The latest battleground in language shaping culture
October 4, 2015 7:38 PM   Subscribe

His daughter died as a result of a car "accident". He and others argue that they should be called "crashes". An academic exercise, or the latest battle in changing the way people think about car culture?
posted by Automocar (232 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
[Sergeant Angel has told Danny Butterman that Official Vocabulary no longer refers to car crashes as accidents: They are now called collisions]

Danny Butterman: Hey, why can't we say "accident," again?
Nicholas Angel: Because "accident" implies there's nobody to blame.

posted by Orange Pamplemousse at 7:44 PM on October 4, 2015 [60 favorites]


It's more than semantics. But he says:

When we say “accident,” we are basically throwing up our hands and saying that the deaths of children like Allison are inevitable, something no one is responsible for, like bad weather.

And I disagree. He brings in a criteria of "preventability": preventability doesn't make something not an accident. In risk management, we deal with preventable accidents all the time. Without consulting legal guidance, it seems to me that intentionality is what makes the difference between an accident and, well, intentional vehicular manslaughter. There are many preventability factors that could make that accident less likely to occur, but not addressing them still doesn't make the accident intentional.
posted by Miko at 7:45 PM on October 4, 2015 [53 favorites]


i agree with the premise. I am down with calling them crashes and murders and deaths and whatever reality-based language is needed to shift the argument away from "the car is might therefore is right" towards "cars are a scourge on our landscape that must be eliminated"
posted by Annika Cicada at 7:46 PM on October 4, 2015 [31 favorites]


From the shuttered Grid Chicago blog*: "They're not accidents, and we don't have robotic cars." Transportation writer Steve Vance has been very vocal about calling out reporting that refers to cars as sentient beings that drive around crashing into pedestrians, bicyclists, and each other, with no reference to the fact that a human being made the decisions behind the collision.

*Disclaimer: I've done some freelance work for the Grid Chicago founders' new project, Streetsblog Chicago.
posted by Juliet Banana at 7:47 PM on October 4, 2015 [9 favorites]


"I didn't mean to kill a person" is not the definition of "accident" if you were being a bad driver and unaware of yourself being so.
posted by Annika Cicada at 7:48 PM on October 4, 2015 [7 favorites]


I think that while your assessment of the technical language is correct, Miko, there's a strong element of 'accidents happen' in the popular understanding of the word 'accident' so that a vocabulary switch might actually be helpful in this instance. I think a lot of people read 'accident' and see 'thing that couldn't be helped' or 'thing that just happened' rather than 'thing that could have and should have been avoided'. It may be possible to shift the understanding of 'accident' rather than the word we use to describe people hitting things with their cars, but I suspect the latter is easier.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:49 PM on October 4, 2015 [21 favorites]


I am glad to learn about Vision Zero.

I don't really disagree with the idea that people need to be held accountable for their shitty driving, but I think the language argument is not an important element of this. It seems to me that even very bad drivers do not set out with the intention to kill anyone. Lack of intention is, in fact, part of the definition of "accident."
posted by Miko at 7:50 PM on October 4, 2015 [8 favorites]


I am solidly in favor of getting rid of the automatic assumption that a car crash is always an accident. Sometimes they are, but there is often negligence, intentional recklessness, or plain old inattentiveness to blame.

Granted, as humans, we are simply not capable of operating our two ton death machines with perfect care and attentiveness at all times. I have yet to be involved in a crash, but there have been a few occasions in my driving career where that was solely due to other drivers paying attention when my attention lapsed or the one occasion I simply looked and did not see.

This is why I fully welcome our fully autonomous driving robot overlords. Even if they occasionally fuck up, it will be an order of magnitude or more less than we humans do, with the attendant decline in injuries and fatalities, even if the technology does not improve one iota beyond today's state of the art.
posted by wierdo at 7:51 PM on October 4, 2015 [7 favorites]


See also: "The car went out of control." vs. "I lost control of the car."
posted by Thorzdad at 7:52 PM on October 4, 2015 [9 favorites]


There are no accidents. If you are controlling a vehicle and have enough information to not kill anyone or strike any objects, you bear responsibility if you do. Call it what it is; don't call it an accident.
Failure to maintain equipment; the same.
Choosing to drive when you ought not; the same.
posted by Alter Cocker at 7:54 PM on October 4, 2015 [9 favorites]


When we say “accident,” we are basically throwing up our hands and saying that the deaths of children like Allison are inevitable, something no one is responsible for, like bad weather.

And I disagree. He brings in a criteria of "preventability": preventability doesn't make something not an accident. In risk management, we deal with preventable accidents all the time. Without consulting legal guidance, it seems to me that intentionality is what makes the difference between an accident and, well, intentional vehicular manslaughter. There are many preventability factors that could make that accident less likely to occur, but not addressing them still doesn't make the accident intentional.


I like to think of driving as probabilistic murder but then I worked as an automotive lines insurance analyst. Once I had done the math I decided I wasn't up for rolling the dice with other people's lives on the table and have not driven in almost twenty years now.
posted by srboisvert at 7:56 PM on October 4, 2015 [67 favorites]


I had honestly thought the bit in Hot Fuzz was reflective of an already-changing vocabulary; I've used "crash" or "collision" ever since.

And I think the point made in Hot Fuzz was that even if the person more responsible for the event didn't mean to hurt anybody, to the victim(s) and their loved ones that's hardly useful or comforting, and sets them apart from people who were the victim(s) of malicious or deliberate behavior as if those injuries are worse simply because of intent.
posted by Lyn Never at 7:56 PM on October 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


An academic exercise, or the latest battle in changing the way people think about car culture?

UMD mourns staff member killed while bicycling in Hermantown
According to the news release, the 2003 Chevrolet Tahoe was southbound on Lavaque Road, crossed over the centerline into the northbound lane and struck Brill.
...
In an interview with the News Tribune, Deputy Chief Shawn Padden of the Hermantown Police Department described a confounding crash scene.

“I don’t know what to charge this guy with — if anything,” Padden said.
After a tragic incident, teachers emphasize bicycle safety
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:57 PM on October 4, 2015 [8 favorites]


At work we've had a 20-year campaign to use the word "incident" instead, for basically the reasons stated in the article. By definition, nobody's responsible for an "accident", and that's completely counter to the safety culture we want in our organization. We take the position that there's no such thing as an accident, first because it removes responsibility from the people involved, and second because we are responsible for investigating and learning from incidents we failed to prevent. Unless we do those things we're essentially throwing our hands up and saying, "Nothing we could have done", which is unacceptable when people's lives are at risk, as the article shows. This is a problem for society as well, unless we want companies and drivers to be able to say, "Hey, it was an accident! Nothing we could have done."
posted by sneebler at 7:57 PM on October 4, 2015 [11 favorites]


Old news here, our state owned insurance monopoly has been referring to car "accidents" as crashes for decades. ICBC here in British Columbia Canada BTW
posted by Zedcaster at 7:58 PM on October 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


This is something that has been going on for a while. The NYPD changed how it refers to collisions over two years ago.


San Francisco did as well

It is absurd that we continue to allow drivers to impatiently and distractedly drive their vehicle into other road users and even kill them and get off without penalty by saying "oops".

The Los Angeles district attorney recently let two different drivers who killed people off without charges. One drove into the back of a cyclist in a bike lane while using a work device (he was a sheriff's deputy) and the other rear ended a stopped car and pushed it into oncoming traffic.

If you want to kill someone in the USA, hit them with your car while sober and then stick around for the authorities. The most you receive is a slap on the wrist.
posted by GregorWill at 8:00 PM on October 4, 2015 [25 favorites]


“I don’t know what to charge this guy with — if anything,” Padden said.

How about vehicular manslaughter?
posted by Alter Cocker at 8:01 PM on October 4, 2015 [20 favorites]


I believe the second definition of Miko's link applies to law, which to me, invalidates Miko's assertion that accidents are due to lack of intention. I am willing to be wrong though.

IMO the injured party should be allowed consideration as to what determines the definition of an accident, but since cars are like, granted status over everything else besides, what, a train, I suppose I'm fighting against the grain of popular will.
posted by Annika Cicada at 8:01 PM on October 4, 2015


I heard the crash on the highway, but I didn't hear nobody pray.
posted by ackptui at 8:03 PM on October 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


Given how many, perhaps most drivers ignore many well-proven measures (drive for the conditions, allow reasonable distances, actually use turn signals) and that many drivers are ignorant or flat-out selfish... I think that 'accident' is an euphemism we could dispense with here.

The majority of daily auto collisions/misadventures/upsets are mistakes, basically, and perhaps if we started underscoring this more, we could affect behaviour...?

sneebler covers this better.

In the coming months, sit back and watch how this rich guy's lawyer is going to wring hands and lament about another terrible 'accident' as he gets his wealthy client off the hook.
posted by Artful Codger at 8:06 PM on October 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


"I didn't mean to kill a person" is not the definition of "accident" if you were being a bad driver and unaware of yourself being so.

We seem to have different definitions of 'accident' - which I think of as "unintentional thing that occurred" (eg 'a happy accident').

That said, call them collisions if they're collisions and that makes people think more about shifting tons of metal around while chatting on the phone or whatever. I'd consider "being a bad driver and unaware of yourself being so" to be negligence, so maybe 'vehicular negligence' - though of course that word has significant legal baggage.
posted by pompomtom at 8:11 PM on October 4, 2015 [6 favorites]


"The road system needs to keep us moving. But it must also be designed to protect us at every turn." This is from the Vision Zero website referenced earlier. We should hold drivers responsible for their actions and argue for everyone to be a better driver, but let's not overlook Vision Zero's argument for systemic change. American communities are car-centric to a dangerous degree. Vision Zero argues for radical changes to laws and street designs to protect us even from bad drivers. Many European communities do not hesitate to inconvenience even law-abiding, competent drivers in the name of pedestrian and bicyclist safety.
posted by smrtsch at 8:13 PM on October 4, 2015 [17 favorites]


I think I am saying the same thing you are, pompomtom? I agree with you, if that helps clarify my comment any?
posted by Annika Cicada at 8:14 PM on October 4, 2015


The etymology of the words accident, incident, disaster, and catastrophe all relate to the stars.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 8:14 PM on October 4, 2015 [25 favorites]


If you are controlling a vehicle and have enough information to not kill anyone or strike any objects

Well, that's assuming a lot: Information, and experience, and skill. Ultimately, in our society we let people operate these things with a pretty low level of skills qualification and almost total lack of enforcement. I'm hesitant to blame individuals for societal failures.

Most people don't set out with a plan or willingness to kill another person.
posted by Miko at 8:16 PM on October 4, 2015 [9 favorites]


Greg Nog on Twitter:
"so what did you do before self-driving cars?"
"we just drove 'em ourselves!"
"wow, no one died that way?"
"oh no, millions of people died"
posted by schmod at 8:19 PM on October 4, 2015 [62 favorites]


car accident, or car intentional?
posted by indubitable at 8:21 PM on October 4, 2015


Miko: in our society we let people operate these things with a pretty low level of skills qualification and almost total lack of enforcement.

I was just going to add that we have to follow up by identifying the real cause of incidents, and then correct those problems, without blaming individuals for societal problems, if possible. IMO you're dead right about two major causes of road incidents.
posted by sneebler at 8:25 PM on October 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Tree falling across the road and onto your car while driving? Accident.

Having a sudden medical emergency while driving, causing you to crash? Accident.

Rear-ending someone because you weren't paying attention to the flow of traffic? Not an accident.

Crashing into an object, person, or oncoming vehicle because you were fucking around on your phone? Not an accident.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:25 PM on October 4, 2015 [43 favorites]


Hmm.

I think we can find different ways to assign and consider responsibility without entirely doing away with the word "accident," but I might be a little sensitive about this.

At the beginning of August, I broke my right arm in a scooter accident - I snapped the olecranon process off my ulna. I broke my elbow off. I knew conditions were not ideal; it had just started to rain, so the surface of the road was slick; I had also looked ahead and had seen seams, holes, and other imperfections to avoid.
And I might have made a mistake trying to steer out of the skid, a miscalculation of balance or angle made in that sick fraction of a second that seems to last forever when you know you are falling but you do not know what is going to happen to you.

While I was waiting at home for someone to bring me to the ER, trying to distract myself from the sickening pain and uniquely disgusting sensation of the bones in my forearm no longer being connected properly, I made the dire mistake of posting what had happened on Facebook.

When I said I had broken my arm in an accident, one person smugged, "There are no accidents."

To someone who had just been injured in an accident.

We are not friends.
posted by louche mustachio at 8:26 PM on October 4, 2015 [27 favorites]


I don't see how you get that, Annika Cicada. To combine the two parts:

"1. an undesirable or unfortunate happening that occurs unintentionally [... 2. ... ] resulting in injury that is in no way the fault of the injured person for which compensation or indemnity is legally sought."

So the two components of the legal definition are that (a) it's unintentional on the part of the perpetrator, and (b) it's not the fault of the victim.

So I actually do agree with Miko that there's no misuse of the word "accident" and I'm not sure about the helpfulness of redefining accident to mean something (inevitable, lack of guilt) that it doesn't, and then picking another term that means what "accident" already means stricto sensu. Lawyers (of which I am not one) have a pretty nuanced vocabulary for describing all kinds of gradations along this spectrum.

Still, it feels a little icky to debate semantics, and I wish the emphasis were more on the matter of being willing to hold people to higher standards of civil and criminal liability for the preventable accidents they do cause. I mean, that there even had to be some kind of push to get a fatal collision with a pedestrian with the right of way classified as a misdemeanor and not just a ticketing offense, when something much more innocuous like jaywalking is already considered a misdemeanor in many jurisdictions...is a bit mind boggling.
posted by drlith at 8:27 PM on October 4, 2015 [6 favorites]


Be careful what you ask for. This sounds like a great idea if you've been hit by another car. It doesn't sound so great if, because of some microsecond mistake, you were at fault. Do you want the police and the insurance company to treat you as a criminal?

(If someone was drinking or whatever, throw the book at 'em, but we already have those laws.)

In the 60s, many states moved to no-fault insurance in an attempt to discourage lawsuits. From a bit of Googling, it appears that they succeeded in this, but encouraged an offsetting rise in health claims. Still, if the idea is to increase people's responsibility, that's going to lead to a lot of litigation.
posted by zompist at 8:31 PM on October 4, 2015 [4 favorites]


Yeah, I think that's where I part ways with this particular attack. Like, I get that driving is incredibly risky and that our commitment to it agrees that a certain number of people will be maimed or perish every year. And I am all for throwing the book at people who fucked up due to inattention or negligence (I live in the Boston area; in the past five years I've been hit twice, both times a passenger-side T-Bone by someone trying to cross my lane of traffic (which had right of way) without paying attention. Of course I think they're liable, and dangerous to boot.). But I think it's not a matter of language choice but of the enforcements and controls we could put around the act that we currently neglect to do.

I don't know how much all of you drive. I drive a lot, and I do know that not every risky incident I've had while driving was a factor of my own negligence (copping to the fact that some were). I mean, as with any system, systems analysis will reveal the presence - and danger - of information gaps; with driving, they're things like air temperature was above freezing, road looked dry yet road was icy; ambiguously signed interchange did not indicate that turn could only occur from a certain lane; sun glare obscured highway signage/stop sign/stalled vehicle; etc). And then there are mechanical failures and road conditions risks. It's ideal to say that every driver should know and be aware of all these risks, but in practice, that is not a realistic goal. Our current standards for drivers are somewhat less than for, say, pilots. Then, too, there's a skills gap, given that most driving is not under conditions that test skill: It's very easy to overcorrect for a perceived error due to lack of experience with something like narrowed roadways from construction or threats in the road, like potholes or debris. It's very easy to miscommunicate with a driver entering a merge or attempting to cross oncoming traffic for a left turn. I'm not comfortable ascribing these information gaps, mechanical, conditions, and communications failures to "driver intention."

I think we can find different ways to assign and consider responsibility without entirely doing away with the word "accident,"

That's basically my view. Let's look at the control points and the results of throttling them up or down, not quibble about language.
posted by Miko at 8:34 PM on October 4, 2015 [18 favorites]


How about vehicular manslaughter?
I don't even like the term 'manslaughter'... it implies more than one death, and what, it only happens to males? And if you split the word up at the end of a line wrong, it's mans-laughter.

For automotive 'mishaps' (no, I don't like that term either), I divide them into three categories...
if it's between two cars, "collided",
it it's with a stationary object, "crashed",
if it's with a human person walking or on a bicycle or smaller device, "run over" (even if the victim is thrown a distance from where they got hit).
Then again, just "hit" is reasonable in most circumstances.

As a certain member of a famous political family would say, "Stuff happens".
Maybe "Hit Happens".
posted by oneswellfoop at 8:37 PM on October 4, 2015


I was advised by a lawyer before a deposition to say "when the cars came into contact" in place of the more common "when the accident happened" - ever since I have changed the way I refer to car collisions/incidents.
posted by djseafood at 8:38 PM on October 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


if it's between two cars, "collided"

I used to work at a newspaper where one of my jobs was filing overnight police accident reports, and I was schooled pretty seriously to use "collided with" in almost every accident report, because anything we wrote in the paper could be used to impute fault in court - which, of course, was not our job. We had to render the report as completely neutral as possible, just the facts, ma'am. Even when it was totally clear that one driver was at fault - like, in the opposite lane, drunk, and a head-on collision - we would just say "a Chevrolet Suburban heading south in the northbound lane collided head-on with a Dodge Omni heading north in the northbound lane," and leave those presumably closer to the situation to make the ultimate call regarding fault.
posted by Miko at 8:44 PM on October 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


To those wringing their hands that calling a car crushing a three-year girl to death something other than an accident might make them feel weird when they're driving: exactly.
posted by fitnr at 8:45 PM on October 4, 2015 [30 favorites]


It doesn't sound so great if, because of some microsecond mistake, you were at fault. Do you want the police and the insurance company to treat you as a criminal?

A four year old was struck and killed while in a crosswalk near my home.

The driver in control of the vehicle was not charged or cited.

I am totally fine with treating a driver who fails to control a vehicle as a criminal, yes.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:48 PM on October 4, 2015 [25 favorites]


Another aspect of this that drives me nuts is how when bad things happen on the road, intent or agency is often ascribed to the vehicle instead of the driver of the vehicle. Like, "The truck cut off the bicyclist while making a right turn..." as if these vehicles just sometimes do stuff and whaddaya gonna do, these things happen. Sometimes I wish that our awesome (insane) laws about asset forfeiture could be applied in these situations. Like hey, the truck cut off the bicyclist and killed her? Then you better charge the truck with homicide. It should be an easy case for the state to win, since as we have seen, inanimate objects don't have civil rights. At least the cops could spare us from all these murderous vehicles we have prowling the streets.
posted by rustcrumb at 8:55 PM on October 4, 2015 [7 favorites]


As a cyclist, ugh, YES.

I've long thought the best way to murder someone in a pre-meditated fashion is to figure out their daily route and just run them over in a crosswalk.

You'll literally face less penalty than if you had sicked a dog on them, despite the fact that you pushed in the gas pedal and steered towards them.

So many people I know have been run over by cars. Assaulted, really. I know a couple people who died even.

I don't know of anyone driving, in any of those stories, who ever saw real jail time or consequences. My mom had brain damage and serious injuries and it was a "civil thing" that ended up being lawsuits and insurance companies jousting.

"Oops" works. And it disgusts me.
posted by emptythought at 8:57 PM on October 4, 2015 [16 favorites]


Ultimately, in our society we let people operate these things with a pretty low level of skills qualification and almost total lack of enforcement. I'm hesitant to blame individuals for societal failures.

I've had a license for more than two decades and in that time have driven in at least eight countries. In that entire time, I've gone through one driving test for a car (at 16) and a second practical test for my motorcycle endorsement (at about 19). Since then I think I've had to retake a written test two or three times when moving between states. I could be the world's worst driver and it would have no impact since the US licensing system is not designed to test for skills or ability.

There are a lot of people who obviously shouldn't be driving. I see them on the highway and I see them in some questions and comments here, but given our current system they are totally legal and are unlikely to face any consequences if they eventually mess up and hit someone.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:58 PM on October 4, 2015 [5 favorites]


This sounds like a great idea if you've been hit by another car. It doesn't sound so great if, because of some microsecond mistake, you were at fault. Do you want the police and the insurance company to treat you as a criminal?

Yes. In a heartbeat.
Given that they kill roughly the same amount of people in the US, it's been a useful comparison lately, but if I accidentally shot someone, I would hope that it wouldn't just be shrugged off as "Well, accidents happen. Nothing anybody could've done to predict it. I mean, who hasn't been a microsecond mistake away from shooting someone?".
posted by CrystalDave at 8:59 PM on October 4, 2015 [7 favorites]


I could be the world's worst driver and it would have no impact since the US licensing system is not designed to test for skills or ability.

