Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Yes but high velocity transportation such as cars come with built-in safety features to help prevent injuries and death. But people are stupid, and won't use their seatbelts, or have their cars inspected. And they do text and use phones while driving.
When you're talking on a phone, your mind is picturing the thing your discussing over the phone. It is not focused on the road or what's going on around you. Distracted driving continues to kill people right left and sideways in our state.
It's not that driving a car HAS to be dangerous. It really is designed to be as simple and safe as possible. BUT - it does have one big requirement. THAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO THE DRIVING PART. Your peripheral vision also helps in avoiding oncoming disaster, but you have to be engaged in watching the road for it to be of any help.
I've seen several accidents play out right in front of me, where both drivers were not paying attention at the same time. That's all it takes to make driving a disaster. And yet, it seems like people would rather have that than be responsible people and leave the phone calls for later.
Driving a car will always be dangerous whether you pay attention or not. It's not "responsible" to leave calls for after you drive. The fact that we have to drive huge machines by ourselves at all is irresponsible.
It's "responsible" to vote for politicians who will fix the problem by starting at the very top of the hierarchy of controls, rather than trying to blame administrative controls for not working.
Do you really think that road design doesn't matter at all, and all designs are equally (un)safe?
Consider a library with a parking lot across the street.
In one design, the street is four lanes, 45 mph, and there's no crosswalk. The expectation is for people to walk a quarter mile out of the way to the nearby intersection.
In the other design: the road is 25 mph, with only two narrow lanes. There's a crosswalk that's over a speed table, with chicanes before and after.
Do you really expect both designs to have equal numbers of deaths?
Road design DOES matter and there's no question that bad roads where I live (in Utah where they cheaped out and bought pavement that ended up cracking all over the roadways) do damage cars and make driving a lot more unsafe. I'm not saying that road design simply doesn't matter, that would be absurd.
But in Utah, it doesn't matter how well designed the roads are. Even with clearly marked pedestrian crossings and lights, cars run the lights and kill people all the time here because, utahns believe they won't be charged if they kill someone with their car.
I know it's hard to believe, but it's absolutely true - they really believe it's OK to kill people on the sidewalks, streets, or in crosswalks.