In the OP you linked to a cite that says pedestrian deaths have decreased over the years. Deaths in bicycle-car accidents are also down, although they fluctuate more because there are fewer if them and there is probably no per-mile data, which is an important thing to note in car accident data. I’m not sure how fuel taxes are supposed to reduce deaths in car accidents because I am not sure they’d have that much effect on driving. I’m all for greater infrastructure spending and more public transportation, but I am not sure you’re characterizing the situation accurately.
I think self-driving cars will do a lot to reduce pedestrian and bicyclist deaths. Flesh-and-blood drivers become distracted; a sensor on the car’s bumper which detects an object ahead and slows the car down automatically to avoid a collision does not.
I’m sure it will eventually become illegal to drive human-controlled “dumb” cars on the public roadways. Probably not during my lifetime, but that day will come.
To turn the chemical potential energy stored in a fuel source into kinetic energy.
To turn the chemical potential energy stored in a fuel source into kinetic energy.
Having a hard time, actually.
I’m having a hard time with the idea that the primary purpose of a gun is to kill people. I’ve fired thousands of rounds in my lifetime and have never once killed a person. I’ve killed a lot of animals, put holes in a lot of targets, and if God forbid me or my family are attacked one day, I wouldn’t hesitate to use a gun to kill that one particular person who might do me harm, but that’s not any of my guns’ primary purpose.
Although I sympathise with the intent, I think this is the wrong perspective to look at the issue from. The most effective way to approach the issue is to look at how to lower the demand for cars. This is not very hard, because the demand for cars has been intentionally planned and constructed. The reason people use cars is because after the cars invention, we quickly started organising and constructing our living enviroments based on the car as the mode of transportation.
Cars are amazing because they make both planned and unplanned individual transportation over great distances cheap and easy. This has allowed us to spread out and segregate our societies basic functions. Such as housing, shopping and work places. Before the arrival of cars there was a strong incentive to keep these functions as close and integrated as possible. A hundred years ago you couldn’t jump into your car and travel 5 miles to shop groceries, so grocery stores needed to be integrated with living enviroments. You couldn’t easily commute 10 miles to your work place, so offices and factories needed to either be close to living enviroments or nodes of collective transportation.
But cars also externalize a lot of costs. Such as space, investment and maintenance in infrastructure, as well as enviromental damage and health problems. Some times these costs are internalised to a degree, but usually they aren’t. We pay collevtively for most of these costs and there is usually little incentive to keep usage down. One could, and should, create incentives for more effective use of cars, but limiting the demand and need for them is much more important and effective in the long run.
How is it done? Some solutions are eay, others harder. A few examples:
- Completely stop urban sprawl. The current infrastructure already in place is enough to support even the most optimistic population growth projections. Allow only densification when building.
- Actively promote geographical integration of functions. If an area is primarily commercial, promote housing, and vice versa. Suburban areas need commercial functions, commercial areas need living enviroments.
- Ban external shopping malls and most external production investments. The constructions that need to be external for safety or enviromental reasons should be provided with attractive mass transportation systems.
- Abandon functionalist traffic separation principles in favor of more integrated and small scale solutions. Ie: build streets in grids rather than separated roads. This makes the infrastructure both safer, more effective AND more resilient.
External shopping malls is a pet peeve of mine, because they act in a parasitical way on the enviroment. Basically they exploit the externalised cost of cars and the low cost of space. The result is that they “suck” the commercial power out of a city centre and sometimes even end up killing their host.
This is really interesting actually. I’ve read research that indicates that when travelling at speeds >20mph people tend to become more and more “psycopathic”. When travelling at lower speeds you view other trafficants as people, but at higher speeds you start viewing them as obstacles.
Practical public transport can never exist out of cities. This is a pipe dream that enviromentalists need to give up. In fact, trying to create it outside of cities is even counter productive. A car is more enviromentally friendly than a bus in a rural area. You need density for mass tranportation.
I think this is a good addition to the overall strategy, but you need a balanced approach.
Agreed. And both these are reinforcing feedback loops. Cars will breed more cars, pedestrians will breed more pedestrians. The saying “If you build it, they will come” tends to hold true. You can not reduce car congestion by building more or bigger roads, because they will only increase car usage and create new congestion.