Right...I think that strengthening the testing and enforcement systems would do a lot more to protect three-year-olds, and everyone else, than changing the language to make us "feel weird" would.

Like, at a minimum, qualifying road test every year to keep your license current. Problem? That would cost a lot of money, only a fraction of that offset by fees.
posted by Miko at 9:00 PM on October 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


I am totally fine with treating a driver who fails to control a vehicle as a criminal, yes.

That sort of thing really should depend on the facts of the case, and I'm frankly not a fan of the kind of thinking that automatically equates events ending in tragedy with criminality, because we have too many "criminals" already.

This also does have seem to have a undercurrent of bikers vs. drivers, round MCLXIV.
posted by cosmic.osmo at 9:02 PM on October 4, 2015 [21 favorites]


It took me a long time to admit to myself that I was not a good driver. I had been in a number of "accidents" but I'd always told myself they could happen to anyone. It took my partner at the time pointing out how no, not everybody had my experiences, and here were all the ways I fucked up when driving for me to swallow that I'd been pretending for a long time that those accidents just happened, rather than being a direct result of my inattentiveness.

I wonder how many other people out there are like me? Telling themselves it could happen to anyone? They were just changing that radio station, or checked their phone once, or were looking at something else . . .

Being a good driver is more difficult than we give it credit for. Perhaps because we put teenagers behind the wheel of giant metal death-machines after a few weekends of driving school and think it's all OK.

It doesn't sound so great if, because of some microsecond mistake, you were at fault. Do you want the police and the insurance company to treat you as a criminal?

Yes. If I fucking kill someone because I was looking at a cloud or not thinking about where I was turning I should face consequences. If I decide to take the responsibility of driving a giant metal death-machine, then I better be fucking on-point at all times to make sure my death-machine doesn't actually kill anyone. And if I'm uncomfortable with facing consequences if I do, then I should drastically work on my driving skills or reconsider driving altogether.

This is no different than gun ownership, save that guns are specifically designed for killing things whereas cars just happen to be very good at it. If your gun goes off and kills someone, you need to face criminal charges for it--why wasn't it locked up? Why was it pointed at someone in the first place? Why didn't you know if it was loaded or not? Cars are the same way. It takes one mistake, one thoughtless mistake, and then someone else is fucked forever.
posted by Anonymous at 9:11 PM on October 4, 2015


Except that sometimes accidents do happen. Drivers lose concentration at exactly the wrong second, pedestrians appear too soon to react, minor errors by three drivers add up into one major collision.

Once we have reliable self-driving cars, I'll be the first to advocate for replacing all human drivers. But until then, while we have a culture of driving to work and getting a license at sixteen, I don't like the idea of telling people, "It's important to drive a car! But if you have an accident crash, you'll be morally+legally+financially responsible." The reasonable response to that is "Well then, I shouldn't drive at all," which, while not exactly wrong, is not yet possible.
posted by Rangi at 9:11 PM on October 4, 2015 [20 favorites]


On the criminality question, I feel we have an obligation to fully implement the physical and design modifications that we know will make roads safer first, and only then start throwing the book at ordinary people making very ordinary and predictable mistakes. Right now people are set up to fail, thanks to poor road design and zero driver training.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:12 PM on October 4, 2015 [20 favorites]


Yes, occassionally "accidents happen". Yes, we need to make becoming and continuing as a driver more difficult. Yes, we need to make our roads safer for all road users. But the vast majority of collisions that occur are due to operator error, not because of "an accident." And continuing to view preventable crashes as "accidental" retards the process of making our streets safer.

If you are reading this and think that it can happen to anyone, as shroedinger alludes to, you need to look at your own driving. Slow down. Pay more attention. Make sure there is at least two to three seconds of space between you and the car in front of you, and even more space when driving conditions are less than ideal.

The Roadcam subreddit is a pretty good community for watching videos of realtime road situations and discussing how to respond better.
posted by GregorWill at 9:25 PM on October 4, 2015 [8 favorites]


This also does have seem to have a undercurrent of bikers vs. drivers, round MCLXIV.

... Which is on topic, because this sort of "oops!" Causing zero charges(or tiny token ones) predominantly seems to occur in cases of car-pedestrian or car-bicycle(and car-motorcycle!) accidents.

If you hit someone in another car it's a big deal and insurance and bla bla. When it's someone on a bike or on foot not much happens. Their insurance doesn't call your human existing in reality insurance.

If you've been on the losing side of both, you'd realize how stark it is. The police literally act annoyed that they have to even deal with it.

When I said I had broken my arm in an accident, one person smugged, "There are no accidents."

To someone who had just been injured in an accident.

We are not friends.


Sanctimonious (motor)cyclists who are like "there are no accidents it's always negligence open your mind and learnnnn mannnn" make me want to kill. Yea, that black ice I wiped out on going 5mph totally could have been better planned for. Bags of dicks.
posted by emptythought at 9:33 PM on October 4, 2015 [7 favorites]


I may have told this story before. Many years ago I was in an ambulance after having fallen and broken my hip rollerblading. We were going through an intersection with the lights and sirens on and we got T boned by some jerk in an SUV who decided he didn't need to yield to an emergency vehicle. They ended up having to send two new ambulances: one for me and one for the ambulance driver who ended up with a broken arm. Guy driving the SUV was let off with a warning because he was from out of town and therefore "unfamiliar with our traffic patterns."
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:34 PM on October 4, 2015 [6 favorites]


I think the article does a poor job of making what is a a very tight case. That is, it's perfectly obvious to me that "collission" should be the preferred word and I think just about every police department and insurance company* uses that now, no?

But the article says "we shouldn't say accident because look at all these cases where someone is clearly at fault!" and so it seems to imply that the word collision implies fault. But I think collision is the neutral word. Accident implies one of those things that just happens sometimes. "Manslaughter" or such implies fault. "Collision" just means something hit something. I don't think it implies that there is blame, it just doesn't preclude blame the way accident seems to.

* My mom was getting out of her car in a parking lot on a windy day. The wind pulled the car door out of her hand and the car door dinged the car parked next to her. The insurance company insists this is a collission because one car struck another car; however parked both cars might have been. I'm pretty sure collision is the preferred word by anyone who deals with these things on any sort of regular basis.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 9:37 PM on October 4, 2015 [8 favorites]


I'm pretty sure collision is the preferred word by anyone who deals with these things on any sort of regular basis.

It's hard to be specific about what actually happened when you're writing reports about automobile collisions if you use the word "accident." Also, I try to avoid using the same phrase to describe bloody death that I might use to describe small children wetting themselves.
posted by asperity at 9:58 PM on October 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


People, including law enforcement and news media, seem to be having a lot of difficulty with the notion that a driver can bear some responsibility for causing a crash, and even killing somebody, even if they didn't intend to do so. "Bob didn't intend to run over a little kid on her bike and kill her, he was just reaching for something he dropped on the floor. It was an accident! Why should he get charged with anything?" This is endlessly frustrating to those of us who ride bicycles, or motorcycles, or just walk places.

Our brains run on language and the words we use shape the way we think about things. Using language that emphasizes that the driver, not the car, was in control and that doesn't immediately waive guilt -- "There was a car accident and a child was killed" -- is probably a good step to changing the way people think about these incidents.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 9:58 PM on October 4, 2015 [7 favorites]


I don't even like the term 'manslaughter'... it implies more than one death, and what, it only happens to males? And if you split the word up at the end of a line wrong, it's mans-laughter.

But I think collision is the neutral word. Accident implies one of those things that just happens sometimes. "Manslaughter" or such implies fault.

Only describe, don't explain.
--Wittgenstein

I concur about collision, as most have, but despite some interpretations of manslaughter, it's a legal term that distinguishes it from the intent and motivations of murder.

And you can slaughter a single animal. But the 'augh' cognate is a bizarre one that I'd call on Robert Graves to interpret as it spans to daughter and laughter.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 9:58 PM on October 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


This thread is cold. Wow. I would think having unintentionally killed someone is punishment enough, personally. I think it's safe to assume that most people will be in hell after that. When designing systems for humans to use, especially when lives are in stake such as with hospital equipment, there is no such thing as user error. Because humans are imperfect and will always make mistakes. If something happens you can't just say "Oh well, user error." No, it was a system error because the system should have been designed better. Of course you get angry when a child or anyone is killed. But nobody wants that to happen. It's cruel and bizarre to me to act like something that wasn't intentional actually was just because an imperfect human piloting an imperfect machine in an imperfect society that doesn't give them any choice on imperfect roads..makes a mistake. Cruel and bizarre.
posted by bleep at 10:00 PM on October 4, 2015 [39 favorites]


A four year old was struck and killed while in a crosswalk near my home. I am totally fine with treating a driver who fails to control a vehicle as a criminal, yes.

Hey, way to go on immediately jumping on the emotive example to drum up fear and anger.

Maybe we could step back a minute before deciding that, once again, the response to a social problem is more criminalization.

Number of auto crashes in the US in 2009: 10.8 million.
Fatalities: 33,000.

That's a rate of 0.3%. (1/3 of the fatal crashes involve alcohol, which strikes me as a more important thing to worry about than what we call the crashes.)

Total of those 33,000 who were children under 13: 940.

Oh, and the auto fatality rate (fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles) went from 5.4 in 1964, to 2.1 in 1990, to 1.1 in 2013. That is, roads are getting safer.

Emotional reactions to the worst possible accidents are very understandable, but they're a poor guide to policy. People think of the worst case, then make harsh laws that will make huge numbers of people miserable.
posted by zompist at 10:10 PM on October 4, 2015 [29 favorites]


I assume convicting a driver by a jury of his/her peers is hard because most drivers are guilty of all the same bad habits at some point. If everyone but you is a shitty driver, that is either self delusion or systemic problems with driver training and traffic laws.
posted by benzenedream at 10:10 PM on October 4, 2015 [4 favorites]


I would think having unintentionally killed someone is punishment enough, personally. I think it's safe to assume that most people will be in hell after that.

I think the goal in changing how we verbally assign blame for traffic collisions isn't so much to punish the people who have already caused them as it is to get other people to pay more attention to how they drive so they don't cause them. If people think of collisions as things they can and should actively avoid, they're more likely to be attentive than if they think of collisions as things that the universe just puts out there and they can't do anything about.

Which isn't to say that punishing people who cause accidents through utterly intolerable negligence (texting while driving, for example) shouldn't be actively punished.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:17 PM on October 4, 2015 [15 favorites]


The US has an auto fatality rate two or three times as high as the rest of the first world (including Australia) when measuring per capita or per mile.

There are systematic faults in the United States road system; one of them is that too many drivers don't take driving seriously and think of preventable collisions (such as driving into pedestrians in a crosswalk) as accidents.

I don't know that I want people thrown in jail for driving offenses, but a ticket, temporary or permanent loss of driving privileges, and some sort of actual driver training (possibly including traveling on the roads via bicycle for a while) before regaining driving privileges, are things that don't happen currently in the US for almost any collision.

However I don't really think there is a solution other than self-driving cars; the US driving culture is too ingrained.
posted by GregorWill at 10:25 PM on October 4, 2015 [5 favorites]


If people think of collisions as things they can and should actively avoid, they're more likely to be attentive than if they think of collisions as things that the universe just puts out there and they can't do anything about.

This is a crucial step to becoming a better driver. How many people can honestly say they treat driving as an active experience that requires 100% of their attention?
posted by Anonymous at 10:33 PM on October 4, 2015


Lack of intention is, in fact, part of the definition of "accident."

The "freak gasoline-fight accident" in Zoolander really *was* a depiction of an accident.
posted by XMLicious at 10:40 PM on October 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


Of course you get angry when a child or anyone is killed. But nobody wants that to happen. It's cruel and bizarre to me to act like something that wasn't intentional actually was just because an imperfect human piloting an imperfect machine in an imperfect society that doesn't give them any choice on imperfect roads..makes a mistake. Cruel and bizarre.

In almost every circumstance, behaving negligently to the point somebody is seriously injured or killed carries criminal or civil liability. Your statement doesn't appear to present a compelling case as to why this exception, a driver's negligence contributing to a crash, should exist.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 10:41 PM on October 4, 2015 [13 favorites]


I am in agreement with calling them collisions, but I'm alarmed by the move among ped/bike safety/livable city advocates to push for increased criminalization of drivers, a strategy that seems supported by this article.

They are not "accidents". Someone is to blame. But the blame should fall on the policy level. Car centric street design, cuts to public transit funding, etc are the bad guys here. Moves to put more people in jail will always be disproportionately enforced.
posted by latkes at 10:44 PM on October 4, 2015 [6 favorites]


Miko: in our society we let people operate these things with a pretty low level of skills qualification and almost total lack of enforcement.

GregorWill: The US has an auto fatality rate two or three times as high as the rest of the first world (including Australia) when measuring per capita or per mile.


(below, a quote from previous fpp with now dead link)

Clearly, we tacitly agree to accept a certain level of carnage in order to use the highways in ways we value. At the present time in the US, this tacit agreement says that it is acceptable to sacrifice between 40,000 and 42,000 lives annually.
posted by Stu-Pendous at 11:06 PM on October 4, 2015 [4 favorites]


Yes. If I fucking kill someone because I was looking at a cloud or not thinking about where I was turning I should face consequences. If I decide to take the responsibility of driving a giant metal death-machine, then I better be fucking on-point at all times to make sure my death-machine doesn't actually kill anyone. And if I'm uncomfortable with facing consequences if I do, then I should drastically work on my driving skills or reconsider driving altogether.

This seems pretty unrealistic about human limitations. I believe pretty strongly that almost nobody
should be driving on a regular basis - I know I shouldn't - but a lot of people really do kind of have to. Criminalizing specific varieties of bad driving "hygiene" is a fine idea but there's not actually anything anyone can do to ensure that you are always thinking the correct thought about where you are turning.
posted by atoxyl at 12:07 AM on October 5, 2015 [6 favorites]


I love the blind eye Americans turn to the daily slaughter on our streets (32,719 dead in 2013) while we wring our hands over gun violence (11,208 homicides in 2013) and lose our shit over terrorism (5 in 2013).
posted by entropicamericana at 12:18 AM on October 5, 2015 [14 favorites]


This debate has been going on in the medical community for some time. See here, for example. I tend to lean toward the "crash/collision" side of the debate, but if I hear someone get sanctimonious about it I want to use "accident" just to annoy them.
posted by TedW at 12:35 AM on October 5, 2015


The point is to make clear what is happening, and therefore bring to light choices we make. What is happening is that a leading cause of death is death by vehicle. The choice we make is to use vehicles for a variety of tasks.

--> People are right to say that accidents are called accidents because they are intentional.

But getting in a vehicle that you are aware is a leading cause of death is a choice you make.

--> People are right to say that they need cars to get to work.

Because you chose to live somewhere that needs a car.

--> People are right to say that society isn't structured in a way that encourages people to naturally value human life.

Because that's a choice we make.

This is all very radical obviously. I can feel the smugness radiating off my bright green urbanite bones already... but seriously the reason to bin "accident" is precisely to start a chain of blame that ends at the level of planning better living conditions. Choices this big should not be decided by the status quo, feedback loops, and ratchet effects.
posted by tychotesla at 12:53 AM on October 5, 2015 [4 favorites]


The article says that sometimes a crash really is an accident, it is specifically about crashes where someone clearly is at fault and challenges the assumption that all crashes are accidents. How can anyone be against a law that "allows police to bring a misdemeanor charge if a driver kills or seriously injures someone who has the right of way in a crosswalk or a bike lane"? Reading about the pushback you would think they proposed an automatic murder charge whenever someone is killed in a crash.

That crashes were someone is clearly at fault are labeled accidents and nobody gets charged is bad enough, but even when car drivers intentionally kill people it is often called an accident, unless there happens to be surveillance footage or other evidence. Here is a surveillance video of a car driver who intentionally drives into someone on a skateboard. This too was initially deemed an accident, but even after the video got out that made it clear that the driver intentionally turned into the curb to hit the man people still want to lay blame on the skateboarder (this article does it too: "all is not always as clear cut as it may appear"). As if whatever the skateboarder may have done or said justified killing him. It's like those gun deaths where the victim isn't perfect, as if not paying child support justifies getting shot. What really scared me most about this story is that that reaction that “some cyclists/skateboarders are so annoying, of course a car driver cannot help but kill them” is not seen as a completely out of the norm absurd thing to say, but a not uncommon reaction.
posted by blub at 2:09 AM on October 5, 2015 [13 favorites]


. It doesn't sound so great if, because of some microsecond mistake, you were at fault. Do you want the police and the insurance company to treat you as a criminal?

Well, but that is what happened to me when I was in a completely victimless car crash when I was 16 or so. Lost control of the car while passing on the freeway (I was not even speeding), thankfully steered into the center divider instead of into traffic, and received quite a steep fine. The CHP did not say, "Gosh, what an unlucky accident!"

I am 100% for designing and renovating streets to encourage safer driving, but I don't see a lot of car owners advocating for narrower streets, wider shoulders, lower speed limits, and traffic cameras.
posted by muddgirl at 2:12 AM on October 5, 2015 [5 favorites]


What is happening is that a leading cause of death is death by vehicle.

It's too many people but I wouldn't call it a leading cause of death. It doesn't make the top 10 for example. And its absolutely dwarfed by the top couple of causes.

We should try to reduce the number of people who die in traffic collisions. Calling them collisions and not accidents seems perfectly fine to me. But we should also keep in mind that driving in the USA is not particularly dangerous relative to much of the world and has been getting steadily safer over the past 50 years. Per capita traffic fatalities are down something like 60% since the 60's. 60%! And still trending down.

This is not a problem we are ignoring. In fact it is one on which we've been making great strides.
posted by Justinian at 2:14 AM on October 5, 2015 [8 favorites]


(And by some metrics we're doing even better. Deaths per million miles travelled is something like 20% what it was 50 years ago. We really are doing better at this, even if we should keep working until we're doing even better still.)
posted by Justinian at 2:19 AM on October 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


People keep saying that traffic fatalities are down and then assuming that's because either our roads are safer or people are better drivers. But I can just as easily imagine that better and/or quicker medical treatment is the cause of that reduction. It doesn't mean were getting better as a society at preventing life-threatening collisions.
posted by mysterious_stranger at 2:20 AM on October 5, 2015 [5 favorites]


People keep saying that traffic fatalities are down and then assuming that's because either our roads are safer or people are better drivers.

Cars are also better engineered than they've ever been. Remember when there was that huge pile-up in Michigan last winter? There's video of the terrible crashes as they were happening and pictures of what some of the cars looked like afterwards. 150 cars involved, many of them on fire, and yet only one person died. That's not good driving or safe roads, that's safety regulations and improved car design.

Criminalizing specific varieties of bad driving "hygiene" is a fine idea but there's not actually anything anyone can do to ensure that you are always thinking the correct thought about where you are turning.

I'm not saying we fine people for turning on the radio. I'm saying that when someone fucks up and drives into oncoming traffic or hits pedestrians that they face real-life consequences for their actions rather than throwing up their hands and saying "shit happens". Nobody expects 100% perfection and no car accidents ever, but it is fallacy to pretend we can't all take driving a lot more seriously than we do. Our society is structured in such a way that driving is a necessity for most people in this country, but that's not a reason to not punish people who aren't careful enough.
posted by Anonymous at 2:42 AM on October 5, 2015


However I don't really think there is a solution other than self-driving cars; the US driving culture is too ingrained.

Reduce the wealth gap, seriously. This is all very back of the napkin, so feel free to poke all the holes you want.

I was looking at road fatality data per 100K people by US state, expecting highly populous states like California or New York to top the list. Surprise, they're actually not. The states that round out the bottom are among the poorest states of the US: Mississippi, Arkansas, Montana, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Kentucky.

And there's a big range among the states. NY (6.1) is about Italy while Montana (22.6) is worse than India (19.5).

I went looking as to why this is and came across a WaPo article highlighting a study that says it's largely the well off and educated that have benefited from the reduction in traffic fatalities, while the poor and those with less education have actually had an increase in traffic fatalities:
Rather, the least-educated tend to live with a lot of other conditions that can make getting around more dangerous. They own cars that are older and have lower crash-test ratings. Those with less education are also likely to earn less and to have the money for fancy safety features such as side airbags, automatic warnings and rear cameras.

The number of trauma centers, the researchers point out, has also declined in poor and rural communities, which could affect the health care people have access to after a collision. And poor places suffer from other conditions that can make the roads themselves less safe.
posted by FJT at 2:43 AM on October 5, 2015 [7 favorites]


I mean, a lot of these arguments seem to be along the lines of "but everybody does it" and that is really not a good defense. There were a lot of horrible things in the past that "everybody" did. And we still instituted a system of laws that punished people for doing them because we as a society agreed they were shitty things to do.
posted by Anonymous at 2:44 AM on October 5, 2015


It's too many people but I wouldn't call it a leading cause of death. It doesn't make the top 10 for example.

