Traffic engineers build roads relying on outdated research, faulty data

Key missing component: CAFE needs a rewrite. US emissions laws have a cutout so that larger vehicles have less stringent emissions requirements. The problem is that this is no longer a gap it's a chasm. Slight hyperbole but a Japanese kei car many Americans would love town own muat do closer to 50mpg, while a monster pickup can do 15mpg. It ends up that a small car can cost $15,000 and the giant pickup costs... $15,000. Many consumers compare the two and wonder if the econobox is really a good choice.

The bright shining hope: Most Americans do not want these big cars. Legislation is making small vehicles less competitive, when it should be the other way.

AKA - we have good, cheap(ish) electric trucks now. Legislation doesn't need to worry about farmers who can't afford electric anymore.

Something that makes this even more insidious, is that trying to change roads to be safer often triggers many studies about the impact of those changes. These range from studies on traffic congestion, to safety itself, local business impact, etc. What makes this so hypocritical is that hardly any of those studies were done when the roads were put in, or subsequently widened. There were no studies on how wide, fast roads would negatively impact neighborhoods. How they would make it dangerous just to walk around, or increase the local pollution (air and particulates ending up in streams). They didn’t study how these widened roads might negatively impact downtowns, etc. All of this car investment happened as though it was for the greater good, and many people still believe this.

"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."

It sounds like the problem we have here is that each individual incident is analyzed and catalogued as an incident, so we never get to 'enemy action'. The most urgent issue to resolve is whose insurance is going to pay for it, which requires assigning blame, and in each case it's usually clear where the blame lies. This is all the system working entirely as expected and we can't really skip this step.

What ought to happen next is that the incidents get compiled, trends turn up, and we change our designs according to those trends.

The article is pretty light on details about the extent to which this isn't happening among traffic engineers. Requiring smaller vehicles or banning touchscreens has to come from Congress, so it's outside the control of any city's engineers. Anecdotally, the engineers in my own city seem pretty determined to consider the possibility that any given accident had a bad design as the root cause, and regularly fix and improve intersections and road markings according to what is happening. They're not perfect, but I don't get the sense that they're resting easy on the assurance that it's all user error either.

There's data that suggests that the increases in vehicle/pedestrian collision is mostly due to the in car displays that require you to take your eyes off of the road to do anything. Most excess collisions since around 2010 collisions have been at night, when peripheral vision is less likely to catch movement, and when the screens will mess up your night vision.

Also, smartphones being used while driving are a massive hazard that people aren't really talking about. The number of people that I, or my passenger, has seen texting while driving is really shocking. I'd wager it's a bigger problem than drunk driving ever was.

> And our reality is one where more pedestrians and bicyclists are getting killed on U.S. streets than at any time in the past 45 years – over 1,000 bicyclists and 7,500 pedestrians in 2022 alone

It links to https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/yearl... for that 7500 pedestrians in 2022 figure.

Yet on that very same page there is a table of pedestrian and bicyclist deaths going back to 1975, which shows that 1977-1981 all had more pedestrian deaths (7732, 7795, 8096, 8070, and 7837) than 2022 (7522). Several of those years are within the last 45 years.

For bicyclists 2022 is indeed the biggest year just edging out 1977 (1084 vs 1003).

This might be forgiven as just being a little sloppy. If he'd just have said "past 40 years" instead of "past 45 years" then it would have been accurate.

But wait...the US population was 338 million in 2022, and around 220 million in 1979. We really should look at rates.

2020 pedestrian deaths per 100k population were 2.22. They were above that every year from 1975-1991. Same for bicyclists--every year from 1975-1991 was higher than 2020.

For pedestrians the rates peaked in 1979 at 3.76 then declined fairly linearly to 1.33 in 2009, then rose again fairly linearly to 1.95 in 2020, then jumped a bit to 2.22 for 2021 and 2022. Same pattern for bicyclists.

Here's a graph of the rates by year [1]. The bicyclist rates are per 1m instead of per 100k to make them easier to read.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/BJ2h9o9

There is overwhelming evidence against the increase of dependency on car centric transportation. Yet people just don't get it until it impacts them personally (ie, death of loved one, loss of limbs of friends, paralysis, DUI).

I'm honestly done with trying to convince politicians, car-brains, "traffic engineers", transportation departments that they way we have been scaling our infrastructure is a tremendous waste of resources. Every talking point they have presented has a mountain evidence against it, yet they continue churning away at "wE mUsT bUiLd mOrE hIgHwAyS!!1 [at the expense of the federal/state/local budgets, environment, and communities near these projects]".