You can have as many steering wheels as you please, keep a whole room full of them if you want. I would just want you to not feel the need to use your car as often. I want to give you the freedom to walk, ride a bike, take a buss or use a subway instead of forcing you to use your car by making all the other options impossible or impractical.
That is an outstanding post, Stoneburg! when people say we “need” cars, that’s generally what they are referring to: the current built environment. And there was nothing inevitable about that environment; it was deliberately constructed.
In addition to the changes you suggest, we could make another one which wouldwork in our current built environment with smaller changes: allow only low-speed motorized vehicles (such as golf carts) within city limits, and only use cars for inter-city trips or visits to rural areas. I’ve heard there is at least one town in Florida where folks are doing just that. Everyone there pretty much uses only golf carts to get around town. That approach would still allow most of the benefits of personal motorized transport (flexibility of schedule, ease of transporting lots of purchases, etc.), while decreasing the death toll from accidents and speeding, and would still encourage density of construction and a mix of residential and commercial buildings (since gold carts won’t have a lot of range). You’d own your own golf cart, and only rent a “real” car when you needed to travel a long distance or visit a very rural area.
There is big difference in the cost benefit analysis between cars and guns. The benefit of guns are largely theoretical and the total absence of guns would make the need for guns much less urgent. The total absence of cars would make us Amish.
If we can regulate guns the way we regulate cars, I think we’d reach a happy medium.
Make people take a state exam to buy, own or use a gun.
Register gun ownership for all new and existing guns.
We regulate safety features in cars that make them more expensive, we can regulate biometric trigger locks on guns that would make them more expensive but a lot safer.
Cars are fairly well regulated and guns should be too.
Maybe for you but I have seven guns and the only reason I ever got a gun was for self defense, if a gun can’t kill someone, I don’t want it.
Well even if it’s true, why should it matter? After all, some people need killing. That’s why policemen carry guns. Nobody seriously gets upset about the fact that policemen carry an object the primary purpose of which is to cause serious bodily harm to people.
Besides which, why should primary purpose matter at all in deciding whether to regulate the use of an object?
The primary purpose of heroin is pain relief. That’s why it was invented. So why not make it just as easy to buy in a drug store as aspirin?
The primary purpose of voodoo dolls is to cause harm to people. So why not ban them?
The answer to these questions is that primary purpose is largely irrelevant to the question of how an object or substance should be regulated. What matters is (1) the actual propensity for destructive and/or illegitimate uses, harm, etc.; (2) the likely effect of a proposed regulation; and (3) the benefit and values inherent in use of the object or substance.
“Antis” like to seize upon primary purpose as a means of distinguishing guns from stuff like cars. But they are simply engaged in special pleading.
The rest of this thread has been commentary; this post said it all.
Deaths from car accidents have been taken seriously and no one seriously objects to regulations aimed at reducing traffic deaths. We restrict who can use a car and how they use it, we know who owns each one, we test them for skill and knowledge of the regulations, people are required to follow rules that they think are stupid (like staying stopped at a red light even if there is no visible traffic), we force cars to incorporate a wide variety of safety devices, and on and on. There are regulations on what is street legal for cars.
Can we have mature discussions approaching regulating gun ownership and use in the same spirit? No one fears that laws regulating driving are a slippery slope to make driving illegal and to confiscate all cars. We sometimes have argued about cost benefit of some safety precautions but it is not so polarized.
Lots of people drive; we work to help make the experience as safe as reasonably possible for them and for others. Lots of people own guns; are there reasonably possible options that can make that fact safer for everyone as well?
It seems silly to worry about highway fatalities when they will practically be eliminated by self-driving cars. I expect to self-driving cars on the road by 2020 and commonplace by 2030. The safety effort will be to eliminate manually driven vehicles.
Also I should point out that cars are 10 times safer than they were when I was a kid when compared on a passenger mile basis.
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811701.pdf
When passenger fatalities are close to 1 per 100 million miles then that is pretty good.
Thank you!