Uh...no. Where are you looking? Are you looking at world stats? If so, why would you do that? Motor vehicle injury deaths certainly make the top ten causes of death in the developed world, especially in the US.

Also, you need to factor out old age if you're going to make rational statements about motor vehicle risk.

In developed countries, motor vehicles represent the number one risk of mortality for about the first third of people's life spans.

If you're younger than 25 and live in an OECD country, you are much more likely to die by car than by heart disease, cancer, or anything else.
posted by lastobelus at 3:01 AM on October 5, 2015 [5 favorites]


The problem with using punishment to solve the problem is that the behaviours that increase vehicle injury risk increase it in the aggregate. If 100000 people exceed the speed limit in a school zone every day for a year, a couple kids will die who wouldn't have if they'd all obeyed the speed limit. Punishing the drivers who were in the cars that hit the kids that died is pointless and accomplishes nothing. All 100000 people who chose not to drive the speed limit are responsible for those deaths.

It's like saying that in a game of russian roulette only the person with the live chamber is responsible for murder. It's magical or fatalist thinking; an irrational way of viewing the world.

Trying to measure intention is even more futile. Not a single one of those 100000 people will have had any intention at all to harm a child. And I know from long experience that you could only convince 1 or 2 per 100 that they bear any responsibility. Even on metafilter. Let alone that their responsibility is precisely the same as the actual drivers involved in the accidents.

The real problem is that we are still fucking monkeys, with a tiny thin veneer of rational thinking ability, that gets applied to only certain limited areas of life.
posted by lastobelus at 3:22 AM on October 5, 2015 [8 favorites]


Motor vehicle injury deaths certainly make the top ten causes of death in the developed world, especially in the US.

Eh? In 2012 there were 32,719 deaths via motor vehicle in the United States. The 10th leading cause of death was suicide with 41,149. Ergo motor vehicle deaths can't be in the top 10.
posted by Justinian at 3:22 AM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


(You are probably look at ALL accidental deaths, which is the 3rd leading cause of death. But traffic deaths are only a fraction of all accidental deaths.)
posted by Justinian at 3:25 AM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


oh for god's sake...here:

Link

if you don't like that particular picture google "causes of death by age group" and find one you do
posted by lastobelus at 3:26 AM on October 5, 2015


where do you get the idea that motor vehicle injury deaths are a (small) fraction of accidental deaths?

They are a "fraction" of accidental deaths, yes, by definition, but it ain't a small one.
posted by lastobelus at 3:29 AM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Are you serious? You're using all accidental deaths as a proxy for deaths in motor vehicle accidents? No.
posted by Justinian at 3:31 AM on October 5, 2015


The CDC clears that one up too. Link
posted by Stu-Pendous at 3:38 AM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Leading causes of death by age group. In the US "motor vehicle accidents" are in the top 3 until at least age 50.
posted by blub at 3:39 AM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Motor vehicle accidents ARE the largest fraction of "unintentional injury" deaths. I'm not sure why you don't know that.

Here is a chart that has a separate category for "road traffic accidents". The age categories aren't quite right to clearly show that there is about a 1/3 period of lifespan where cars are your greatest risk, but it does show that it's number one for age 15-24. It actually start's being number one around 5 years old if I remember correctly, but I can't find the year-by-year breakdown at the moment to cite for you.
posted by lastobelus at 3:39 AM on October 5, 2015


I think the idea that people who cause accidents are some other, some evil entity who values life less than you do...

This let's you make the terrible dangerous and reckless decision to pretend you are above that risk every day and drive a dangerous machine that kills animals and people alike while absolving yourself of the enormity of that decision, blaming all the deaths of this cultures decision to allow traffic deaths as a human sacrifice made to the car gods for our willful desire to value easy transport over human life on people who were essentially being people.

You can not wash your hands of the death associated with your decisions by adding those who make unintentional errors never wanting anyone to die just as much as you to the wicker man you've already created.
posted by xarnop at 3:41 AM on October 5, 2015 [5 favorites]


In 2012 there were 32,719 deaths via motor vehicle in the United States.

Accident, collision, how about "expected result" which is that on average approx. 100 people die every day in the US as a result of using motor vehicles. Every day, every year. As sure as the sun rises. Everywhere else too. It's the cost of doing business.

As this carnage has been going on for more than a century, I'm gonna go out on a limb unsupported with any economic evidence and say that the car's benefit to society clearly outweighs the costs imposed on certain individuals so I don't see what the fuss about naming these costs is all about.
posted by three blind mice at 3:56 AM on October 5, 2015


Oops, I forgot to actually put in my link above. Here

But the graph that blub linked clearly shows what I mentioned, that there's about 1/3 of lifespan where motor vehicle injury is the greatest risk of death.

It's how we kill our children.
posted by lastobelus at 4:09 AM on October 5, 2015


Maybe we could step back a minute before deciding that, once again, the response to a social problem is more criminalization.

Honestly, this looped back around to deaths/fatalities when way, way more of those 10.8 million result in injuries.

I know more than one person who has lost their job because of an injury that resulted from a collision where they were not at fault. And i'm one person, who statistically barely knows anyone. I know more people than that who are in some way permanently injured. Not disabled, but injured in a way that's never really going to heal and may get better with expensive PT, but in some cases that's just the new reality. I myself have a fucked up knee from getting hit by a car as a pedestrian.

I understand that criminalization isn't necessarily the answer, but why can you assault someone with a deadly weapon as long as it's a car and it's suddenly different? Even if we're calling this negligence, if you were operating a crane and you dropped a port-o-potty on someone and they didn't die, more would happen.

In a way, the hair splitting over fatalities almost feels like a derail to me? A lot more people are hurt in permanent, concrete ways where they're injured(even SERIOUSLY injured) but don't die as a result of vehicle incidents.

I don't even want to see people in jail, necessarily, but anything would be progress. Suspended licenses? Huge fines? Fuck, anything at all besides slaps on the wrist.

This really can't just be about deaths, though, or it'll endlessly grind down in to "that's not a big number and people are getting their hackles up bla bla bla". For 2012, for example, that looks like 2.36 million.

How many are those people were bankrupted? I know one. How many of those people lost their jobs? Are, in some way, permanently injured? How many ended up having to lawyer up or deal with insurance companies for a year or more?(3-4, on that one). How many drivers faced more than minor civil penalties or like, a failure to yield ticket unless they were inebriated?

I'm searching for more stats on this stuff, but yea, fatalities are just a part of this story.
posted by emptythought at 4:17 AM on October 5, 2015 [11 favorites]


We need to create an infrastructure so that the poor even have the option of not driving. People have to work and eat and since we refuse to question mandatory car use for all citizens, to fight for properly planned cities that deter car use to protect people from dangerous fumes while walking or cycling, and we refuse to create effective bus systems, we are requiring people to drive cars to survive.

Not everyone should be driving a car but not everyone has the luxury of moving somewhere with a bus system or were all their needs are accessible through walking.

Scapegoating those who are forced to drive when they shouldn't is just another way of absolving responsibility for clinging to car use as a common required component to modern society.

We need to sack the beast and stop justifying it, and stop sacrificing human lives and paying in blood for selfish wants that are NOT justified.
posted by xarnop at 4:31 AM on October 5, 2015 [9 favorites]


emptythought, I agree that deaths are only part of the picture. And also recent data has suggested that the indirect costs are much higher than we thought, via air pollution. Then add cars contribution to climate change. It's a horrible social cost, borne disproportionately by children.
posted by lastobelus at 4:33 AM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


I've made a similar argument for similar reasons since I was a teenager and only ever got shouted down for my trouble. Didn't change my mind though. I still always say "wreck" or "collision."
posted by ob1quixote at 4:35 AM on October 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


This is something we've already started to change in the medical field. It's probably of somewhat less relevance there, but physicians can definitely be pedants when it comes to precise language usage (at least within their bailiwick).

So people become victims not of MVAs but of MVCs.

Although I confess it still seems bizarre to label a car v pedestrian collision as an MVC. So I usually just call it what it is: car v pedestrian collision.
posted by adoarns at 5:01 AM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


I can't really believe we are a society who would put a 16 year old behind a dangerous machine and then turn on them as a murderer if they cause an accident. A 16 year old is not even considered of sound enough mind or experience to vote.

Is this intentional evil or just negligent ignorance? Should we start assigning higher penalties for people who irresponsibly put dangerous machines in the hands of underage minors?
I would like to see broken down the demographics of people who caused accidents. How many are teenagers? (We know it's disproportionately high in teens), how many are under 25? How many are low income or have mental difficulties?

Yeah more punishment, shaming, and othering of our fellow humans is surely what will fix the horrible price we pay for our obsession with cars.

Ok let's admit, we all know it won't actually stop the deaths but it will allow everyone to feel smug and self satisfied and most importantly, cleanse the consciousness of making the same decision to put others at risk by driving a car knowing that the human mind is imperfect even for those of sound mind who are trying.
posted by xarnop at 5:07 AM on October 5, 2015 [4 favorites]


Drivers need to be more careful. We all need to obey speed limits, stop at stop signs and red lights, respect crosswalks, and look before we pull ahead.

And drivers need to stop being so aggressive. Especially on freeways -- there are people who drive like it's a competitive sport.

It would be great if we could decrease reliance on cars, and also we need to have a conversation about how people drive, because I see a lot of drivers out there just not giving a fuck.
posted by spacewaitress at 5:20 AM on October 5, 2015 [9 favorites]


Wow, I feel like there are a lot of strawman arguments being thrown around here. No one is arguing that we should, like, lock up 16 year olds for life if they are involved in a car crash where someone dies! Where did anyone get that impression?

Should we start assigning higher penalties for people who irresponsibly put dangerous machines in the hands of underage minors?

Personally? Yes, I think we should. A friend of mine, in high school, was "responsible" for driving her 3 younger siblings to school every day in an unmaintained minivan. She became distracted at a rather high speed, ran a red light, and struck an elderly couple in the other car. The driver in the other vehicle nearly died. Was it "just an accident?" No. Do I think her parents should have been held responsible for handing their daughter a dangerous vehicle and putting the safety of her siblings and other people in her hands? Abso-fucking-lutely.
posted by muddgirl at 5:30 AM on October 5, 2015


All flowers are flowers. Some flowers are roses. Calling roses flowers doesn't mean you're saying they're not roses, but it 's more honest if we calldon't all flowers roses.

All "accidents" are "collisions." Some "collisions" happen by accident. Calling accidental collisions "collisions" doesn't mean you're saying they didn't happen by accident, but it's more honest if we stop calling all collisions "accidents."
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:11 AM on October 5, 2015 [10 favorites]


All I'm saying is let's be real about it, humans are bad drivers because we don't require ourselves to be good ones. If driving a car was considered as important as flying an aircraft we'd have less crashes. Period.

It starts with adjusting how we frame "accidents" in our minds and ALSO changing our attitudes about how we get from point a to point b. Driving is required, to not have to drive is a huge privilege in this country, so I'm not about criminalizing anyone, I'm about changing the way we look at driving and doing it better over time to make our roads less dangerous and less car-centric.
posted by Annika Cicada at 6:18 AM on October 5, 2015 [8 favorites]


This is no different than gun ownership

Do you drive your gun to work? Would you be unable to obtain meaningful employment without your gun? Do you live in an area where, without a gun, you would have an immeasurably hard time taking your children to school, buying groceries, or otherwise leaving the house? Do you find yourself forced to use your gun in inclement weather or while dealing with wholly unrelated emotional turbulence?

There is a universe of difference between a gun and a car, despite the fact that both can be and are involved directly in incidents which involve loss of life.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:21 AM on October 5, 2015 [8 favorites]


Sometimes, slopes *are* slippery. It's not as if we have fine-tuning policy knobs that would allow us to, say, issue a mild rebuke to an at fault driver while not opening the door to law-and-order escalations the likes of which brought us Rockefeller drug laws and three-strikes, let alone the civil liability angle.

It's an ingrained, systemic problem and needs systemic approaches to improve.

(so, so much more to say but ... mobile. More when traffic lets up










no, seriously, I'm not driving, just sitting after bteakfast waiting for AM commute to clear)
posted by one weird trick at 6:25 AM on October 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


I would think having unintentionally killed someone is punishment enough, personally.

It's a crapload of punishment. It would tear me apart. I think there are two other issues to consider, though:

1. The purpose of judicial/legal punishment isn't just punishment, it's deterrence. For some reason, many people don't seem to be deterred by the prospect of having to live with killing someone. I say "most people" because when I drive this thought is never far from my mind. One small error, one lapse of attention and I could kill someone. It's the reason I rarely drive and the reason that when I do drive my hands and shoulders ache afterwards from the tension. But until everyone fully groks the possibility that they're operating a deadly weapon, some other deterrence is useful.*

2. It's also to some extent not a deterrent because if you ever do kill someone, everyone around you (friends and family, not the law) will tell you it's not your fault. If you were someone I knew and you killed someone even I would tell you " it was just an accident; it's not your fault." Because living with the fact that you killed someone is so horrific, it's almost too awful a punishment. Jail, sure. House arrest, fine. Suspended license, great. But living forever with a life on your conscience is just too much punishment for terrible judgement.

* Though I think this deterrence should ideally be applied to the risky behaviours, not the outcomes. Start taking away licenses and putting people under house arrest for speeding, running yellow lights, talking on the phone while driving, not signalling, not checking blind spots, rolling through stop signs, not stopping for pedestrians etc. There's no reason the social justice "but people need to drive" argument should preclude this, either. Yeah, it would make many people's lives very difficult to not be able to drive, but not checking your blind spot and stopping at red lights is free and there's no reason people who depend on their cars can't just decide that since they depend on their cars they need to drive responsibly so that they don't lose them.

This stuff isn't little stuff everyone does, it's a decision that a small bit of convenience for the driver is worth risking someone's life. Stigmatize it like we do any other crime. While in general, I agree that criminalizing everything in site is a bad idea, I'm generally in favor of criminalizing and treating more seriously things that "respectable" "middle class" people do. I think your average middle-manager is going to be more deterred by the prospect of house arrest or a few months in jail or even the embarrassment of not being able to drive than someone at the bottom of the ladder who is constantly treated by crap by the law anyway.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 6:36 AM on October 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


If you saw my last comment appear earlier now reappear: There was a display error that deleted parts of the comment. Taz sent me the text to so I could repost.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 6:37 AM on October 5, 2015


I used to work at a newspaper where one of my jobs was filing overnight police accident reports, and I was schooled pretty seriously to use "collided with" in almost every accident report...

It may now seem to be a derail, but because the OP is about what to call it when a car hits something, this use of "collided" is questionable. The now-moribund Testy Copy Editors blog regularly complained about news stories that claimed a car collided with a tree. Their position is that a collision requires two moving objects. That's where the co- comes in.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 6:38 AM on October 5, 2015


“some cyclists/skateboarders are so annoying, of course a car driver cannot help but kill them” is not seen as a completely out of the norm absurd thing to say, but a not uncommon reaction.

I wouldn't say anything so extreme, but here's an illustration. I live in a second-tier northeastern city known for killing witches a few centuries ago. The attractions associated with that around right now, the month of October, draw thousands of people from the surrounding metro area each night, especially weekend nights, to roam the streets and take in the various bars and festival attractions and general mayhem. Many of them are young, ranging from middle-school age to college age. And many of them dress in things like long black robes or black hoodies and black pants, sometimes with a mask or something else on their heads. Short version, once it gets dark, some of these kids are near-invisible. As the evening wears on and the day drinking settles in, they begin to get drunk. Together in bunches, they wander into streets, down the middle of streets. They make mad dashes from one place to another. My home is near a large downtown park and that park, though well lit, also has shady areas due to large old trees around it. Driving around there in October requires a vigilance akin to a Beefeater's and demands a slow crawl - and yet, every year I swerve to avoid some jerkass who is either stupidly, drunkenly, intentionally or all three about to move straight into the path of my car, on foot or on a skateboard. I really resent them for placing me in a position where it becomes likelier that I will hurt or kill them by accident because I cannot see them well or predict their motions until it would be too late. They are taking risks too, and their risks - their choice of clothing, their decisions about locomotion - are more intentional than mine. These situations may be unusual - this town is unusual - but it's real enough. (I am sure people will have recommendations for what the town should do to prevent this, yadda yadda, so suffice it to say citizens are plenty active and have taken many measures to reduce and contain this sort of behavior but there is a low-though-consistent distributed activity level which it is uncontrollable without imposing a police state).

I'm gonna go out on a limb unsupported with any economic evidence and say that the car's benefit to society clearly outweighs the costs imposed on certain individuals so I don't see what the fuss about naming these costs is all about.

Well, yes. My thoughts on this have for a long time been informed by an argument from a philosophy class I had in college. It was something like this: we had a table showing that there were number of highway deaths when the speed limit was 65, x-10% when it was 55, x-20% at 45, and so on down to when you'd have almost no deaths at 10mph (it was an extremely simplified model but a generally true one). So, should the national speed limit be 10mph? We argued it for quite a long time, understanding that anything we agreed on would be agreeing to accept a certain number of deaths. Well, that's what public health is: what number of deaths from X is acceptable? What number of deaths is achievable without structural change? It's easy to demonize drivers, and I do: I hate the way people drive, I'm a road vigilante, it's bad. I am going to be the old lady who sits by a lawn chair in her street and shakes her finger at every passing car to slow them down. But we can't get away from dependence on driving without truly massive structural changes to our economy and a general political and individual will to live in a completely different way than we do. The poor and immigrant drivers mentioned above are caught in a bad pinch: excluded from center cities by high rents, and limited in their choice of housing, they have generally had to move out to inner-ring suburbs in the last couple of decades, where housing is too dispersed to accommodate bus routes efficiently. Change, for that and every other social condition that requires driving, demands in either housing/land repurchase/urban redevelopment to relocate enormous swaths of the population, steep investments in public transportation which will be guaranteed to generate consistent losses and require subsidy; resructuring of the school system so that elementary and secondary schools once again are located within walking distance of students' neighborhoods; moving firm headquarters and major hospitals from the ring roads around cities back into urban infill that will cost 4x the square footage to outfit in a way consistent with contemporary expectations for workspaces and facilities. The intense energy and water demands these newly dense cities would impose would require enormous infrastructure projects. I'm just beginning. We did build our country around the presumption of low oil prices and the availability of driving to every adult. We agreed that comes at a cost, and have weighed it against these other costs and kinds of investment, and decided to land the cost on the individuals and the courts rather than on the public coffers. There are no simple solutions, no individual solutions. There is only the long, slow process reinvestment and restructuring on a truly massive scale, knowing that a significant proportion of the population will still not care to give up the geographic freedom their cars offer.

(Nobody's mentioned $8/gal gas - I think that would be a pretty good solution to at least reduce road traffic. A few years back when it was hitting $5 a gallon there was a distinct difference).
posted by Miko at 6:45 AM on October 5, 2015 [8 favorites]


Oh, as for living with having killed someone in your car, there is a heartbreaking TAL episode called Life After Death that gives some sense of what that is like.
posted by Miko at 6:46 AM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


The US has an auto fatality rate two or three times as high as the rest of the first world (including Australia) when measuring per capita or per mile.

Just to note this doesn't seem to be true, at least if we believe wikipedia. Per billion vehicle-km, the US does better than Belgium, New Zealand, and Japan, and does way better than the Czech Republic, Estonia, Bulgaria, and Korea. The Scandinavian countries have rates about half the US, but nowhere in the small set of countries this was reported for had a third the rate of the US.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:51 AM on October 5, 2015


This thread is cold. Wow. I would think having unintentionally killed someone is punishment enough, personally.

It is something I would never wish on anyone.

But that's not an argument for not criminalising negligent driving that causes death.

Rather, we should seriously crack down on negligent driving before it causes a serious collision: criminalise speeding, agressive driving, tailgating, unsafe lane changes, using any distractive devices while driving, ignoring right of ways, etc.

We criminalise other behaviours that are likely to lead to collisions, like driving under the influence; we need to take conscious, unsafe driving, like speeding, as seriously as we take a DUI. No one accidentally drives 20-40 km over the speed limit. They do it because they refuse to understand that faster speeds increase the force of a collision (and thus potential death) and also reduces the time you have to react to avoid a collision. Same goes for tailgaters: their behaviour makes the road more dangerous for us all, but they refuse to see how their impatience is putting everyone at higher risk.

