A possible tie-in to this topic is this 1968 interview with Ralph Nader, discussing <i>Unsafe at Any Speed</i>, by Studs Terkel:<p><<a href="https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/ralph-nader-discusses-his-book-unsafe-any-speed" rel="nofollow">https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/ralph-nader-discusses-...</a>> (Audio, 32:31).<p>Direct audio link: <<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/wfmt-studs-terkel/published/11364.mp3" rel="nofollow">https://s3.amazonaws.com/wfmt-studs-terkel/published/11364.m...</a>> (MP3).<p>Nader covers a number of topics, including auto safety. Among the key points he makes is that (as of 1968), the contribution of the automobile itself to accidents was simply not <i>legible</i>, in the James C. Scott sense (<i>Seeing Like a State</i>), to the point that police accident report forms had no options for noting the contribution of the vehicle to the accident.<p>Built environment and highway design are another factor, of course, but the Nader interview came immediately to mind. I've listened to it several times, and it bears a few more listens as well.<p>(The Studs Terkel Archive itself is a true gem and recommended for those who enjoy podcasts.)
Something that stood out to me in the Discussion:<p>> Yet notably, speeding as a behavior surprisingly did not show any effect on fault outcomes in our models. The only effects related to driver behavior to decrease the likelihood of a pedestrian being found at fault were driver distraction and vehicle turning.<p>In other words: speeding by drivers is normalized to the extent that it doesn't appear to factor into the likelihood of being found at fault for an accident.<p>This is a distressing finding, but not a surprising one given the urban environment surveyed (pictures in Figure 2): wide, straight streets with ample spacing between lights mean that drivers drive at an "intuitive safe" speed, not the speed that is actually marked (much less the speed that is actually safe for pedestrians moving through crosswalks).
After several near death experiences in daylight crossing with a green light in a crosswalk from left turning cars and a city bus across four lane arterial roads, I now have a high intensity blinking flashlight that I aim at the driver.<p>I suspect that these drivers are NOT looking across the entire crosswalk and are focusing their attention on oncoming traffic.<p>In the case of North American city buses, the low mounted side mirrors block view of pedestrians and pedestrian fatalities are frequent because of this. In Europe the side mirrors are mounted from the roof allowing visibility of pedestrians.
> The conclusion argues that the designation of individual responsibility for crashes preempts collective responsibility, preventing wider adoption of design interventions as well as systemic changes to the processes that determine the built environment of US roadways.<p>I don't quite understand (based only on the abstract): Are they suggesting that we alter the data (re: who is responsible) to achieve a certain outcome? Do they want to 'prevent wider adoption of design interventions'?<p>I expect the answer to those questions is 'no', of course, but I don't understand their argument or conclusion.<p>@luu: as submitter, what did you see in this paper?
For the history in the US of how streets when from being 'mixed use' pre-automobiles to being basically only about automobiles see <i>Fighting Traffic</i> by Peter D. Norton:<p>> <i>Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers." In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.Peter D. Norton is Assistant Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia.</i><p>* <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2924825" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2924825</a><p>* <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/" rel="nofollow">https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/</a>
I was waiting for Chinese food and watched as a Left-Turn light went green for cars at the same time the Pedestrian crossing light turned "OK to cross".<p>The waiting car sped up, made it's left turn right into the crossing pedestrian. Pedestrian died in the hospital and I never ate my Chinese food.<p>How can that sequence of traffic lights even happen? For the pedestrian to get the OK, she must have hit the crossing button - system knows a person is there, why give cars the OK to turn right into her, leaving the responsibility on the driver to see and yield?
Private automobiles do not belong in cities. They are guests there. But they've invited themselves in and taken over the place.<p>It's disturbing how common it is for people's default assumption to be that it's the pedestrian/person on the bike/scooter/what have you 's fault that they got hit by a car. Rarely the driver's fault, and NEVER the urban designer's fault.<p>Most crashes are fundamentally caused by designs that encourage them.<p>We <i>know</i> drivers speed, we <i>know</i> they text while driving, we <i>know</i> signs and even enforcement doesn't work etc etc. The ONLY conclusion is it's the built environment that must disallow crashes and people being hit by cars from being possible in the first place.<p>Narrower, more winding streets, cobblestone, speed humps and other calming surfaces, more vegetation, raised crosswalks, dedicated and physically segregated (by bollards, concrete blocks etc) spaces for pedestrians, people on bikes etc etc.