Exactly. We tend to quickly adjust to changes, and almost assume that even decisions which we are in complete control of are inevitable or results of natural laws. Unfortunately we also tend to become polarised into thinking of these things as conflicts or either/or situations, rather than a continous flow of processes that we can and should influence.
In my mind it is a tragedy when it happens, since it prevents a development that would be mutually beneficial. If we look at it from a prspective whether you are for or against cars, or whether you are for freedom or the enviroment, we get stuck in pseudo-conflicts. If we instead focus on the overlaying goals, we almost always find a common goal.
Most can probably agree that reducing the need for car travel is a positive thing. As is increasing peoples safety and freedom of movement, reducing enviromental damage, increasing physical health and safety, creating more attractive living enviroments, creating structures that support innovation and entrepeneurship etc etc. Whether you like or dislike cars, these are most likely things that we can agree are good and definetely goals that we can achieve in ways that will benefit everyone.
This is definetely a case of development that would be positive for the vast majority. The only critisism I would have is that you stated the solution as “allow only” rather than “make possible”. I think it is better to start from the point of trying to provide better options, rather than forbidding options that you don’t want people to choose.
I don’t walk to the store because I am forbidden to drive a car there (I’m not, there are even subsidised parking spots there to make it easier), I do it because it is a cheaper and more practical option.
I actually think that the original comparison to gun control in this thread was a bad idea, because it derails the discussion into a much-repeated trench war, but I still can’t help myself from making a comparison…
Whether you’re pro-gun or not, I think everyone can agree to some pretty basic goals IF they feel that they can do so without having to agree to solutions that they don’t like. For example, nobody wants people to die from gun violence. So we could have a productive discussion about that if we started from a point that was more constructive, such as:
What are the underlying causes of gun violence?
Then maybe we will end up agreeing that (I’m just spitballing here…) things such as bullying in school, social isolation, mental health issues or the connection between masculin culture and aggressiveness contribute to gun violence. And if we agree that is the case, we can suddenly start working towards reducing the thing we all want to get rid of without anyone having to be afraid of losing their rights or freedoms. In my experience as a polcitician, this is a much more effective way to achieve reforms with a broad support. And having a consensus or broad support also results in much more effective implementation as well as sustainability.
I don’t believe this is true. Consider the issue of senior citizen drivers causing car accidents and death. Stats have found them to be as likely to cause an accident as teenage drivers, but we have yet to properly address the issue.
In 2006 George Russell Weller drove through an open air market killing 10 and injuring 63. He was 86 at the time. What broad brushes are we willing to paint with in order to prevent that from happening? At the moment, no one gives a shit, we have to wait until the next mass fatality before it will be news again. But imagine if it had been 10 children. What would the AARP have to say about that?
Once. We do that once at age 16 and then never again. Does that sound to you like we take it seriously? Not to mention that the testing system is a joke. Considering the potential for harm, why aren’t drivers tested more frequently or more strictly–particularly the elderly? If you want to apply that to guns, we’d have the same results: every gun owner tested at 16 before they have a criminal record or mental health issues, and then never again until they’re 86 and kill 10 people.
Again I’d disagree. Look at the reactions when people suggest dealing with elderly drivers. And look at how MADD continues to push for tighter drunk driving laws, year after year. We now have police check points set up for drivers to prove that they’re sober. There are people that think all cars should have ignition interlock, and people that are using drunk driving deaths to ban alcohol altogether.
That tragedy last week could have just as easily been from an elderly driver or a drunk driver plowing into a group of children waiting for the bus. Had it been either of those this board would be full of people having the same polarizing conversation.
How many deaths will it take before we ban senior citizens from driving? Well we can’t ban them from driving, but perhaps we could have a few regulations. Are there any reasonable regulations we could implement to reduce the number of fatalities caused by elderly drivers? Could we limit the types of the cars they can use? Perhaps limit the speed that they can travel? The roads they’re allowed on? Take a moment and apply all the rhetoric about gun laws to elderly drivers and see how they line up.
I think you are probably right. I would guess that also by then, schools will have sophisticated intruder detection systems with cameras and computers with facial recognition software. If somebody who doesn’t belong even comes close to entering the school, the school administrators will be notified immediately and the doors will lock him out.