We won't get safer streets and highways unless we make drivers responsible for how they drive. We may not have the infrastructure to test everyone every year, but we do have the infrastructure to monitor & ticket bad driving - which, being the real world, is a better indication of how someone chooses to drive than an artificial test.

But we have to actively support police ticketing dangerous behaviours like speeding, tailgating and aggressive driving, and admit that these really are dangerous choices that drivers make.
posted by jb at 7:11 AM on October 5, 2015 [10 favorites]


I live in a location where I can take the train or bike to work, and it's more convenient than if I had a car. Not only would a car be more expensive, but it would probably take longer. And that doesn't even get into time it would take to find a parking place, because I would need to pay for parking at home and parking is available at work.

And this is something that I regularly remind myself of and take joy in: I do not have to drive on a daily basis! As much as I might bitch about crowded trains, I can spend the time reading instead of driving!

All of this is compounded by the fact that cyclists here think nothing of cruising through an intersection, whether they're merely rounding a blind corner or going right across the traffic. I would be terrified to drive, just because I know that I could be held liable for hitting someone who went right through an intersection, against the light, without looking for traffic.

So nice not to have to be concerned by any of this. And when the conditions are right, to be able to get on my bike and ride!
posted by oheso at 7:13 AM on October 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


This thread is cold. Wow. I would think having unintentionally killed someone is punishment enough, personally. I think it's safe to assume that most people will be in hell after that.

This view is modeled around the unbelievably stupid notion that our justice system exists solely to dole out punishment for moral failings.

In this particular case, justice acts as a deterrent and helps to prevent recurrence. It's a tool to keep us safer. It's also a tool we should reserve for the worst of the worst, but we don't even currently do that.

I'm not even talking about "broken windows," mandatory minimums, or harsh sentences. If we only prosecuted the most blatantly egregious cases, we'd still be far better off than we currently are. The bar for what is investigated and prosecuted is unconscionably low -- in most cases, no investigation is performed, the victim is blamed, and the driver is either not prosecuted, or gets off with an unbelievably light sentence. For a country that is "hard" on almost every other kind of crime imaginable, we sure don't seem to give a rats ass about pedestrians and cyclists who are killed by cars.

Negligent vehicular homicide often carries a lighter sentence than some first-time DUI offenses. That's just crazy.

Last year, a cyclist near my neighborhood was hit by a driver who then left his car, and proceeded to physically assault the cyclist. The police arrived, immediately sided with the driver, and issued the cyclist a $100 ticket for a made-up offense. Fortunately, the whole thing was caught on camera. Despite having virtually-unassailable evidence (and the fact that DC is generally pretty friendly to cyclists), the case against the driver was virtually impossible to prosecute.

We should treat serious vehicle accidents like the FAA treats plane crashes. If there's an accident with fatalities, a thorough investigation must automatically be triggered. Like FAA investigations, these investigations should focus on determining the root cause of the accidents, and produce actionable items that will prevent similar accidents from occurring. If design issues are found with the road, the road should be closed until the issues are corrected.

Finding a scapegoat or someone to prosecute should be an afterthought, but extreme negligence does need to be prosecuted.

A few years ago, there was a really horrific accident in my area, where a driver killed a young woman after striking her and dragging her several thousand feet down the road. The driver knew she had hit something, but didn't even get out of the car until she got home. Eventually (after considerable public outcry), the driver was prosecuted and spent a year in prison.

She does not appear to have lost her license.
posted by schmod at 7:15 AM on October 5, 2015 [12 favorites]


I really resent them for placing me in a position where it becomes likelier that I will hurt or kill them by accident
I understand and agree, but to be clear: that was not what my link was about. This was about somebody who intentionally turned his car and drove into a skateboarder, not someone who accidentally killed a skateboarder he didn't see.
posted by blub at 7:16 AM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


"But we can't get away from dependence on driving without truly massive structural changes to our economy and a general political and individual will to live in a completely different way than we do. "

Which isn't going to happen because too much money/work/time, so..... we'd rather have people die, it's cheaper.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:27 AM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


I don't like cars. I think they cause social isolation, air pollution, contribute to climate change, and make us poorer both as individuals and as a society. We have sacrificed a human-centric urban design philosophy to these giant smoke-belching death machines. I think if humans survive the next couple hundred years, our car-centric built environment will be one of the things that people scratch their heads about. The fact that people (both in the cars and outside of them) regularly die in horrible ways due to their use is just the icing on a really shitty cake.

That said, they're not going away--but anything that we can do to make people think more critically about their use is a good thing, and any carrots and sticks we can create to lessen their use is also a good thing. More enforcement of traffic laws, higher gas taxes, better and more frequent public transportation, a ban on private cars in dense urban areas. The goal should not necessarily be "fewer deaths" (that's how we get things like requiring cyclists to wear helmets and laws against "jaywalking") but a better and more fulfilling built environment for people to live in.
posted by Automocar at 7:33 AM on October 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


I can't find the article or the FPP, but I remember reading something about people who had been involved in crashes on streets that they knew very well. They would swear that they had looked at the road and all evidence indicated that they had. Yet, despite this, they had somehow not seen the bike/car/person that they struck (or in the case of a car, that they pulled out in front of). And these blind spots can kill people. But they happen. Once you get used to driving, it falls into an automatic process. It takes mental effort to stay aware on the road. And even with this, you can look right at another car in your street, a car in a place where there never was one before, and just not see it.

My driving epiphanies came about after two incidents. One was a bit of road rage that had me shaking afterwards when I realized I could have caused a multiple car wreck at 60+ MPH. The second was fuming behind someone going the speed limit on my parent's street. A dog ran out in front of them, they stopped in time, I stopped behind them and then the person who owned the dog ran out, sobbing, grabbed the dog and took it back to the house.

I'm lucky. I live in a city that does not require car ownership. Driving, at some fundamental level, terrifies me. I could kills someone; I am the sort of person to become momentarily distracted and miss something.

So yes, reasonable speed limits, average speed cameras (check how long it was between when you passed A and B, compute speed, no slowing down for a speed trap) and moving driving from a required daily activity for most people in the US to something that is only occasionally necessary. Re-certification for driving via a practical test probably would not help, as this is an issue of attentional lapse and automation, not an ability to do a three point turn.

Honestly, the only thing that I can think will really solve things is increasingly smart cars filtering their way into the world. The auto-breaking feature you see on some new cars will eventually become standard, like anti-lock breaks or air bags. So give it 30 years, maybe. People like to keep cars running for as long as possible due to the cost of replacement, but eventually, the newer cars will become normal.
posted by Hactar at 7:37 AM on October 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


I really resent them for placing me in a position where it becomes likelier that I will hurt or kill them by accident
And to add to my previous comment: I agree that that sucks if we're talking about people who run red lights/stop signs, have no concern for other traffic, do not stay on their lane, do not wear visible clothing/lights, etc. Where I live that's a small minority, but they do exist and it sucks. But I also notice that even when I'm a perfect traffic participant, with reflective clothes and front and back lights, who waits for traffic lights and always signals when I take a turn, I still get a lot of crap from car drivers who resent me for placing them in a position where it becomes possible that they will hurt me, just because I exist on the road with them. There's also a bit of a disconnect where car drivers say "well, one little mistake, that can happen to anybody" when it's about car drivers, but when a cyclist/skateboarder/runner makes a mistake they are resented for it and blamed and nobody says "well, we all make mistakes".
posted by blub at 7:40 AM on October 5, 2015 [12 favorites]


Except that sometimes accidents do happen. Drivers lose concentration at exactly the wrong second, pedestrians appear too soon to react, minor errors by three drivers add up into one major collision.

This is like the "sometimes women make false rape allegations therefore we should not believe any rape allegation unless the rapist confesses and there are six independent witnesses" nonsense you also get.

This thread is cold. Wow. I would think having unintentionally killed someone is punishment enough, personally. I think it's safe to assume that most people will be in hell after that.

It's not. Take the case of the bin-lorry driver in Glasgow who knew he was unfit to drive a HGV, did it anyway, and killed six people and 15 others after collapsing at the wheel at Christmas. His licence was taken away. Six months later? He went driving again, illegally.

People are idiots. Cars are stupidly lethal and lull their operators into false senses of security. The three things don't mix well.

There are better ways of getting around; better ways of planning our social spaces; better ways of organising our societies. Until the real cost of cars are brought home to individuals, we won't start agitating for any of those better things and the carnage will continue.

All that said, if America wants to feel better about itself, nothing here has horrified me as much as this Slate piece about drivers in China, who because of ill-considered legal penalities will actively try to kill the pedestrians they hit, to the point of reversing back over children who were only mildly injured.
posted by bonaldi at 7:40 AM on October 5, 2015 [4 favorites]


Yes it's the theme of the OP, but only looking at fatalities and how to punish the driver misses the bigger picture about what's behind most vehicle collisions, serious or otherwise.

I'm putting infrastructure concerns to the side for a moment. Collective poor driving behaviour creates an environment where collisions are more likely. An aggressive commuter may him/herself never be in a collision, but by being aggressive, following too closely, speeding, they influence other drivers and they can trigger a series of issues that lead to a collision. Same for a distracted driver. Unfortunately, we don't yet have the means to effectively detect and punish bad driving. For the moment, authorities seem to have given up, and I've seen very few recent attempts at awareness campaigns.

Dropping the universal use of the word 'accident' in favour of collision or crash is in my opinion a useful step in raising consciousness about this. I think there should be some sort of campaign that says "most collisions are mistakes, not accidents" and try and instill some collective guilt over the amount of bad driving.

Any improvement in general driving behaviour should result in fewer fatalities. It's a tall order to change behaviour, but in my lifetime we've banned smoking in restaurants and society didn't collapse, so change is possible if enough people want it.
posted by Artful Codger at 7:40 AM on October 5, 2015 [4 favorites]


The now-moribund Testy Copy Editors blog regularly complained about news stories that claimed a car collided with a tree. Their position is that a collision requires two moving objects.

In the maritime world, when a moving vessel hits a stationary object it's called an allision. As in "the tug allided with the bridge".
posted by Artful Codger at 8:10 AM on October 5, 2015 [5 favorites]


People are idiots. Cars are stupidly lethal and lull their operators into false senses of security.

People are completely stupid, which is why I would love to see tougher enforcement but also believe that infrastructure changes will do more to ensure safety. People are always going to be stupid and their perceptions will sometimes lie to them, too. Smoking is a good example, but it was actually changing the infrastructure of smoking that is probably primarily responsible for the decline: those changes meant that people were unable to buy cigarettes as easily without proper ID, could no longer buy them at all in a lot of places like hospitals and stores near schools, could not smoke indoors at work and at restaurants, and paid more than triple the original cost of a pack due to taxation intended to drive down consumption) . It became difficult and a hassle to smoke and the barriers between a person and a cigarette got higher and higher until the logical thing to do was quit. Given that there were no major medical advances that made quitting easier, I think we have to look at the fact that we just made smoking a lot harder for a sense of what solutions might look like.
posted by Miko at 8:21 AM on October 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


The problem being, of course, that drivers as a group are not okay with infrastructure changes that make everyone safer. They lobby against them. Because god forbid their commute take 5 extra minutes because we reduced driving lanes to add wider sidewalks and bike lanes, and make intersections shorter. God forbid we install speed cameras that ticket people going significantly over the speed limit alongside a park or school or playground. (The difference between hitting a pedestrian ["accident" or not] at 30mph vs 40 mph is the difference between 50% likelihood of pedestrian death and 90% likelihood of death, but it's really important to be able to drive 40mph without repercussion on a city street.) Let's all waive our hands about red light cameras causing more accidents because -- oh no! -- people slow down on yellows instead of zooming through them and get rear-ended by the asshole behind them who was also planning to zoom through the red light.

I'll have sympathy for driver's hurt feelings about the term collision vs accident the minute they join those of us who have been advocating for better infrastructure for decades instead of fighting every little possible progress we make.

The problem is not that drivers make mistakes, it's that so many of them think they DON'T make mistakes. That they are somehow so skilled that they can drive 40mph on a city street and have enough reaction time to deal with kids, pedestrians, cyclists, car doors flying open, emergency vehicles. All things, by the way, that are completely predictable, not "out of nowhere", features of the driving environment. But no, they're so skilled that they can take that glance down at their phone while moving and everything will be fine. They're important enough that the slow car in front of them is totally reason enough to slam on the gas to overtake them via the bike lane to the right.
posted by misskaz at 8:40 AM on October 5, 2015 [25 favorites]


in my lifetime we've banned smoking in restaurants and society didn't collapse, so change is possible if enough people want it.

So true! We didn't stop people smoking in restaurants by asking them to please step outside though. We created a swath of new policy including legally banning smoking inside, advertising bans, restrictions on sale of cigarettes, increased warning labeling systems, etc.

We can't just ask people to drive more safely - we need to rearrange our cities to make them more safe.
posted by latkes at 8:42 AM on October 5, 2015 [5 favorites]


Tom Fucoloro, who writes Seattle Bike Blog, has been using language like this very intentionally for quite some time. He makes a point of always saying "people in cars" instead of "drivers" and "people on bikes" instead of "cyclists", for instance.

I hadn't realized how powerful this use of language was, how easily it helps us step out of our usual manner of thinking about things, until this headline of his from last week:

Two people crash their cars in Bellevue, kill toddler in stroller on sidewalk
posted by gurple at 8:57 AM on October 5, 2015 [6 favorites]


Do you drive your gun to work? Would you be unable to obtain meaningful employment without your gun? Do you live in an area where, without a gun, you would have an immeasurably hard time taking your children to school, buying groceries, or otherwise leaving the house? Do you find yourself forced to use your gun in inclement weather or while dealing with wholly unrelated emotional turbulence?

None of these things excuse poor driving habits. I am not saying we should ban cars. I'm saying we, as a society, need to take driving skills a lot more seriously and impose a higher bar for what is considered an acceptable level of driving ability. Changing infrastructure is a part of this, but so is not acting like people just happen to drive into pedestrians or door cyclists or don't check their blind spots while merging into other lanes. Those things are not cruel twists of fate. They are the direct result of the driver not paying attention to their surroundings.
posted by Anonymous at 9:00 AM on October 5, 2015


.
I would think having unintentionally killed someone is punishment enough, personally.


Why is this true for people who kill people with a car and not the entire class of manslaughter*? Do you think that charge simply shouldn't exist?

*(or whatever the correct term is, not sure on the legal definitions)
posted by the agents of KAOS at 9:14 AM on October 5, 2015 [4 favorites]


This discussion has served as a good reminder of how far we've come and how far we've yet to go in this. I really thought everybody knew about Vision Zero, but I also work with a lot of transportation wonks.

A couple of years ago I was involved in a project to get rid of "accident" from a transportation thesaurus - opting for "collision" or "crash" or even a couple "incidents" as appropriate. We did have some philosophical discussions about cases where a tree branch falls on a car, or some other "Act of God", but for our purposes we decided to just use collision/crash for the reasons The Underpants Monster stated above. The misuse of "accident" was pervasive across all modes, but for at least the last 5 years (if not more), all of the federal transportation agencies have stopped using the word.

I understand why people bristle at the change - we've been conditioned to think many collisions/crashes are things that just happen. Note how neatly fatalities and injuries rise and fall with the nation's VMT. There is a collective attitude that we can't do much to change it, but that's just silly. Taking responsibility for our actions and driving more cautiously will help, but we need to adjust our perception and expectations. OK, so most of this society might be car dependent, but that doesn't mean we have to be risky drivers. It's why I find the complaints of autonomous vehicles driving slow and safe amusing - people hate them because they obey the laws!
posted by kendrak at 9:24 AM on October 5, 2015 [6 favorites]


I bike to work. A month ago, I was sitting at a stop sign, waiting to make a left turn across traffic that didn't have a stop. A person driving a car, coming into the intersection from my right, made a left turn and cut the corner, heading straight for me. Luckily, she wasn't going very fast, and she saw me in time to stop.

She made a point of pulling over and apologizing profusely. She said she was "really very conscientious", and that the only reason she'd almost killed me was that the sun was in her eyes, and so she couldn't see me as she made the turn.

And, yet, she made the turn. Why is it the cultural norm that, when you can't see well enough to drive safely, you drive anyway? She could have pulled over and waited an hour until the sun was high enough in the sky that she could make the turn safely -- or timed her commute so that she wasn't driving when it was too dangerous to drive. Or she could have just gone straight through that intersection, turned around further on, and then made her turn without looking into the sun.

I don't blame her. I've done the same thing she did, probably a hundred times or more. I've always gotten lucky so far, never killed anybody. If I did, of course, it would be an accident.
posted by gurple at 9:28 AM on October 5, 2015 [9 favorites]


As the father of two sons who walk to school (and after our entire family was almost run over in a crosswalk yesterday while walking on a walk sign) all I can say is that I hate cars and I hate car culture.
posted by Nevin at 9:34 AM on October 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


"They're not accidents, and we don't have robotic cars." Transportation writer Steve Vance has been very vocal about calling out reporting that refers to cars as sentient beings that drive around crashing into pedestrians, bicyclists, and each other, with no reference to the fact that a human being made the decisions behind the collision."

Exactly right. Drives me crazy. And it would be great to see a lot less use of passive voice. "The pedestrian was stuck", "The victim was struck by a bullet", "the ICBM was launched". It implicitly blames the victim, and removes the driver, shooter, mad launch-button controller from the conversation.
posted by jetsetsc at 9:40 AM on October 5, 2015


I'm hesitant to be fully on board for more traffic citations, mandatory periodic license recertifications, and harsher laws not because I think they're ineffective, but I believe these will fall more heavily on minorities, the poor, and the undocumented.

The simplest example is when I drive in Orange County I see red light cameras in all the poorer or more Hispanic areas of cities and once you get into an affluent suburb or nice beach town they disappear. These red light cameras are certainly not being placed where they would be most useful, which is at the most dangerous intersections (I know, because I just checked Google Street View). Instead, they're just a way for a cash strapped city to try to extract money from people who are least able to afford it and fight it.
posted by FJT at 9:54 AM on October 5, 2015 [5 favorites]


And to add: Yes, it is probable that the presence of those cameras did help reduce collisions in those intersections specifically, but it still kinda sucks that it's focused on certain bad intersections instead of just bad intersections in general.
posted by FJT at 10:01 AM on October 5, 2015


These red light cameras are certainly not being placed where they would be most useful, which is at the most dangerous intersections

Are "most dangerous" and "best cash grabs" really mutually exclusive? I would think that the best way to make money would be to put the cameras wherever the most lights are being run. Though I think what should really be done is to put the boxes/brackets for them every which place and then move the cameras within the boxes around every week or two. People would always know there could be a camera in the box today.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 10:05 AM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


In my vocabulary accident is not a euphemism for an act of god. Accidents have causes. People get charged with manslaughter for causing accidents. I understand that in current usage a lot of people equate accident with blameless event. That's just stupid in my view but then language means what people mean language to mean so who am I to judge? If anything I would say that calling something an accident is a conclusion so until an incident is examined it seems premature and prejudicial to call something an accident that might be intentional, (road rage anybody?) Isn't the fact of the matter that people are going to harm others unintentionally and we need a word the summons empathy and holds off blood feuds and retribution?
posted by Pembquist at 10:21 AM on October 5, 2015


I'm hesitant to be fully on board for more traffic citations, mandatory periodic license recertifications, and harsher laws not because I think they're ineffective, but I believe these will fall more heavily on minorities, the poor, and the undocumented.

Earlier this week research about the relationship between socioeconomics and traffic safety made the news. Essentially the more educated you are, the less likely it is you will die in a motor vehicle crash. Oh the authors of that paper use "Accident", *tut tut*.
posted by kendrak at 10:29 AM on October 5, 2015


People get charged with manslaughter for causing accidents.

You forgot the word "rarely."
posted by entropicamericana at 10:31 AM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


, I don't like the idea of telling people, "It's important to drive a car! But if you have an accident crash, you'll be morally+legally+financially responsible." The reasonable response to that is "Well then, I shouldn't drive at all," which, while not exactly wrong, is not yet possible.
posted by Rangi


I agree its not yet possible, but not sure why we shouldn't be making driving a bigger deal than it is. Everyone should be morally, legally, financially responsible...maybe we would drive better....or at least pay attention.
posted by agregoli at 10:56 AM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


They put red light cameras in poor neighborhoods knowing that poor people don't have the resources to fight tickets, hence easy money, and/or don't pay the tickets, resulting in high fines, warrants, suspended licenses, and the like, which result in higher revenues for courts and law enforcement.

Source: am poor person
posted by disclaimer at 10:57 AM on October 5, 2015 [9 favorites]


They put red light cameras in poor neighborhoods knowing that poor people don't have the resources to fight tickets, hence easy money, and/or don't pay the tickets, resulting in high fines, warrants, suspended licenses, and the like, which result in higher revenues for courts and law enforcement.

