit systems that are limited to cities.<p>Yes cars can cause deaths. So do a lot of other things. But the rate of vehicle-caused injuries/deaths has been dropping sharply since the 80s (see CDC data). It will continue to drop as backup cameras, lane departure prevention, collision detection, collision avoidance, and other assistance features become ubiquitous or required. Nothing is ever perfect, and this is the fundamental reason why efforts like Vision Zero are flawed. "Zero deaths" is not the goal, and generally any such absolute goal is unrealistic.<p>We get massive benefits from fast, private point-to-point transport. Let's not forget that and work to retain those benefits, instead of damaging the benefits of vehicles with low speed limits and other 'road diet' suggestions.
Answers to the title question:<p>* Transition away from physical controls to touchscreen controls in new cars<p>* American's love affair with the automatic transmission<p>* Car-unfriendly "progressive" movements and the return of population towards city centers<p>It seems like people have very little actual interest in making things better but only interest in blaming something they have a built-in bias against or promoting a technology they find interesting.<p>The article completely failed to mention manual transmissions in America and the rest of the world while wondering loudly why it is so different here and the prevalence of touch-screens not just on phones in cars. Automatics are much more popular in the US and having a manual transmission forces you to pay much more attention to driving and simply occupies both hands more often especially inside cities.<p>One thing emphasized way too little is the responsibility of the pedestrian for not getting hit – the feeling of entitlement to right of way leading to people just not paying attention to cars or expecting behavior instead of watching for it.<p>I grew up around farm machinery often with little visibility and it teaches you to pay attention to what is going on around you a lot more. Not just in a way of being ready to react because there are circumstances where reacting is impossible, but in knowing what movements a machine is capable of and what the operator intends to do as well as if the operator knows you are there at all.<p>This is one of the primary reasons I think robot cars will go absolutely nowhere. It is impossible to come up with a theory of mind for a robotic car. As a pedestrian all you usually need to know the intentions of a driver (or vice versa) are an instant of eye contact. We are evolved to use tiny signals to decide intent and many people are barely aware of this. That kind of information just can't be reliably exchanged with a machine.<p>And people just aren't expecting the kinds of things which will happen when people start to believe robots with super fast reaction times will do anything not to hit pedestrians. Pedestrians will start running into the street without a care (or as a cheap thrill)<p>The article missed a lot and spent too much time on the wrong topics.