I agree, your phrasing is a better description of how the process has to occur if it’s to be successful. Free choice rather than coercion is needed if a change is going to last. You ultimately can’t force people to give up something they value highly, and attempts to do so tend to backfire badly.
One of the interesting things about the golf cart town was that the switch away from cars to golf carts came about spontaneously. Being in sunny Florida, it had lots of older people living there who liked to golf and owned golf carts. A few people tarted driving their golf carts into town, and the idea gradually caught on until today it’s the expected way to get around. There’s no law forbidding people from driving their cars around town, but doing so gets you odd looks. It’s become a social faux pas to use a car rather than a golf cart. They don’t need to outlaw car use in town, because no one wants to do it.
Some motor vehicles are necessary, but not nearly as many as we use now. And to the extent that they are displacing more cost-effective ways of doing the same or equivalent things, they make us poorer.
Too many people are forced to spend too much of their income on buying/insuring/fueling/maintaining their own personal motor transport system, simply because we haven’t built most of our society to include or support any alternative. And too many state and local governments spend too much of their income on building and maintaining roads.
Relying on vast fleets of private internal-combustion cars and trucks, plus vast networks of public asphalt roads, just isn’t efficient, or sustainable.
Bingo. Except I’d argue the “cheap” part. Cars have never really been as cheap as they seemed, because of the split between the mostly-private costs of the fleet and the mostly-public costs of the infrastructure. But cheap gasoline sure helped, for many years. That’s over now.
Practical public transport can exist within cities, even modest-sized ones that in today’s America have nothing. And it can exist between all those cities.
For a country of our size, technology, and affluence, we should have an environment in which anyone living in a city of 100,000 or more is within foot, bicycle, or trolley range of an intercity rail station where they can get passage to any other city of size.
There’s so much progress that could be made on those fronts that, for the foreseeable future, saying we can’t ultimately have bus or rail lines to every rural hamlet, while true, mainly functions as a distraction from the substance of the issues.
They could probably do that now, but I’m not sure how you could ensure the police would get there in time. I would add a metal detector and an airlock, so they couldn’t get in unless someone buzzed them in, if they aren’t on the authorized list. It’s probably still cheaper than a full-time security guard. I had a computer room I worked in during the 70s. It just had an atrium and a window, so the operators could verify you and buzz you in through the second set of doors. I’d also add secure fencing so no one could get in through the playground.
That’s sad.
Rather than ask for the cite I’ll just pony up with one. You are wrong.
The rest of your post is just as specious. We have a vigorous system designed to make sure that drivers are obeying a host of laws that decrease the risks of driving to themselves and others. We accept that the goal is not to prevent all driving accidents or deaths associated with accidents and can have reasonable debates about what is reasonable. But no one is arguing that cars should all be outlawed and no one is seriously worried that they are going to be and that any additional regulation is the first step to eliminating all autos. No one tries to make it illegal for a pediatrician to advise that children should be kept in car seats and boosters to this or that age. OTOH even a pediatrician discussing gun storage safety was such a threat to the NRA that they tried to make asking about gun ownership a crime.
Guns are a particularly … loaded … issue. And the debate is usually framed by those at each pole much more than most other issues, even in our otherwise highly polarized political clime. Treat gun safety issues and risk reduction just like we treat car safety issues please.
From the actual report:
The point is that we don’t treat elderly drivers the way we treat teen drivers, which means we’re far from serious when it comes to dealing with driving fatalities. And what you’ll notice is that seniors have much more lobbying power than teens. Remember you said, “Deaths from car accidents have been taken seriously and no one seriously objects to regulations aimed at reducing traffic deaths.” Well, you’re wrong, seniors object, and will put up just as much of a stink as gun owners if you were to try and target them regulations.
In August a 100 year old man plowed into a group of school children injuring 11. You noted that technology is making elderly drivers safer, but it’s also allowing the elderly to live long. As baby boomers age they’ll make up a larger portion of drivers. Fatality rates end up being U shaped, lots of deaths for teens, and lots for the elderly, but our treatment of the two groups doesn’t match up. Why is that?