Source: am poor person


Red light cameras don't jump out and mug people. They fine people who are going through the intersection despite the fact that the light is red, thus risking the lives of other people. Stopping when the light turns yellow if you can do so safely is free.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 11:00 AM on October 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


Red light cameras are, however, rigged.
posted by grumpybear69 at 11:06 AM on October 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


I would think having unintentionally killed someone is punishment enough, personally

But it's not enough. It's not enough for the family that's destroyed needlessly by the loss of a life. And the pain and guilt of unintentionally killing someone will fade over time. It's certainly not enough of an incentive right now to make drivers more attentive and cautious. If it was, this conversation would be very different.

I live in the same city as Miko, and while I totally understand and gripe along with the irritation over drunk people dressed head-to-toe in black wandering into the streets, everyone in our city should be well enough aware of this phenomenon to slow down and look around better while driving. I walk home with my kid every day, crossing only in designated crosswalks, using crossing signals where they exist, and we have close calls on almost being hit with frightening regularity. There's a particularly busy crosswalk with a pedestrian activated red light, which I push and wait for the red, but cars blast through that red, despite seeing a person and a kid waiting to cross (kid holding a flashlight for better visibility at dusk). My neighborhood has been extremely vocal with the city about another really dangerous intersection that used to have a pedestrian controlled light that was removed a few years ago- the city can't do anything about it because the road is under state jurisdiction, and the state certainly isn't going to do anything about it. It's really frustrating to be a pedestrian feeling like injury or death is gamble we have to take every time we step into a crosswalk, and any penalties for drivers are obviously not enough to actively change their behavior. I'm not a perfect driver myself, but I do work really hard to scan the sides of the road ahead of me looking for people that seem like they are going to step into the road. I stop at crosswalks for pedestrians. That's like the least we could do.

Rearranging cities to make drivers less dangerous takes time, money, and effort, and I'm not convinced that enough people care enough to make it happen. Enforcing the existing traffic laws way more stringently would be a better step to actually changing behavior. If you know there's a red light camera, or that the chance of there being a camera is high, aren't you more likely to just stop at a red light? Then you won't get a ticket.
posted by banjo_and_the_pork at 11:07 AM on October 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


Red light cameras don't jump out and mug people. They fine people who are going through the intersection despite the fact that the light is red, thus risking the lives of other people.

Discriminatory enforcement of perfectly valid and useful laws is still discriminatory.
posted by Etrigan at 11:08 AM on October 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


Stopping when the light turns yellow if you can do so safely is free.

Not stopping at the light because the jackass behind you is tailgating and clearly has no intention of stopping, however, mostly only costs $325 if you don't have $325 to pay for it.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:08 AM on October 5, 2015


entropicamericana you are being provocative and contemptuous. Whether or not the frequency of manslaughter indictments meets your criteria for justice is not relevant to the meaning of the word accident.
posted by Pembquist at 11:08 AM on October 5, 2015


I'm not saying we fine people for turning on the radio. I'm saying that when someone fucks up and drives into oncoming traffic or hits pedestrians that they face real-life consequences for their actions rather than throwing up their hands and saying "shit happens".


I'm... almost saying the opposite, if not literally about "turning on the radio." It is much more appropriate to face consequences for a clear choice that will make you a more dangerous/distracted driver than for "fucking up" unless you mean something different by that word than the way I understand it.
posted by atoxyl at 11:14 AM on October 5, 2015


Discriminatory enforcement of perfectly valid and useful laws is still discriminatory.

If they're putting the lights in the places they expect to make the most money, that's not discriminatory enforcement. At least not discrimination on the basis of poverty or vulnerability or anything else. It's discrimination on the basis of behaviour - put the cameras where the most red lights are run. You're not going to place the cameras randomly. There has to be SOME basis of discrimination and "where people run the lights" seems like a good choice to me.

On the rigged article, I'm not sure I understood it. The cameras are going off before the light turns red? If so, that's not a great idea and the solution isn't to move the camera somewhere richer, it's to calibrate the camera properly. It's not like a mis-calibrated camera would be ok in a rich neighbourhood. The neighbourhood is neither here nor there to that problem.

I would like to see more ticketing of people running yellow lights, too, but that needs to be done by live police who can view context; not by a camera. Though I think the live police should be recording so they can make their case that the person did run the yellow light...which makes me think why not have red light cameras backed up by live video-viewers do yellow light ticketing....that is, the camera flags the yellow light runners and a real person then views the video and issues a ticket or doesn't based on context.

Oh, and if you take a ticket to court and lose, the fine should triple. This "no harm in trying" or "just go in and get the fine reduced" BS needs to end, and that actually would hit the rich more, since they're the ones who can take time off of work to go argue some bullshit or just go in and apoligize and hope the judge takes mercy.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 11:16 AM on October 5, 2015


It is much more appropriate to face consequences for a clear choice that will make you a more dangerous/distracted driver than for "fucking up" unless you mean something different by that word than the way I understand it.

The only reason I can think of to the contrary is that the "I fucked up" defense can be exploited by a person who was in fact doing something egregious (without any witnesses to contradict their account).

Looking at your gun analogy that may be your point in which case I'm not sure we actually disagree that much really except that you have a higher estimate and I a lower one of how many accidents could actually be prevented by consciously making a different choice, other than the choice not to drive at all.
posted by atoxyl at 11:22 AM on October 5, 2015


If they're putting the lights in the places they expect to make the most money, that's not discriminatory enforcement.

It absolutely is, if they're doing it because they know that poor people won't fight back and/or will have trouble paying the penalties on time, therefore leading to more penalties.

It's discrimination on the basis of behaviour - put the cameras where the most red lights are run.

disclaimer stated that poor neighborhoods were more targeted for red-light cameras for economic reasons, not because they were the places where the most red lights are run.
posted by Etrigan at 11:28 AM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


everyone in our city should be well enough aware of this phenomenon to slow down and look around better while driving

My point was that I do do this very well - hypervigilantly, given the particular gamut I have to run - and situations are still sometimes incredibly risky, through no fault of my own and entirely through the fault of the pedestrian. It happens. What I worry about is not doing the least I can do, but the incidents when the best I can do is not enough. And so many people who drive around here aren't from here, meaning there's no way they can know enough to predict this problem.

and then it's the "should." Whenever I encounter a solution to a public health or policy problem that begins "everyone should just..." I sigh. Because people don't. Of course they should, but they don't. We know this. That's why we have to outsmart humanity with design, otherwise, only the most scrupulous people will act safely, and that's not enough.

I'm not convinced that enough people care enough to make it happen

I think this pretty much it.

I'll have sympathy for driver's hurt feelings about the term collision vs accident the minute they join those of us who have been advocating for better infrastructure for decades instead of fighting every little possible progress we make.

I'm not sure who these kinds of invectives are aimed at. For instance, I drive a few times a week - wish I didn't have to, but for various structural and work reasons, I do. And I totally agree that we need stronger traffic enforcement, better infrastructure, and more traffic calming. And I'm certainly not fighting progress in any way - I support these measures - so I guess I've already "joined" you? But we can still call out "drivers" as a whole, as if everyone who agrees with these principles never drives? Because that's not true, I agree with them, and I still drive. The problem, I think, is that most people drive, and many of those people would really like driving to be a lot safer not least for their own safety, and others of those people may be actively fighting traffic solutions but I suspect they're a small minority, and the vast majority just can't be bothered to care. As with anything.
posted by Miko at 11:31 AM on October 5, 2015 [4 favorites]


disclaimer stated that poor neighborhoods were more targeted for red-light cameras for economic reasons, not because they were the places where the most red lights are run.

Well that's fucked up. I assumed the economic reasons worked because of all the people running red lights. If it's just scam poor people, then obviously that's messed up. But again, the red light cameras aren't mugging people. If they're miscalibrated, then calibrate them. Once they're calibrated poor people can undermine the whole cash grab by stopping when the light turns yellow if they can do so safely and keeping their neighbours safe. There's no poverty-related need to run a red light in the first place.

Triple the fine if you fight and lose" would solve the inequality of fighting it problem, since the rich would stop fighting it.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 11:34 AM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Triple the fine if you fight and lose" would solve the inequality of fighting it problem, since the rich would stop fighting it.

Rich people don't just have more money, they don't have to worry about money. If you're rich, you can afford to bet $200 on a 1/3 chance of getting your $100 ticket revoked, because you're only barely going to miss that $200. If you're poor, even if you were right, you're not going to contest it, because even if it's a 90 percent chance that you win, you're taking a 10 percent chance that you won't be able to make rent next month.
posted by Etrigan at 11:40 AM on October 5, 2015 [7 favorites]


It isn't about the cameras being poorly calibrated. It is about the length of the yellow light being intentionally set so low that if you are traveling at or under the speed limit and it changes as you are entering the intersection it will already be red before you get through.

So either you get fined for running a red light or you get fined for speeding as you try to avoid the red light. Or you slam on your brakes and possibly get hit from behind.
posted by weretable and the undead chairs at 12:11 PM on October 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


Yeah.... there's a big difference between running a red light 0.5 seconds after it's turned (which I would imagine represents the vast majority of automated enforcement tickets) and blowing through a light long after it's turned.

Both are bad, and you shouldn't run red lights. But, you're much less likely to cause an accident (particularly one involving a cyclist or pedestrian) in that first scenario.

Also, the people installing traffic cameras and speed cameras generally seem to be very uninterested in using the funds collected to institute a road diet, add bike lanes, improve the visibility of traffic signals, etc.

If a speed camera is issuing hundreds of tickets a day, the design of the road is a big part of the problem, and the camera is unlikely to be a sufficient deterrent to actually improve safety.

Of course, predatory traffic enforcement is par for the course in the US, and very few municipalities have any interest at all in improving safety.
posted by schmod at 12:26 PM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Lots of areas that put in red light cameras have dangerously short yellows. I know around here the yellow lights are way too short, so there's lots of situations where going the posted speed you have to jam the breaks to not blow through a red. Ideally a yellow light should be long enough that you don't have a zone where you need to slam your breaks to avoid running a red. Longer yellows accomplish this. They do not however encourage the fines that get you a return on investment from a stop light camera.

NJ has extremely long yellow lights and they're great because you have a long ways to parse the information of "hey slow down" and you never have to break to the point of getting rear ended.
posted by Ferreous at 12:29 PM on October 5, 2015 [5 favorites]


Traffic citations are definitely biting harder on the poor. In California, it often starts a vicious cycle where an unpaid citation results in the suspension of their driver's license. And since a lot of jobs require a car to get to or are a requirement of the job itself, these people end up losing their jobs and are further unable to pay their citation and it's late fines.

Since 2006 in California, 4.8 million licenses have been suspended due to failure to pay or appear in court. Of those only about 83,000 have been reinstated. Fortunately, the article does mention a traffic fine amnesty program that started a week ago and will run until March 2017, where people will only have to pay 50 to 80 percent of what they owe, depending on income or pay their fine in installments. Which is not great, but it's a start.
posted by FJT at 12:34 PM on October 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


I have to admit I find the faith people have, when faced with clear and obvious attempts to use legal penalties as a moneymaking scheme totally divorced from any meaningful attempt to deal with any societal problem, that all you have to do is obey the law and you'll be fine, seems remarkably naive.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:07 PM on October 5, 2015 [8 favorites]


I feel sickened by car commercials now: these often totally CGI'ed fantasies probably contribute subliminally to irresponsible driving, even if the real world driver is not consciously imitating them. Maybe each car commercial should voice-over the recent fatalities, as with the side effects in pharma ads.
posted by bad grammar at 1:57 PM on October 5, 2015 [4 favorites]


It is much more appropriate to face consequences for a clear choice that will make you a more dangerous/distracted driver than for "fucking up" unless you mean something different by that word than the way I understand it.

There are many factors that go into someone being a distracted driver, and without dash cams that are focused on the driver themselves it's difficult to prove exactly why someone made the mistake that led to them running off the road or side-swiping a cyclist. Basically I think if you are driving a car and you hurt somebody with that car because you weren't paying attention you should face consequences. It doesn't matter if it was because you were drinking coffee or yelling at the kids in the backseat or fiddling with the radio. You were irresponsible, it led to somebody getting hurt, now you face consequences.
posted by Anonymous at 2:07 PM on October 5, 2015


I've got no problem with red-light cameras and think they've got the potential to be a useful tool to make roads safer for everyone, but they need to be implemented only with very clear rules about how they can be used. Hard legal limits on how short a yellow light may be and on how close to the light change the ticket can be issued. Specific restrictions on how funds from fines can be used. Sufficiently wide distribution that they aren't being installed in ways that have a discriminatory effect. And most especially: no profit-sharing agreements with red-light camera vendors. The vendors can sell police and public works departments the equipment and charge for service, but they sure as hell should not be allowed to take a cut of every ticket, and that is apparently how some of these contracts work now.

I'd also make the fines for uncomplicated red-light violations caught by camera small ones. They should be swift, certain, and sufficient to be annoying without causing hardship, at least unless you're a severe repeat offender. Certainty of minor punishment is much more likely to work as a deterrent than making the fines high does (or else nobody'd ever lose money gambling.)

And of course no other fuck-barrel stuff should go along with this. No compounding interest on fines, no constantly escalating consequences for the same original action.

Do all that, and I'll welcome our new red-light camera overlords heartily.
posted by asperity at 2:12 PM on October 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


Can we please stop treating sobriety as a get-out-of-manslaughter-charge-free card?

We rightfully prosecute drunk drivers for making very bad choices some time before they killed (or could have killed) someone. Why do we excuse the lucid for making bad choices immediately before killing someone?
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:12 PM on October 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


I feel sickened by car commercials now: these often totally CGI'ed fantasies probably contribute subliminally to irresponsible driving

It cracks me up that the commercials always show the cars whizzing along a scenic coastal highway or, increasingly, a mysteriously deserted city street, as if that bears even the slightest resemblance to reality. I think they should be required to be a little more realistic: Imagine a car commercial showing a paunchy, balding guy behind the wheel of a cluttered minivan, stuck in stop-n-go traffic. His eyes are dull and lifeless. He sighs heavily. The camera swooshes dramatically around the minivan inches forward before transitioning into a crane shot, showing the minivan to be just a dot in a sea of other vehicles, surrounded by frontage roads lined with fast food restaurants and big box stores....
posted by entropicamericana at 2:13 PM on October 5, 2015 [6 favorites]


Also, traffic fines should be proportional to income like they are in civilized counties.
posted by entropicamericana at 2:15 PM on October 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


My bad. If they're shortening yellow lights, that's not just money-grubbing, it's money-grubbing by putting lives at risk. It seems like there should be someone one can sue over that (i.e. that citizens of a city should be able to have the courts force safe timing), but I can't figure out how that would work.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 2:17 PM on October 5, 2015


But really, the people who are most responsible for the deaths on our roads are the ones who build them. They're at the mercy of politicians and voters and angry mobs of special interest motorists, so it's not easy.

But designing roads to minimise conflict and make it uncomfortable to drive at unsafe speeds will cut down on KSIs without needing to scold or prosecute.

But when you try, you get weirdos like the crackpot protestors at the Waltham Forest Mini Holland opening. People are easy to rile up with the "they're trying to take your cookie" rhetoric.

But hey, even the Netherlands had to fight for this stuff.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:18 PM on October 5, 2015


(Nobody's mentioned $8/gal gas - I think that would be a pretty good solution to at least reduce road traffic. A few years back when it was hitting $5 a gallon there was a distinct difference).

The reality is that this is as regressive as sales tax. Poor people still need to drive to work too, and "just ride the bus lol" doesn't apply to large swaths of the country. This is one of those things that you can only do in concert with, or really even after you've provided a viable alternative to driving.


My bad. If they're shortening yellow lights, that's not just money-grubbing, it's money-grubbing by putting lives at risk. It seems like there should be someone one can sue over that (i.e. that citizens of a city should be able to have the courts force safe timing), but I can't figure out how that would work.

People are on it.


Why is this true for people who kill people with a car and not the entire class of manslaughter*? Do you think that charge simply shouldn't exist?

Because no one wants to examine too closely the fact that they themselves could be, or have very nearly been in this sort of situation.

I'm not excusing myself from that dataset, but that's entirely what it is. Driving is just too relatable. Everyone, or a large enough set of people that it wouldn't be unfair to use that phrase, drives. We have an entire culture where people chide you for "not being a real adult" or "not being responsible" if you don't have a car and a drivers license. I've applied for jobs, in which i'm not delivering pizza or anything but sitting in an office, where they straight up ask you how you're getting to work and note that public transit is not a valid option for "reliable transport".(and this is in a major metro area with mostly functional transit, meaningful express service, commuter trains, etc)

There really is no analogy that works, because it's so ubiquitous and simultaneously required in many peoples lives. To the point that chosing to live without a car is a more privileged choice to be able to make than like, taking up scuba diving or sailing as a hobby.

So you end up in this situation where it's not only relatable, but everyone involved has it deeply ingrained that there's basically a Right To Drive, since duh, you need to. And well they fucked up while doing that thing i do every day, everyone fucks up sometimes right? That other person just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time! Oh well!
posted by emptythought at 3:09 PM on October 5, 2015 [6 favorites]


The goal should not necessarily be "fewer deaths" (that's how we get things like requiring cyclists to wear helmets and laws against "jaywalking") --Automocar

I think the goal should ABSOLUTELY be "fewer deaths." We just need to decouple it from the assumption that everyone on or near a road will be encased in a giant box engineered to withstand collisions at 60mph.

----

most people drive, and many of those people would really like driving to be a lot safer not least for their own safety, and others of those people may be actively fighting traffic solutions but I suspect they're a small minority, and the vast majority just can't be bothered to care --Miko

I suspect Miko is right, but that small minority can be very vocal, and I don't meet many people at council meetings or advocacy groups saying "I support safe infrastructure for all modes" who aren't also saying "I bike/walk/take transit." Part of this stems from the fact that so many people don't care, but I think it's also the case that people who don't walk/bike for transportation on a regular basis are simply unaware of how dangerous cars are.

That's why we need to change some of our transportation-related language: it overlooks both the experience of travelling without a car and the things we all have in common, regardless of how we get around.

Seattle had a big shift in transportation language recently, as described by Michael Andersen in an article on PeopleForBikes: http://www.peopleforbikes.org/blog/entry/how-smart-language-helped-end-seattles-paralyzing-bikelash

I've stopped talking about traffic "accidents" not because I think people should take more blame for them, but because I think we all need to take responsibility for them. Their roots are usually in education and infrastructure, both of which are matters of public policy. We can ALL have an impact on those policies, and there are many ways to do so. Changing how we talk - and think - about injury and death in the transportation system is one of them.
posted by sibilatorix at 4:04 PM on October 5, 2015 [4 favorites]


1) Echoing Miko, the complaints about "the media" using "accident" seem ill-informed. "Collision" was drilled into me in j-school, and most reports I see use that. It's the "alleged" of crashes — it exists to both cover your ass and be more objective about the process.

2) I have been in collisions, I have been in accidents. I'm a really good driver (no, really), but I recognize that "accident" is orthogonal to harm — even the most recent "accident" that I was at fault for (when a jackass stopped short in an intersection and I hit his bumper at a speed so low that the spedometer didn't even register) was still because I didn't scrupulously follow the laws. It was unintentional, and came from expecting him to follow the law, but still — my bad. I'd contrast that with an accident I had years ago when my serpentine belt snapped (something entirely unpredictable and not my fault) and I lost power steering in the middle of a turn and plowed into a lamp post (luckily, it was at like 3 am so I was alone on the road). There was nothing I could do, and if I had hit someone I still would have been at fault legally (because my car is my responsibility) but it definitely would have been accidental.

3) "Accidents" have also been on my mind because I fell down a hole into philosophical apologetics recently, and anything not philosophically definitional is "accidental," i.e. that Christ rose and returned is crucial to Christianity but whether he had a beard is accidental. Just gives a weird flavor to the discussion.
posted by klangklangston at 4:09 PM on October 5, 2015


Basically I think if you are driving a car and you hurt somebody with that car because you weren't paying attention you should face consequences. It doesn't matter if it was because you were drinking coffee or yelling at the kids in the backseat or fiddling with the radio.

For the most part I think these are distractions people have a choice to avoid, yes, so we're not entirely in disagreement. Those are things that diminish one's ability to pay attention. I guess my concept of attention itself is of something that is only partly within conscious control, and I interpreted your specific examples in this sentence

If I fucking kill someone because I was looking at a cloud or not thinking about where I was turning I should face consequences.

in a way that seemed to imply otherwise.
posted by atoxyl at 4:11 PM on October 5, 2015


To the point that choosing to live without a car is a more privileged choice to be able to make than like, taking up scuba diving or sailing as a hobby.

I'm not going to say it's not a privileged choice, but my job doesn't pay enough for me to afford a car any more than it pays enough for me to take up sailing (and I'd probably need the car to drive to the marina, assuming I lived anywhere near a marina.) I spend a lot less on transportation than any of my coworkers who drive everywhere, even if I have to put up with hassles they don't (and vice versa). There's certainly privilege in the choice to avoid unnecessary driving, but it's not so much financial privilege as privilege in a variety of other life circumstances.

One of my coworkers actually claimed that he needed to stay home from work today because he didn't have a car, which got him roundly mocked because he lives closer to this office than I do and he's entirely able-bodied and presumably smart enough to read a bus schedule. Turned out he just chose a really stupid excuse to cover for staying home to entertain visiting family. (Diarrhea would have worked better and gotten less scrutiny.)
posted by asperity at 4:11 PM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


I don't meet many people at council meetings or advocacy groups saying "I support safe infrastructure for all modes" who aren't also saying "I bike/walk/take transit."

I haven't met many people who never bike/walk/take transit who express much awareness that non-driving transportation modes even exist. On the bright side, this is an advocacy issue for which it's fairly easy to improve awareness just by getting people to hop on a bus now and then.
posted by asperity at 4:23 PM on October 5, 2015


This thread is cold. Wow. I would think having unintentionally killed someone is punishment enough, personally. I think it's safe to assume that most people will be in hell after that.

I was accidentally hit by cars a dozen times in my relatively short time being alive. The last two times, the cars accidentally rear-ended me when I was stopped at a red light.

I'm not sure which of the drivers pissed me off more, the one who got out, looked at his car and said "It doesn't look like you did much damage to my car.", or the young driver with his giggling friends who rolled down his window and said "Oops."

The last time a car accidented me caused me enough injury that three years later, I can't carry a full laundry basket or lift my carry-on luggage into the overhead bin without suffering pain in my neck and shoulders for days after.

I have a very hard time thinking that those reckless and inattentive drivers appreciate the ways their careless driving has had lasting consequence in my life where I can't easily manage day-to-day activities. And in the scheme of things, my injuries are minor -- I can't imagine loss of limb or life resulting from another person's active disregard.
posted by loquat at 4:39 PM on October 5, 2015 [5 favorites]


Still in response to schroedinger:

I know very well that I am a bad driver. I've crashed into another vehicle I think twice in my pretty short life - not at dangerous speeds but once fucking up the other car pretty badly and once my own - and done various things that were quite unsafe in retrospect. I've learned to try my best to avoid those unsafe situations - I won't drive when I haven't slept, if I get into an emotional argument while driving I am pulling over right away next time, in general I know I shouldn't get too involved in talking to a passenger. But on both occasions that I actually hit someone ('s car) I was driving by myself in the middle of the day when something unexpected happened and I responded in a split second by taking exactly the wrong action. One of those crashes was undoubtedly related to pressure from a personal problem but the whole reason I was driving was that I needed to solve that problem. The other was at a point where I was pretty inexperienced/out-of-practice as a driver in the real world but I didn't really know that until I demonstrated it to myself. More fundamentally though I'm just an unusually poor multitasker and I don't know what kind of solution there is for that. Driving is awful and I hate it - it will definitely be a criterion for my next job that I don't have to drive there - and I don't know why we let most people do it.
posted by atoxyl at 4:44 PM on October 5, 2015 [2 favorites]


LastOfHisKinds: Our brains run on language and the words we use shape the way we think about things.

Linguistic determinism has been largely discredited.

https://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/sapir.cfm
posted by readyfreddy at 4:47 PM on October 5, 2015


This from McSweeney's re: "officer-involved shootings" seems appropriate to this discussion on diffusing responsibility through language. It's a different issues, obviously, but touches on similar linguistic constructs as have been discussed in this thread.
posted by jacquilynne at 4:53 PM on October 5, 2015 [4 favorites]


The reality is that this is as regressive as sales tax.

It absolutely is! I don't disagree with you. But so are many of the other seemingly obvious solutions here - let's not pretend they wouldn't impact people with the fewest choices the most painfully.
posted by Miko at 7:16 PM on October 5, 2015


I would support renewal of driver licenses contingent on passing an on-course driving test and an eye exam every five years, plus a mandatory comprehensive driving safety course every ten years. The AARP would fight this tooth and nail.

I also think that licenses should be suspended and revoked much more frequently, for a wider range of traffic crimes and offenses. If you kill someone, your license should be revoked. Inconvenient? You killed someone, lump it.

This would immediately take enough drivers off the roads that we might see meaningful infrastructure changes before the end of time, since all those former drivers would be hollering for more trains, buses, bike lanes, and sidewalks.

And who knows? We might even save a tree.
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 7:24 PM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


Oh yeah, and I'd pay for it all by taxing the rich again.
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 7:25 PM on October 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


readyfreddy: Linguistic determinism has been largely discredited.

From the linked article: "While linguists generally agree that the weaker Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, also known as linguistic relativism, can be shown to be true to some extent, there are criticisms of the stronger form of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, also known as linguistic determinism."

Why does the merest mention of Whorf or linguistic determinism bring down the wrath of anyone who's ever taken a linguistics course? It seems like such a consistent over-reaction that I must have missed something (wouldn't be the first time, either).
posted by sneebler at 7:25 PM on October 5, 2015 [4 favorites]


I've applied for jobs, in which i'm not delivering pizza or anything but sitting in an office, where they straight up ask you how you're getting to work and note that public transit is not a valid option for "reliable transport".

Which is, of course, probably illegal discrimination, considering that there are many disabled people who cannot drive (legally blind people, people with seizure disorders, etc).

There really is no analogy that works, because it's so ubiquitous and simultaneously required in many peoples lives. To the point that chosing to live without a car is a more privileged choice to be able to make than like, taking up scuba diving or sailing as a hobby.

I keep hearing people say this, but are they aware that there are many people who are simply too poor to have a car? Even in suburban or rural areas. My dad lives in rural BC, sans car. He gets by on the occassional taxi, but usually by walking or cycling a long way if he wants to go anywhere. At times, my mom has travelled 2 hours each way through two different transit systems to get to and from work. Neither ever learned how to drive, and couldn't have afforded cars even if they knew how.

For the vast majority of carless people, it's not a luxury or a choice: they just can't afford a car.

and this isn't even considering people who will never be able to drive due to disabilities. Or those who are too young to drive or those are too old, of those who never learned because their parents were too poor to drive ...

Maybe instead of going on as if carless people only ever live in posh inner city condos, we can recognise the reality that millions of people in suburbs, exurbs and rural areas don't have cars because they can't afford them or can't drive them, and start to offer alternative transportation in these areas as well?
posted by jb at 8:33 PM on October 5, 2015 [5 favorites]


Which is, of course, probably illegal discrimination, considering that there are many disabled people who cannot drive (legally blind people, people with seizure disorders, etc).

So are many things, like for example in my city/state asking about convictions on the application. But tons of places do it because fuck us, right?

I keep hearing people say this, but are they aware that there are many people who are simply too poor to have a car? Even in suburban or rural areas. My dad lives in rural BC, sans car. He gets by on the occassional taxi, but usually by walking or cycling a long way if he wants to go anywhere. At times, my mom has travelled 2 hours each way through two different transit systems to get to and from work. Neither ever learned how to drive, and couldn't have afforded cars even if they knew how.

For the vast majority of carless people, it's not a luxury or a choice: they just can't afford a car.


I, too, have heard stories like this. But there really are large areas in which if you want to have a job, you need a car. This is why $500 and less beaters exist, especially in states that don't do inspections. Many of them are probably uninsured, and probably one pull-over and set of tickets or major breakdown away from being not worth fixing(or, to the owner, functionally unfixable).

Nowhere did i disagree with any point that you're saying, but it is really worth recognizing that a lot of the people who make those sort of "why have a car?" comments online(and not so much on mefi, but it does pop up here) live in NYC, or another major city with a functional transit system. Or are fervent and evangelical bike commuters, etc. "You don't need a car to commute, i live in the city and i haven't had a car for years" is a statement of privilege when living in a city large enough to have a meaningful transit system is increasingly a luxury.

A lot of the people who live in rural areas or far out suburbs while not having a car are incredibly poor. Unless you're retired, it's an isolated lifestyle. Some of my relatives live in rural idaho where they need to drive two hours just to get to a real grocery store that isn't just a mini mart with inflated prices. They also have to drive about an hour and a half to work. And there isn't really any direction they could move that isn't even further where both would be in the same place, or that they could afford. My family that lived in eastern washington also drove a bit over an hour to work every day, with no availability of transit, while being really poor. And don't even get me started on reservations.

For a lot of people, yea, it isn't a luxury or a choice, but not having a car means you will stay incredibly poor since it's extremely hard to work.

It's one of those weird things that the relatively well off and the very poor oddly have in common.
posted by emptythought at 11:28 PM on October 5, 2015 [3 favorites]


I think people perhaps overestimate how many people would ditch their cars and take public transport if only there were more options. I live in a city with good public transport and cycling roads, and cycling is culturally completely normal. And yet, every single person I know has a car. And they all drive it everywhere. Sure, you see lots of Dutch people cycling on those youtube video's, but the majority of that is people going short distances for shopping a few forgotten groceries, visiting friends or cycling to work if it is less than 2 miles (in other words - totally walkable distances). And I'm not saying that this infrastructure isn't totally awesome and that it isn't super valuable to have these options to cycle, and cycling 2 miles is a lot faster than walking 2 miles, so it's still really super useful, but I don't think that most car use for Americans is for those less than 2 mile distances and therefore I don't think that improving cycling infrastructure will make a real meaningful dent in traffic crashes if all else stays the same. In fact it will maybe even increase deaths because people on bicycles are more vulnerable than people in cars. Even with our heavily praised cycling infrastructure 200 cyclists die in crashes every year (out of a total of 570 people who died in traffic "accidents").

Public transport isn't a panacea either. For one, it's way too expensive, even where I live, where gas is heavily taxed and public transport is heavily subsidized. But it's also really inconvenient for most people. I think many people who commute by car and say they would love to go by public transport have this idealized image of a bus/train that stops near their home and then again near their work and it would take less time than a car ride would take and now they can read a book. And if you have a job like that it can be great, but that's not most jobs. The only people I know who take public transport to work are people whose employer will pay for public transport but not for gas+parking. Just having a good public transport system is not enough to get people to ditch their cars.

I think all this talk about how to get people to ditch their cars is a distraction from the problem that this post is about: that when people ignore traffic rules and kill somebody it is seen as an accident where nobody is at fault. You don't change that by wondering about some utopian world where people do not use cars anymore, but you can start by at least making people responsible for their actions when they are clearly at fault and making infrastructure safer in places where it is currently particularly unsafe. That doesn’t have to be done through some grand nation wide plan to make roads safer, but just one dangerous intersection at a time.
posted by blub at 1:16 AM on October 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


I don't think that most car use for Americans is for those less than 2 mile distances

Not most, but probably 20% or so
posted by the agents of KAOS at 4:50 AM on October 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


I think people perhaps overestimate how many people would ditch their cars and take public transport if only there were more options.

This is very true. People value the convenience of a car above all: going door-to-door to exactly where you want, when you want, however many times you want, without having to concern yourself with an indifferent (and here, somewhat unreliable) schedule. To your "read a book" is their "listen to podcasts/audiobooks/talk on the phone." There are a lot of places with decent public transportation, but the only places in the US that it works really well are places where, in addition to the transport, there are distinct disincentives to using a car - limited parking, high parking costs - and there is enough neighborhood infrastructure in the form of groceries and laundry and such that you really can get by without that.Then, too, there's the "proximity premium" (I think I just coined that) of local/neighborhood businesses price-gouging on necessities because they know you have limited access to going outside neighborhood bounds for cheaper groceries and basics - something wealthier people complain about but can manage, but that really impacts the diet and health of lower-income people. There really is no level of personal convenience like having a car once you step outside of a dense and well resourced urban network that offers jobs, food, housing, and services in that 2-mi (or so) walking radius. Even my weekly trip into the downtown core to take a class takes a minimum of 90 minutes end-to-end on public transport, with a choice of only one or two departures an hour, where driving is about 30 minutes - the only hassle once there is parking, but there are times $30 in parking is worth it compared to $19 in transit fees and an additional 2 hours added to my day.

In my household we have 2 drivers, one of whom uses our car to commute, and rather than have a 2nd car we use Zipcar, which is a great solution. I'd really like to see that sort of "middle way" expand - a Zipcar can fill the niche in life that once needed 50 or so individually owned cars to fill. It doesn't really solve the safety issue much, though, since I feel like by definition people who drive less are less good drivers, and Zipcar is exclusively aimed at people who drive less.
posted by Miko at 5:59 AM on October 6, 2015 [3 favorites]


To the point that chosing to live without a car is a more privileged choice to be able to make than like, taking up scuba diving or sailing as a hobby.

I keep hearing people say this, but are they aware that there are many people who are simply too poor to have a car?


I think you missed the words "cho[o]sing" and "choice" in that sentence. Yes, a lot of people are too poor to have a car. I suspect that nearly 100 percent of them would rather not be too poor to have a car.
posted by Etrigan at 6:08 AM on October 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


Me: My bad. If they're shortening yellow lights, that's not just money-grubbing, it's money-grubbing by putting lives at risk. It seems like there should be someone one can sue over that (i.e. that citizens of a city should be able to have the courts force safe timing), but I can't figure out how that would work.

Empthythought: People are on it.

That seems inadequate and missing the point. I don't mean that someone should sue because they're being unjustly ticketed. That sucks, but even for the very poor, it's the smaller harm. The greater harm is that people's lives are being put at risk. You know what's worth than poor people being hit with endless fines? Poor people, or anyone, dying. I would like some city safety committee (I made this term up, I mean someone in the city that is concerned with safety, be it a private non-profit or a city department) to have minimum yellow light times set (and its my understanding that these usually are computerized to vary with conditions so when it's rainy or icy, they're longer). If traffic signals are deliberately unsafe, heads need to roll somewhere, and it shouldn't be at the intersection.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 7:19 AM on October 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


where gas is heavily taxed and public transport is heavily subsidized

If you live anywhere in the United States, gas is not heavily taxed. Delaware is the state that most closely covers its road costs with user fees (at almost 60% (and this is probably because Delaware hits up everyone who drives the ten miles through the state on I-95 with a toll), but the national average is that only about a third of road costs are covered by user fees. Driving is more subsidized by percentage than transit in almost every state. If you switch to absolute numbers instead of percentage, the subsidy for driving dwarfs the subsidy for transit.

The federal gas tax has not been raised since 1992. Ross Perot advocated a 50 cent raise in the gas tax back then, but the federal gas tax is still 18.4 cents per gallon.

And these numbers don't take into account the many externalities of subsidized driving: sprawl, air pollution, increased obesity, resource depletion, among others. Taking these into account, a gasoline price of $8/gallon actually seems reasonable.

The real regressive tax in the United States is having to own an automobile at all.

To your "read a book" is their "listen to podcasts/audiobooks/talk on the phone."

Why do we allow people to talk on the phone at all while driving? There are many studies showing that driving while on even a hands-free phone call is as bad or worse than driving with a 0.08 BAC. Yet, as long as you have a hand-free device, it is socially and legally acceptable to talk on the phone. This is another example of drivers not taking responsibility for their actions. If you are driving your car, you should be driving your car, not texting, not talking on the phone, and not staring off into space.
posted by GregorWill at 9:54 AM on October 6, 2015 [4 favorites]


If you live anywhere in the United States, gas is not heavily taxed.
I live in the Netherlands. Gas really is heavily taxed where I live, it costs about 1.60 euro per liter ($6.80 per gallon) at the moment.
posted by blub at 12:33 PM on October 6, 2015


Why do people use devices while driving? Because driving is boring. Most modern cars are like driving around in a living room. You're so isolated from the concept that you're moving at speed, that your car has weight and momentum and inertia, that you get bored.

You've got all these conveniences around you - a radio/XM/Sirius, a DVD player, a nice comfy adjustable seat, armrests, a cup holder, all of it. Take a modern cabin from a car and expand it a bit and you've got the perfect micro-living room. You don't even have to reach for anything.

Want to make driving safer? Take all that shit out. A steel seat, some rough suspension, a steering system that's actually feeding back the effects of the road and is a little tough to handle, brakes that you actually have to work to employ, and you get an engaged driver.

My dad bought my sisters and I a 1970 Chevy Suburban when we learned to drive. It was a piece of shit. It weighed like 90,000 pounds, had power steering that failed every once in a while (so you had to reef that steering wheel around like a stuck valve when you didn't expect it), drum brakes, and a terrible suspension. The steering didn't track very well, so you had to concentrate on driving in a straight line (which taught me to look waaay out ahead of me because that's how you drive a straight line), and to look ahead for things happening waaay out there, because in that beast, you needed to prepare.

You felt every mile an hour, the shitty leaf springs and off road tires that dad put on it (as an attempt to improve his odds of us not calling him if we got it stuck somewhere, I think) made that clear. It had blind spots all the way down both sides despite having huge side mirrors that blocked your side views very effectively. You couldn't NOT take a careful look at the area around the truck before you changed a lane or made a turn because once you started a maneuver, you had to finish it.

It didn't take long for any of us to figure out that you really needed lead time to stop, and that you really needed to plan ahead for a turn, and if you went too fast down a bumpy dirt road it was gonna hydroplane into a donut at the slightest opportunity. It was also an internal death trap. It had a solid steel dashboard with zero padding and a steering wheel that left bruises. I had bruises all across my midsection for a month from that steering wheel after I put it into a snow bank once. And there weren't seat belts to speak of, just a "lap belt" that basically kept you from sliding around but would have just paralyzed you from the waist down if anything got too serious.

So we learned to drive in that thing and even when I still drove, 30 some years later (I don't anymore), it was still engrained behavior to expect the steering to fuck up or the guy in the next lane to sneak up on me, and to check. By looking. And to drive with the radio off and a window open, so I could hear outside. No matter how cool it is being IN a car - and modern cars have all manner of cool things inside - everything important is happening outside. And that's where your attention belongs and that's what that truck taught me. A few times. The hard way.
posted by disclaimer at 1:43 PM on October 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


That seems inadequate and missing the point. I don't mean that someone should sue because they're being unjustly ticketed. That sucks, but even for the very poor, it's the smaller harm. The greater harm is that people's lives are being put at risk. You know what's worth than poor people being hit with endless fines? Poor people, or anyone, dying.

The thing is, that's hard. That's hard and expensive to quantify and prove with studies. "These fines are unjust because they're unreasonably hard to avoid and a reasonable person couldn't stop in time" is relatively easy to prove comparatively.

If you take away their profit, or get them to increase the yellow light time because of those suits, then the net is still positive? That's how i see it at least.
posted by emptythought at 2:48 PM on October 6, 2015


I'm 100% against red light cameras in all contexts. I hate hate hate red light violators, but an appropriately set yellow light phase (which depends on speed limit, grade, and the condition of the roadway) along with a short all red phase, which far too many intersections lack, cuts down on deaths from red light running as much as the cameras do.

BTW, in most states, there is no such thing as "running a yellow." If you enter the intersection prior to the light turning red, you are not committing a violation. A surprising number of crashes are caused by people failing to yield to those legally clearing the intersection from the previous phase because they saw the light turn green and just went without bothering to look. Or flew through the intersection at full speed immediately as the light turned green, to the same effect. A lot of people don't grasp that a green light does not mean that they have the right of way under all circumstances.

I also have a particular hatred for the speed kills crowd. In the sense that higher speed = more energy, sure. But in the sense of higher speed = greater risk of crash, no. Higher speed differentials kill. Yes, speed limits need to be set low, and the road designed such that drivers want to drive slowly, where there is pedestrian and bicycle traffic. On a limited access highway, however, it is the people going excessively slowly and the relatively fewer people going excessively faster than traffic that cause most of the trouble. Especially when they fail to exercise any sort of lane discipline. Exceeding the speed limit is not the issue, failing to stay close to the speed of the overall traffic flow is.
posted by wierdo at 8:34 PM on October 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm 100% against red light cameras in all contexts. I hate hate hate red light violators, but an appropriately set yellow light phase (which depends on speed limit, grade, and the condition of the roadway) along with a short all red phase, which far too many intersections lack, cuts down on deaths from red light running as much as the cameras do."

The problem with long yellows as the solution is that too many people don't think "can I stop safely" when they see a yellow. They think "can I make it before it turns red." So as the light gets longer people just adjust their estimates of whether or not they can make it. I see people every day who are waiting to turn left already stopped and not in the intersection when the light turns yellow. The light turns yellow and the car that's already in the intersection goes, and if they think they can make it, they go too. That should get your license suspended as far as I'm concerned. Ditto people stopped for pedestrians to cross the street they're right turning onto and then turning right when the light turns yellow.

And speed does kill; whether it increases the risk of accidents or not. Basically you're saying "I hate it when people say this, even though it's technically true, because I don't think this other related thing is true." I'm not convinced, though, that driving too fast doesn't increase the risk of accident, since speed increases stopping distance which means you have less time to react. That fact that something else speed related might also increase the risk, doesn't mean this doesn't increase the risk.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 8:50 PM on October 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


@If only I had a penguin: the elasticity doesn't make it breakeven, though.

An increase of 0.5 to 1.5 s in yellow duration (such that it does not exceed 5.5 s) will decrease the frequency of red-light-running by at least 50 percent;
Drivers do adapt to the increase in yellow duration; however, this adaptation does not undo the benefit of an increase in yellow duration;
source
posted by whisk(e)y neat at 8:56 PM on October 6, 2015 [2 favorites]


I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that people going "excessively slowly" could be the cause of a collision. Even on a limited-access highway there could be wildlife running into the road, water pooling or flowing across the road, sinkholes opening up or any number of other things that would result in vehicles stopping completely. If you're trying to blame your collision with someone in front of you on the premise that they were going too slowly it seems like it must mean you were driving in a fashion that would have caused a collision in any of those circumstances.
posted by XMLicious at 9:01 PM on October 6, 2015 [5 favorites]


Wow, that's great. Let's do it, then. Though I don't see why it requires getting rid of the red light cameras.

But wait... is the .5 to 1.5 second really the relevant one? I mean hopefully all lights are already 1.5 seconds long, so this doesn't so much mean that increasing to 1.5 seconds decreases the risk, but that decreasing it to .5 seconds from 1.5 would increase the rate 100%.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 9:02 PM on October 6, 2015


I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that people going "excessively slowly" could be the cause of a collision.

I think this argument is usually about speed differences... the one car going to slowly while everyone else is going faster is going to cause a crash. I'm not sure why this is always the imagined situation, though, since the "speed kills" argument isn't meant to get one car to drive at the limit while everyone else speeds, it's to get everyone to slow down. People driving slower only creates a speed differential if you don't go slowly, too.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 9:06 PM on October 6, 2015 [4 favorites]


If you're trying to blame your collision with someone in front of you on the premise that they were going too slowly it seems like it must mean you were driving in a fashion that would have caused a collision in any of those circumstances.

When I hear people complaining about "slow" drivers on limited-access highways, they're usually also the ones who don't maintain anything like a two-second following distance. Sure, minor differences among vehicles in speed are going to be a problem if everyone on the road's tailgating. The answer's not for everyone to try to maintain the exact same speed regardless of ability/preference/visibility/whatever, but for people to drive such that they're not expecting everyone on the road to have something far better than normal human reaction times.

And maintaining a sensible following distance gets you pegged as slow by that kind of driver, even when the driver ahead of you is going the exact same speed. That's dangerous bullshit that makes driving suck more than it should.
posted by asperity at 10:42 PM on October 6, 2015 [5 favorites]


BTW, in most states, there is no such thing as "running a yellow." If you enter the intersection prior to the light turning red, you are not committing a violation.

Accelerating to beat a yellow will get you a ticket, and if you fight it, you'll likely lose. I've had driver's licenses in five states, and every one of them says that the Technically Proper Response to a yellow light is in fact to stop, unless it is unsafe to do so (e.g., if you're practically already in the intersection).
posted by Etrigan at 6:08 AM on October 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


Yeah, I think I used the phrase "running a yellow" in a comment, and to me that's the "hmm that's a stale green ohshit it'sturningyellow ibetterslamonthegasandgetthroughbeforeit'sred!!!" Which, technically legal or not, is really unsafe driving and people who do it are bad drivers.
posted by misskaz at 6:49 AM on October 7, 2015


Yeah, by running the yellow I mean both trying to beat the yellow light when there's every reason to think you could have stopped safely (regardless of whether or not they accelerate to beat the light) AND people who go through the yellow even though they were already stopped or pretty damn close to stopped (e.g. in stop and go traffic) when the light turned yellow and go anyway. It should probably also include people who are stopped in the intersection when the light turns yellow, other than those turning left (i.e. people who entered an intersection when they had no room to exit the intersection).

I don't mean anyone who is ever in the intersection while the light is yellow.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 7:43 AM on October 7, 2015


"I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that people going "excessively slowly" could be the cause of a collision.

This is one of those issues where people discussing it often base their opinions on an idealized notion of law-abiding citizens rather than the actual behavior of drivers.

The first and biggest reason why excessively slow drivers are dangerous is in the context of (in the U.S.) driving in the left lanes, prompting people to pass on the right. Nominally, passing on the right is illegal, however it is common practice in any multilane road, and it's significantly more dangerous than passing on the left.

And it's often a behavior I've anecdotally noticed in people who are self-righteous about traffic laws — my father-in-law being a great example of someone who refuses to break the speed limit even when passing on a multilane freeway, often proclaiming that he's going the speed limit so everyone behind him is going too fast, and frustrating miles of traffic behind him while he passes a semi doing three miles under the limit.

For a more extreme example, think about when tractors get onto a main road and everyone pushes to get around them. Again, the argument that the real cause of the collision is unsafe behavior from drivers seeking to pass ignores the behavioral norms of driving — and study after study has demonstrated that in general, the 85th percentile of drivers tends to be the safety median for setting limits. If limits are set too low, or drivers are driving significantly below 85th percentile speed norms*, behavioral norms will ignore limits and treat slow drivers as hazards, increasing the risk for all drivers. And unfortunately, most speed limits in America are set at between the 30 and 50 percentile norms.

And it's weird — while Italy gets a bad reputation for wild drivers, which seems true inside the cities (I was in a cab in Rome where the driver hopped up on streetcar tracks and essentially played chicken with a tram before cutting back into the street), on the highways one of the things that I found really pleasant in the week or so of driving I did there was that there was very little macho shit about not letting people pass or getting over. If someone is coming up faster than you, you move to the right and let them get past, because if they want to go faster that's on them.

"Accelerating to beat a yellow will get you a ticket, and if you fight it, you'll likely lose. I've had driver's licenses in five states, and every one of them says that the Technically Proper Response to a yellow light is in fact to stop, unless it is unsafe to do so (e.g., if you're practically already in the intersection)."

This is emphatically not true in California, where the sole legal definition of a yellow light is that it is a warning for a driver that the next light will be red. The law in Michigan is that you should stop if safe before a yellow light, but that if you're in the intersection when the light turns red (and the stop at yellow wasn't "practicable") you have the right of way to proceed. In Oregon, the law is that you should stop if safe at yellow, and that if your vehicle has not entirely cleared the intersection by the time the light turns red, you are guilty of running a red light.

State laws are inconsistent and can often be weird. But in none of those three states is accelerating to beat a yellow officially prohibited by statute.

State laws also differ on what constitutes a "full and complete stop," which is obnoxious. Slight changes in definition require different behavior; in some states a complete stop at a stop sign is defined primarily by looking to the other directions of traffic to determine if it's safe to proceed, in others it's all forward motion, in others it's a reasonable pause or a specific duration of being stopped.

Basically, on a given road, about 85 percent of drivers will be at a given speed or below, with a two-peaked distribution around the 85th percentile and whatever the given speed limit is. There tend to be fewer collisions when those two peaks are closer together. But this number does not refer to 85 percent of a given speed or have an even distribution. I believe I'm getting this right — hwyngr might come to correct me.
posted by klangklangston at 10:50 AM on October 7, 2015


"Accelerating to beat a yellow will get you a ticket, and if you fight it, you'll likely lose. I've had driver's licenses in five states, and every one of them says that the Technically Proper Response to a yellow light is in fact to stop, unless it is unsafe to do so (e.g., if you're practically already in the intersection)."

This is emphatically not true in California, where the sole legal definition of a yellow light is that it is a warning for a driver that the next light will be red.


Solid Yellow– A yellow signal light means "CAUTION." The red signal is about to appear. When you see the yellow light, stop if you can do so safely. If you cannot stop safely, cross the intersection cautiously.
posted by Etrigan at 10:53 AM on October 7, 2015


State laws are inconsistent and can often be weird. But in none of those three states is accelerating to beat a yellow officially prohibited by statute.

In my experience, judges will defer to whether a police officer says it was "unsafe" or "reckless" for a person to accelerate through a yellow light. I've had five different soldiers under me who fought these tickets, in three different states, and they lost every time.
posted by Etrigan at 10:56 AM on October 7, 2015


"Solid Yellow– A yellow signal light means "CAUTION." The red signal is about to appear. When you see the yellow light, stop if you can do so safely. If you cannot stop safely, cross the intersection cautiously."

The actual text of the law: 21452. (a) A driver facing a steady circular yellow or yellow arrow signal is, by that signal, warned that the related green movement is ending or that a red indication will be shown immediately thereafter.

I said "… the sole legal definition of a yellow light is that it is a warning for a driver that the next light will be red." Do you disagree?

"In my experience, judges will defer to whether a police officer says it was "unsafe" or "reckless" for a person to accelerate through a yellow light. I've had five different soldiers under me who fought these tickets, in three different states, and they lost every time."

That's different from saying that it's illegal to accelerate to or through a yellow light. That's a citation for driving at speeds unsafe for conditions or reckless driving, which is an umbrella charge that basically every state has and is applied at the discretion of the officer, and generally the same citation you'd get for going through a yellow without accelerating if the officer thought you could have stopped in time.
posted by klangklangston at 11:08 AM on October 7, 2015


I said "… the sole legal definition of a yellow light is that it is a warning for a driver that the next light will be red." Do you disagree?

I disagree with the part of your comment that you hid behind an ellipsis, yes. wierdo was not citing a legal definition, and I carefully noted that the Technically Proper Response -- as articulated in the official California Driver's Handbook -- is that one should stop. The idea that one cannot commit a violation that is essentially Running A Yellow is preposterous.
posted by Etrigan at 11:20 AM on October 7, 2015


The first and biggest reason why excessively slow drivers are dangerous is in the context of (in the U.S.) driving in the left lanes, prompting people to pass on the right. Nominally, passing on the right is illegal, however it is common practice in any multilane road, and it's significantly more dangerous than passing on the left.

Even the way you've worded it there, though, seems to indicate that at worst the slower drivers who remain in left lanes are annoying rather than dangerous and it's the people who are saying "I am forced by annoyance to drive in a significantly more dangerous fashion" who are actually dangerous.
posted by XMLicious at 2:20 PM on October 7, 2015 [2 favorites]


You said "Accelerating to beat a yellow will get you a ticket." That is emphatically not true in California, neither as practice nor as law. That you can be cited for driving unsafely for conditions does not mean that you are being cited for accelerating to beat a yellow light, which is the law in some other states. You can also be cited for driving unsafely for conditions while under the posted limit in inclement weather. That does not mean that you were breaking the posted limit, that means that you were cited for driving unsafely for conditions.

You pointed to the California Driver's Handbook, which in its disclaimer describes itself as a summary of the laws, but notes explicitly that the police and courts follow the California Vehicle Code, which I cited.

Further, in California the statutory requirement for a yellow light duration is such that a car traveling at the legal limit would have sufficient time to cross the intersection. Because of this, an assertion that someone speeding up to make it through a yellow light would not be sufficient to assume that they were driving recklessly provided they were below the speed limit — it's actually safer for everyone if they can get through the light while it is yellow. (If you'd like, I can cite that law as well.)

As your statement is wrong in two different ways, I feel confident describing "Accelerating to beat a yellow will get you a ticket" as "emphatically not true in California." If you can cite any court decisions where someone was accelerating to get through a yellow in California and not cited for breaking the speed limit or driving too fast for conditions (sometimes termed as breaking the "presumed limit"), I'll happily reconsider.

"Even the way you've worded it there, though, seems to indicate that at worst the slower drivers who remain in left lanes are annoying rather than dangerous and it's the people who are saying "I am forced by annoyance to drive in a significantly more dangerous fashion" who are actually dangerous."

First off, if you're being passed on the right, in most states you have a legal obligation to get over to the right — left lanes are for passing or (in California, "for a reasonable duration") preparing to make a left turn. So both the person getting passed on the right and the person passing on the right are breaking the law.

Second off, it's behavior that deviates from the established norms that causes most collisions. People driving slower than the general pace of traffic is highly correlated with an increase in collisions around them. This is one of those times when the idea of legislating on a "should," i.e. that people should follow the posted limits, is ineffective and leads to more collisions, and people who are driving slower than the pace of traffic around them contribute to that.

Like I said, this is easier to recognize in a more extreme situation, that of a tractor or oversized load on the road, where they are unable to keep pace with the normal flow of traffic — if they're significantly impeding others to the extent that they raise the risk of accident, they're a traffic hazard. People driving too slowly are traffic hazards too, just to a lesser extent.
posted by klangklangston at 2:35 PM on October 7, 2015


I agree with most of what you're saying there; my initial comment was in response to wierdo talking about his "hatred for the speed kills crowd" and his positing of certain highways where "it is the people going excessively slowly and the relatively fewer people going excessively faster than traffic that cause most of the trouble" which I don't think you're trying to support at this point.

The existence of traffic hazards like wildlife, precipitation, farm vehicles, construction zones, and people going a different speed than you isn't a carte blanche to drive as though none of those are things you could possibly encounter, or as though they're things you shouldn't be burdened to deal with, and then blame it on said traffic hazards when you kill someone.

I'm saying I would need much more comprehensive evidence to believe that there are actually places where "most of the trouble" of collisions and fatalities is genuinely attributable to a majority of reckless drivers whose recklessness is embodied in driving too slowly, rather than it being a case of the people who are actually the direct causes of accidents due to driving carelessly bullshitting and trying to place blame on "excessively slow" drivers who may or may not have even been party to the collision.

I mean even though I've driven in a wide variety of environments all over North America, maybe this exists and is something I simply haven't encountered yet. But tbh it sounds much more like the viewpoint of people I've known who bitterly resent having to share the road with anyone else at all, and who consider it completely immaterial when you point out that people who drive more slowly or don't react as swiftly could be sick, elderly, or driving a car full of screaming children; to them, the other people on the road are simply obstacles they shouldn't have to deal with rather than fellow drivers who have any right to be there.

It's more believable to me that there's a category of drivers who are unable or unwilling to deal with heterogeneous driving conditions and they're the reason why there would be fewer collisions and fatalities in a perfectly homogeneous population of driving abilities and behaviors. Which is not the same thing as saying that it's inherently dangerous for a driver to not fall within the 85% interval you're talking about.
posted by XMLicious at 6:08 PM on October 7, 2015


I'm not really sure what is so difficult to believe/understand about how people who drive significantly slower than the prevailing speed of traffic, especially when they fail to keep right, cause the rest of the drivers to have to weave (in the traffic engineering sense) around them, thus making the roads less safe for everyone.

A large part of modern freeway design is the elimination of movements where there are conflicts between vehicles entering and exiting a lane. Slow drivers essentially create a rolling pinch point that works the same way as roadway designs we are attempting to eliminate.

Tailgating is a separate phenomenon and isn't really relevant to what I was talking about. I will say that the danger of it varies widely between drivers. Someone who is looking/planning ahead and is prepared for the driver they are following too closely is less risk than the person who is focused solely on following the car in front of them. Weaving in and out of traffic is significantly more dangerous than all but the most egregious of tailgaters, assuming dry weather.

Finally, give it a small amount of thought. If everyone is going the same/nearly the same speed, everyone has longer to react to the unexpected compared to times when there is a 20mph speed differential. Passing someone at 5-10 mph relative speed is much safer than passing someone at 20mph. It is precisely the same difference between driving 5-10mph in the mall parking lot and driving 20mph in the same place. When the "obstacles" are moving it's relative rates of closure that matter, not the absolute speed.
posted by wierdo at 8:34 PM on October 7, 2015


I should add that my distaste for "speed kills" rhetoric is primarily because it often comes at the expense of the things that make a much bigger difference, like reasonable following distances, good lane discipline, signaling turns and lane changes, and general awareness of one's surroundings.
posted by wierdo at 8:39 PM on October 7, 2015


So I take it this sort of response means that there isn't actually any comprehensive evidence (maybe not even suggestive evidence?) that "most of the trouble" even on particular types of roads is caused by the dangers of driving too slowly? Of course I understand conceptually how specific slower-driving behaviors can require more patience or focus or attention on the part of others to deal with safely (though I'm not sure that people who decide they "have to" weave in and out of traffic are actually trying to be safe); what I don't believe is the part where you identify slowness as the pinnacle of hazardous driving in the context of discussing what kills people on the road.
posted by XMLicious at 9:44 PM on October 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


Again, it isn't specifically slowness, it is the difference in speed. If everyone else is driving 55 and I'm driving 75, I'm a menace, but no more so than the person driving 35. Minimum speeds exist in some places for a reason.

I'm on my phone, so providing links isn't exactly easy.
posted by wierdo at 9:57 PM on October 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


A salient difference would seem to be, if there are all these dangerous driving behaviors like weaving in and out of traffic which those going faster "have to" engage in, that even with all things being relative the slower driver doesn't regard themselves as being forced to weave in and out of traffic, while the person at the above-average speed feels compelled to engage in these behaviors both in response to average-speed drivers and also in response to slower drivers.

Also, you weren't originally distinguishing between people violating traffic rules by hanging in the left lane while not passing and those who simply drove slowly—klang is the one who brought that up; and you were talking about there being "relatively fewer people going excessively faster than traffic" compared to those going excessively slow, which is the complete opposite of my experience in that encountering someone going 35mph in a 55mph zone, even in the form a large truck, is extremely rare compared to encountering people going 75mph.

I guess maybe on a city street rated for 25mph you'll encounter more parked cars than people going 50mph? But it seem obvious that driving down such a street at twice the speed limit is more dangerous than parking a car on it.

So while "Everything is relative so most of the trouble is caused by excessive slowness excessive slowness and excessive speed are equally dangerous" sounds good, I think that upon further examination it may be reductive and what you're saying overall doesn't accurately gauge the level of danger inherent in various driving behaviors.

I have to retire for the night soon anyways, so don't feel that you need to respond on your phone.
posted by XMLicious at 10:42 PM on October 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


my distaste for "speed kills" rhetoric is primarily because it often comes at the expense of the things that make a much bigger difference, like reasonable following distances, good lane discipline, signaling turns and lane changes

Going faster than traffic implies that onewould be more likely to make compromises in all of the above areas.

If everyone else is driving 55 and I'm driving 75, I'm a menace, but no more so than the person driving 35.

This is about the lamest excuse for aggressive, selfish driving that I've ever read. Exhibit A for how much attitudes towards driving need to be changed.

Physics says you're wrong. Greater speed means longer stopping distance.

Not saying that the person driving 20 mph below the limit isn't a potential source of increased collision risk on a busy road, but the speeder is an immediate risk, to themself and others.
posted by Artful Codger at 5:46 AM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


The person doing 35 is going to cause a lot more bottlenecking, breaking, and maneuvering around them than one person passing other cars on the left. The single safest thing you can do while driving on a highway is to maintain the average roadway speed, keep right and pass left. It's not hard.

When I lived in NJ I would take the parkway nearly every day, and despite the fact that the posted speed was 55 for large stretches everyone did 70-80 in all but the furthest right lane. Despite this being well over the posted limit, it worked fine since almost everyone had a similar relative speed everyone had a good amount of time to react and the roads were well graded and had good visibility. The only thing that screwed things up was when someone (generally from out of state) would be going the speed limit in the non-far right lane. Suddenly you have a system that works at 75 trying to deal with someone going 20mph slower. That guy is causing way more danger than all the other cars going at the prevailing rate.
posted by Ferreous at 6:04 AM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


That guy is causing way more danger than all the other cars going at the prevailing rate.

Frustration != Danger.

The danger, if any, comes from other drivers' reluctance to drive slower than they believe they have a right to. Which brings everything neatly back to the mindset change required of car culture.
posted by bonaldi at 6:13 AM on October 8, 2015 [6 favorites]


No, if a bunch of cars have to suddenly deal with someone going slower than they are by a huge margin the fact that people are going to have to slam their brakes, or weave out of the way to avoid colliding with this person they are creating danger, not just frustration.

It's super pedantic rules lawyering "well I'm going the speed limit everyone else are the assholes!" Highways in America are designed in such a way that they encourage and even work best when people are operating at high speeds, very often higher than the posted limit. So yes, when one person goes well below the prevailing speed they are the ones creating danger, not just frustration.

If you want to slow down people on highways or roads in general you have to design them in such a way that people slow down. Huge straightaways with large margins on the sides and multiple lanes per direction but then posting it as 30 mph is going to be an exercise in futility.
posted by Ferreous at 6:24 AM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


Highways in America are designed in such a way that they encourage and even work best when people are operating at high speeds, very often higher than the posted limit.

If only there were a way for the designers and maintainers of these highways to indicate what might be the most appropriate speeds on various sections of these roads. Perhaps if they were to put up large signs with numerical designations of these appropriate speeds so everyone had the same idea of how fast they should go.
posted by Etrigan at 6:26 AM on October 8, 2015 [3 favorites]


Except that's not how humans driving vehicles work. Most people drive at the speed they feel safe going. The outliers on this spectrum are the ones who cause danger.

If you want to reduce speed on the engineering side, you need more than just signs, you need traffic calming measures. Things that lower what people feel is the safe speed to drive works far better than just putting up a sign.
posted by Ferreous at 6:34 AM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


No, if a bunch of cars have to suddenly deal with someone going slower than they are by a huge margin the fact that people are going to have to slam their brakes

"Suddenly" doesn't really happen like you're imagining with slower traffic up ahead; cars behind it slow, the cars behind them a little less and there is a gradient effect. Compare the speeding driver, which cars in front *do* have to suddenly and unexpectedly deal with.

So yes, when one person goes well below the prevailing speed they are the ones creating danger, not just frustration.

You're just repeating the claim here. I'd like to see some support for how US highways work "best" when people are doing eg 80mph compared to 50mph. Where "best" doesn't amount to "in a way I find less frustrating".

Most people drive at the speed they feel safe going.

Ding. And car culture, and cocooning living-room-sofa car interiors, have conditioned them to set their internal speedometers higher than what is actually safe. So it's time to change that. Or take the drivers out of the loop entirely.
posted by bonaldi at 6:56 AM on October 8, 2015 [3 favorites]


Actually humans are generally good judges of driving at a safe speed. The outliers are the ones that cause the problems. This article lays out the argument pretty well. Under ideal circumstances the speed limit should be set near the the average real operating speed of a road so that the people who choose to follow the limits regardless of the prevailing speed wouldn't be an issue. We'll always have speeders, but if the prevailing speed of a road posted 55 is in fact 70, the guy doing 80 is the one that's the danger, not the bulk that's doing 70.

And again, if you want people to actually slow down, make the roads less engineer for high speed use. It's that simple. Living room sofa interior cars have nothing to do with it.
posted by Ferreous at 7:07 AM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


Actually humans are generally good judges of driving at a safe speed.
No, no they aren't. Which is why they keep getting into speed-related fatalities. What they're good at is concurring with one another, which is why roads have "operating" speeds.

Under ideal circumstances the speed limit should be set near the the average real operating speed of a road
If you're optimising for reduced deaths, change the road, not the speed limit. The road should be designed so that its average real operating speed is closer to a safe one. Which agrees with your point about engineering roads appropriately.

(Living room interiors have a hell of a lot to do with it, though. Insulating drivers from the feel and perception of their actual speed changes their risk calculation)
posted by bonaldi at 7:17 AM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


The single safest thing you can do while driving on a highway is to maintain the average roadway speed, keep right and pass left. It's not hard.

AND maintain safe distances AND make APPROPRIATE lane changes safely AND drive like we're all in this together, not in a qualifying round for the Indy. Apparently this IS hard for many.

... if a bunch of cars have to suddenly deal with someone going slower

... then these drivers are not driving with enough awareness of what's ahead, and not allowing enough distance in front of them. If they can't cope with a slower vehicle, they'll be even less prepared for the overloaded truck with ther 4-ways going, the ladder or box that fell off the back of the pickup, the burst tire from a transport, or the inattentive driver ahead who locks brakes and fishtails because they weren't prepared either.

We'll always have speeders selfish assholes, but if the prevailing speed of a road posted 55 is in fact 70, the guy doing 80 is the one that's the danger, not the bulk that's doing 70.

If everybody drove 70 safely... I'd agree with you. The reality is that they don't. You do have many, perhaps most, who can drive safely at that speed...you have some who can't or won't... then you have way too many whose chosen speed is always higher than whatever the proles are doing, they have some God-given right to do so, and if we don't speed up or part like the Red Sea to Moses for them, they will make sure we feel their righteous wrath.

If a road is safe at X for most (in ideal conditions, with late-model cars and experienced drivers), then it will be safer for more people, in worse conditions, at X-10, And X-10 therefore should be the posted max. That's simply engineering.
posted by Artful Codger at 7:34 AM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


If we're talking about the danger of speeding I think there should be a distinction made between big highways (multi-lane, directions separated by a barrier, straight, no intersections, no cyclists/pedestrians around) and other roads. I would argue that speeding by 10-20 mph over the posted limit (i.e. regular traffic speed) on a highway isn't a huge increase in danger, whereas speeding by the same amount in e.g. a residential area, on a windy 2-lane road, in bad weather, at dusk in deer country, or somewhere with bicycles and/or pedestrians crossing the road is much more dangerous. And because nearly everyone speeds on the highways, it becomes "normal" to speed the same amount on any road, without really thinking about anything other than driving the fastest speed possible before you're likely to get ticketed.

As far as I know, and please correct me if I'm wrong, police don't consider any of these variables when ticketing (other than a few e.g. school zones) and in fact everyone I know who's gotten a speeding ticket has gotten it on a highway. Yet you hear about far more people being killed on regular roads (mostly pedestrians and cyclists) in situations where speed was definitely a factor. I suspect raising the speed limit on highways/less risky roads and being much more strict about speeding might help avoid this normalization of speeding. Or maybe people would still speed 10-20 mph over the new limit, I don't know.
posted by randomnity at 8:54 AM on October 8, 2015 [3 favorites]


Metafilter: Physics says you're wrong.
posted by jb at 9:10 AM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


I've often wondered why we even mnaufactur4e cars that are capable of going as fast as they do. I mean, sure, there are occasional times when you need to exceed the speed limit, such as passing. But I don't get why the average car needs to be built to go as fast as it can for as long as it can.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:06 AM on October 8, 2015


I would argue that speeding by 10-20 mph over the posted limit (i.e. regular traffic speed) on a highway isn't a huge increase in danger, whereas speeding by the same amount in e.g. a residential area, on a windy 2-lane road, in bad weather, at dusk in deer country, or somewhere with bicycles and/or pedestrians crossing the road is much more dangerous.

There's big caveats to both scenarios, dependent on the exact road, the conditions, the presence of other vehicles or other hazards.

If you speed on a highway, the actual risk to you might arguably be less than speeding in the other scenarios, but because of higher speed and the number of vehicles around you, a collision on a busy fast highway has the potential to be alot more severe and involve many more vehicles. Not to mention the hundreds of cars behind you who are now severely delayed and inconvenienced while your "accident" is investigated and cleaned up.

tl;dr: a speeder on the highway puts MANY people at higher risk.
posted by Artful Codger at 10:08 AM on October 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


Yeah, I absolutely agree that a 75mph highway crash is more deadly than a 55mph crash anywhere else. And yes, speed increases the chances of a crash, all other factors being equal. But they aren't equal, which is why there are so many more collisions on smaller roads than on highways. Less deadly ones percentage-wise, absolutely, but still many fatalities. Whether the more-frequent-less-deadly crashes yield more fatalities than the less-frequent-more-deadly crashes, I don't know. It doesn't matter, because I'm not comparing overall deadliness of highways to deadliness of smaller roads.

What I'm arguing is that a given increase in speed (let's say 10 mph) is a more dangerous increase in risk (vs. not speeding on the same road) on a city road than on a highway. The main reason is that there are MANY more unexpected things that need to be responded to, and response time is the main reason speeding is dangerous. A difference from 40 to 50 mph could easily be the difference between hitting that dog (or idiot college student dressed in black at night) running out in front of you vs. stopping in time. Or seeing the cyclist in time to move to the left, or stopping in time to avoid the guy running the red light, or hitting that car turning left in front of you who thought you were going more slowly (like say, the speed limit). Or losing control of your car, maybe while turning left trying to beat that yellow, and hitting a group of pedestrians on the sidewalk. A difference from 55 to 65 mph on a straight highway in good weather is vanishingly unlikely to make most people lose control of their car, and if you're not tailgating, it's unlikely that someone in front of you will slam on the brakes so suddenly that you can't stop in time. Particularly if everyone else is travelling at 65 mph.

Besides the greater increase in frequency of collisions, you're putting much more vulnerable people at risk when you speed on a city road - someone is much more likely to survive (or walk away from) a highway crash even at 75 mph than they are to survive getting run over by a guy going 55 mph. Safety features in cars are pretty amazing these days, but safety features on bikes and pedestrians haven't quite caught up yet. So you're not only decreasing your response time on a road with many more obstacles than a highway, you're much more likely to kill any living obstacle that you do hit.
posted by randomnity at 11:28 AM on October 8, 2015


"If only there were a way for the designers and maintainers of these highways to indicate what might be the most appropriate speeds on various sections of these roads. Perhaps if they were to put up large signs with numerical designations of these appropriate speeds so everyone had the same idea of how fast they should go."

You seem like a smart guy, but you don't seem to have followed your line of thought past a glib snark. According to the National Cooperative Highway Research Program(pdf), the largest reason for deviation from the 85th percentile standard is "political pressure," with 33% of deviations explained this way when new limits are set. They also found that in almost all of the observed traffic, the posted limit was below the 85th percentile design limit, and that roughly two thirds of drivers go faster than the posted limit.

" The danger, if any, comes from other drivers' reluctance to drive slower than they believe they have a right to. Which brings everything neatly back to the mindset change required of car culture.
"

You mean, slower than the road is designed to handle and slower than that particular driver safely navigates all the time? You're stuck assuming that safety flows from the law rather than the idea that laws should be set based on safety.

"No, no they aren't. Which is why they keep getting into speed-related fatalities. What they're good at is concurring with one another, which is why roads have "operating" speeds."

Yes, actually they are. In the US in 2013, there were about 1.9 crashes per million miles traveled. The average number of miles driven by an American per year is about 12,000. Across the population, that means that drivers average roughly one accident per 40 years of driving.

Again, your contention is not supported by data, and is contrary to the current recommendations of every civil engineering authority.

"If you're optimising for reduced deaths, change the road, not the speed limit. The road should be designed so that its average real operating speed is closer to a safe one. Which agrees with your point about engineering roads appropriately."

How about we change the posted limits to reflect the designed limits, instead of the other way around? It seems far more likely to find the budget to change signs than to rebuild entire highways.

"If a road is safe at X for most (in ideal conditions, with late-model cars and experienced drivers), then it will be safer for more people, in worse conditions, at X-10, And X-10 therefore should be the posted max. That's simply engineering."

First off, this posted max would be higher than most posted maxes now, due to the cushion built into designed limit specifications — the 85 percentile speed starts with headroom against the top ideal operating speed, and then the posted limit is almost always an additional five to 10 miles lower. Second off, this is like economic theories that assume a perfectly rational consumer — it's better to engineer systems based on how people actually function than design based off an abstract principle.

"tl;dr: a speeder on the highway puts MANY people at higher risk."

Not in a meaningful way, since defining safety based on posted limits is inherently flawed. One way that this was demonstrated was with a study where posted limits that were initially set around the 20th percentile (meaning 80 percent of drivers were speeding) moved to about the 40th percentile (still 60% speeding) saw no increase in crashes and only an average increase of 2 mph for the 85th percentile mark (something deemed statistically but not practically significant). Again and again, studies have found that changing speed limits has little effect on driver safety because most people drive at a safe speed for conditions. (Interestingly, while changing the limits themselves has little effect, increased enforcement — no matter the limit — tends to decrease crashes. I'd argue that's likely because other aggressive driving activities would likely also be curtailed in the presence of police.)
posted by klangklangston at 11:35 AM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


And finally, since the repeated calls for more data make this worth a separate comment: A synthesis of speed-related crash data shows a U-shaped curve (first defined in 1964, replicated in 1968 and 1991, with confirming data collected in 1971 on the effect of turns).

Those driving significantly below the average speed of the road are more likely to get in crashes than those above — i.e. those doing ten below the average speed are significantly more likely to be in crashes.

From the Institute of Traffic Engineers Tips to Florida:
An unrealistically low speed limit can actually lead to crashes. Here's why:

First, many studies conducted over several decades in all parts of the country have shown that a driver's speed is influenced more by the appearance of the roadway and the prevailing traffic conditions than it is by the posted speed limit.

Second, some drivers will obey the lower posted speed while others will feel it's unreasonable and simply ignore it. This disrupts the uniform traffic flow and increases crash potential between the faster and the slower drivers.

Third, when traffic is traveling at different speeds, the number of breaks in traffic to permit safe crossing is reduced. Pedestrians also have greater difficulty in judging the speed of approaching vehicles.
So yes, slower drivers are as much of a hazard if not more than faster drivers — the danger from faster drivers is the correlation with fatal and injurious crashes, but even that is remarkably low in rate of occurrence — it's simply high in absolute numbers because of the sheer number of miles that Americans drive.

I hope that's sufficient to put the end to the repeated notion that it's simply faster drivers being assholes, and to point out that those who obdurately insist on slower speeds can themselves be the assholes.
posted by klangklangston at 11:45 AM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


So yes, slower drivers are as much of a hazard if not more than faster drivers — the danger from faster drivers is the correlation with fatal and injurious crashes, but even that is remarkably low in rate of occurrence — it's simply high in absolute numbers because of the sheer number of miles that Americans drive.

I hope that's sufficient to put the end to the repeated notion that it's simply faster drivers being assholes, and to point out that those who obdurately insist on slower speeds can themselves be the assholes.


Highways have a min and max speed, and if someone is in the right lane, slow but doing above the posted min, for whatever reason (including but not limited to: trailers, heavy load, vehicle capability or issue, or simply inexperience)... it's their right. Yes a slower driver is sometimes an asshole about it. However the fact that statistically speaking there's a raised risk for the slow vehicle has everything to do with the poor skills and behaviour of faster drivers not being prepared and attentive.

If the traffic is heavy but safely moving at 70 and someone decides that they need to drive at 75... asshole. They start riding the bumpers of left-lane cars they think should be yielding, even if that car is itself right behind another, they are cutting into already insufficient car spacing as they weave between lanes. Most people react poorly in the presence of such behaviour.

Driving is very much a group situation. Dickish speeding behaviour from a few, coupled with unsafe practices, inattention and short fuses from the rest significantly increases the risks for all.
posted by Artful Codger at 12:08 PM on October 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


You mean, slower than the road is designed to handle and slower than that particular driver safely navigates all the time?

No, I mean slower than they want to. People forced to slow by a slower car display the same behaviours and frustrations regardless of whether the speed they want is the legal speed, their purported safe speed or a speed backed by any other justification they can concoct.

Again, your contention is not supported by data, and is contrary to the current recommendations of every civil engineering authority.

Your data doesn't show that we're good at judging what is a safe speed. The same data would support equally as well the contention that what people driving cars are actually good at is aligning with one another (thereby reducing the risky deltas).

How about we change the posted limits to reflect the designed limits, instead of the other way around? It seems far more likely to find the budget to change signs than to rebuild entire highways.

I don't have any problem with speed limits that are set for better reasons than politics. Hell, in the UK our national speed limit was set by a non-driver with a figure based on nothing more than the capability of a well-selling family saloon in 1966. I think we can do better than that. The dynamic speed limits used on some London motorways would be a good start, unfortunately there's some good suspicion that they're sometimes just used to activate the speed cameras rather than for safety reasons.

I hope that's sufficient to put the end to the repeated notion that it's simply faster drivers being assholes, and to point out that those who obdurately insist on slower speeds can themselves be the assholes.

Obdurately? How can we tell the reason a particular person has for going below the limit, other than as a projection of our own frustration with them?

People driving slowly can totally be doing it because they're assholes. Most people who drive behave like assholes, at least part of the time. But the principle of charity would be well applied on the roads as well, even if that meant sometimes we had to drive marginally slower than we could if only that asshole wasn't in front of us.
posted by bonaldi at 12:37 PM on October 8, 2015


Just a quick nomenclature reminder, it's not assholes:
Anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac. -- George Carlin
posted by Etrigan at 12:52 PM on October 8, 2015 [3 favorites]


And finally, since the repeated calls for more data make this worth a separate comment: A synthesis of speed-related crash data shows a U-shaped curve (first defined in 1964, replicated in 1968 and 1991, with confirming data collected in 1971 on the effect of turns).

Those driving significantly below the average speed of the road are more likely to get in crashes than those above — i.e. those doing ten below the average speed are significantly more likely to be in crashes.

This is a rather deceptive, if not outright mendacious, description of the contents of this FHA publication. The 1964 study that plotted the U-shaped curve of results was based on data collected in the late 1950s and there was no differentiation of drunk-driving-related crashes, something much more common in the 1950s as the FHA report itself notes.

Much more importantly, your note about "confirming data ... on the effect of turns" is eliding the fact that the left side of the U-shaped curve isn't made up of the average speed of vehicles as they traveled on the road but rather the speed at the time of collision, even if the collision occurred while the driver was in the process of stopping to turn or stopping for some other purpose.

The concluding summary of the FHA report explicitly states,
There is evidence that crash risk is lowest near the average speed of traffic and increases for vehicles traveling much faster or slower than average. The occurrence of a large number of crashes involving turning maneuver partly explains the increased risk for motorists traveling slower than average and confirms the importance of safety programs involving turn lanes, access control, grade separation, and other measures to reduce conflicts resulting from large differences in travel speeds.

When the consequences of crashes are taken into account, the risk of being involved in an injury crash is lowest for vehicles that travel near the median speed or slower and increases exponentially for motorists traveling much faster.
That "confirming" 1971 study is described in part,
...Crashes involving turning vehicles accounted for 44 percent of all crashes observed in the study. Excluding these crashes from the analysis greatly attenuated the factors that created the U–shaped curve characteristic of the earlier studies. Without vehicles slowing to turn, or turning across traffic, the investigators found the risk of traveling much slower than average was much less pronounced. Crash risk was greatest for vehicles traveling more than two standard deviation above the mean speed...
And the accompanying Figure 2 for the 1971 study actually appears to show a "Relative Involvement Rate" of less than 1.0 for events falling under "-15.5 to -5.5 Deviation from mean speed, mi/h" whether or not turning accidents are excluded, contradicting your claim that "those doing ten below the average speed are significantly more likely to be in crashes". (Though to be fair, in that 1971 data plot accident rates for 5.5 to 15.5 mph above the mean speed are only slightly higher than accident rates for the mean itself, with accident rates rapidly getting higher in both directions in a suspiciously trapezoidal plot that probably indicates low resolution data.)

I don't know which 1991 study you're counting as having "replicated" the 1964 results since there are several and none of those described would appear to have replicated the results, but for example the paragraph covering the first 1991 report mentioned is as follows:
More recently, Australian researchers, Fildes, Rumbold, and Leening (1991), used self–reported crash data collected at roadside from motorists whose driving speed had been unobtrusively measured. The researchers found a trend of increasing crash involvement for speeds above the mean speed in both rural and urban conditions – similar to the correlations reported in the early studies. However, no relationship between slower speeds and increased crash involvement was found. In fact, Fildes and Lee (1993) report that the researchers, "...failed to observe any vehicles traveling at the very slow speeds reported by Solomon on rural highways."
(Solomon being the author of the 1964 study.) In the FHA report's Figure 3 where the data from 1960s studies is plotted on the same axes as the data from this 1991 study, the data sets from the 1991 study are represented by straight upward-sloping lines, not U-shaped curves.

Most revealingly, one paragraph in this report states:
If conflicts created by large differences in travel speeds were a major factor in the likelihood of crashes, then one might expect to find a large number of crashes involving two or more vehicles traveling in the same direction. Cerrilli (1997) found less than one–third of all crashes and 5 percent of all fatal crashes in 1996 involved two or more vehicle traveling in the same direction. Many of these likely occurred as a consequence of a vehicle slowing or stopping for cause (i.e., to make an intended maneuver or avoid striking a stopped vehicle or other hazard) and being struck from behind by a vehicle following too closely or going too fast for the driver to stop in time to avoid the collision. By far, the predominant crash type on rural roads is a single vehicle running off the road.
So the evidence supposedly demonstrating in klang's words that "slower drivers are as much of a hazard if not more than faster drivers" not only is based on cars that have slowed down or stopped to turn being struck from behind by other drivers who aren't paying attention but probably also includes things like erratic slowly-driving drunk guys in the 1950s wandering off the road and wrapping their cars around trees.
posted by XMLicious at 2:11 PM on October 8, 2015 [4 favorites]


lol at the idea of listening to Florida about anything, especially roads.
posted by entropicamericana at 3:41 PM on October 8, 2015


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