Maybe those safety rating systems should include the things SUVs are bad at. I think there's one tester who does a body roll test and most SUVs fail to swerve out of the way of something without rolling. Unsure if that's still true. But with that and like a "how likely is your child to be squished dead" rating, maybe people will think twice

Some time ago, I read all of the published data on the safety of traffic circles, as I had often seen them recommended as a safer alternative to traffic lights.

I was not very impressed. The confounding factors for the traffic light to circle projects were always far too large, and it always had to be coupled with the fact that it was usually poorest intersections that get rebuilt. I no longer have a high opinion of traffic safety research as a field.

Regarding this article's claims in particular, traffic fatalities went up a certain amount after 2020, and I doubt that road design changes were a primary driver. (Policing trends are one possible candidate.)

Regardless, in the last six months or so, my Tesla's autodrive went from "expensive joke" to "safer driver than me". IMO, leveraging existing technology could cut traffic deaths to a small fraction of what they are now over 3-5 years, were we to pursue aggressive conversion of the existing vehicle fleet.

These Stupid Trucks are Literally Killing Us by Not Just Bikes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo

Until the US government isn't deadlocked and is able to pass new laws, this isn't going to get better at all.

The huge hoods/bonnets on SUVs and trucks need to be regulated to make future cars smaller. I'm not an expert (I'll pontificate anyway) but could external airbags help at all?

One issue with our neighbourhood is that SUVs use our road to skip past 2 junctions that get congested during school drop-off/pickup. The moms sometimes look ridiculously tiny in their urban tanks, but they speed through a residential road to shave off a minute from their school run. People in cars appear to act more selfishly than people outside of cars (has there been any research on that?) and I think roads should be designed with that in mind.

The YouTuber Not Just Bikes made a great point in one of his videos: why in the world are public safety improvements up for debate? If people keep falling off a walkway, we don’t hold town hall meetings to debate the merits of pedestrian safety, we don’t do studies on the impact to traffic flow, we just put up a railing.

Here in Philadelphia, advocacy groups spent years fighting to have a wide, lethal stroad that runs through the middle of the city put on a road diet. Residents were polled, and something like 70% of people in the surrounding neighborhoods were in favor of it. The city spent millions in planning and engineering, and then right before paving was about to start, a local councilmember blocked it and canceled the whole project on the half of the road that runs through their neighborhood. So half of the road was narrowed to two lanes and has no speeding, no fatalities, and generally sane driver behavior. The other half is a reckless free-for-all that’s exhausting to drive on and terrifying for pedestrians and cyclists.

Millions in taxpayer dollars and the political will of a majority of citizens were wasted because our system allows one NIMBY to stop everything. A year later, there has already been a cyclist fatality on the road.

No matter how you slice it, a large moving object will do severe damage to a pedestrian or bicyclist.

The only car that's safe for pedestrians is the one that isn't moving, which is why pedestrian impact isn't a factor in safety.

And they sometimes get very upset when people call them out on their BS.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jq98/man-fined-for-enginee...

https://indyweek.com/news/wake/state-engineer-files-complain...

That’s pretty obvious if you’ve visited any major city

It's a dramatic article likely intended to help sell his book (with an equally dramatic title).

Missing from all of this is, well, data. He squarely blames large vehicles, SUV's. Now, I have no horse in this race, I prefer small vehicles for practical every-day driving. For moving family, dogs, camping trips, etc., a minivan is great.

Yet, at a very basic level, some of what he is saying makes no sense to me. Take this introductory statement:

"As a country, we hit the threshold of 1 million cumulative deaths in 1953, 2 million in 1975 and 3 million in 1998. While the past several years of data have not yet been released, I estimate that the U.S. topped 4 million total road deaths sometime in the spring of 2024."

So, 4 million by 2024. Fully half of that by 1975. Care to guess how many SUV's existed in 1975? Also, I am going to guess average speeds where likely lower.

He is blaming SUV's and claiming that making them 10 cm lower would have a dramatic impact on results. OK, well, if the data up until 1975 is any indication, this is nonsense.

How about distractions, drunk driving and, yes, pedestrians and cyclists. Accidents are not always attributable to one side or a single variable. The world is a complex multivariate problem. This guy is trying to sell books by hating on everything and only blaming one or two variables: SUV's bad, wide roads, bad.

And then there's are the circumstances of each accident. He gives the example of an SUV losing control, jumping a curb and killing a father and his kid. Well, not every accident is like that. And, no, life isn't going to be perfectly safe. You are not going to go down to zero accidents and zero fatalities, no matter how hard you might try.

Which brings me to the last point: He offers not data whatsoever on how things would improve if his world view were to be adopted. If we ripped-up and modified every road and shrunk every vehicle by 10 cm.

You see, it is easy to be critical of anything when you don't have to be accountable for any of it. Happens all the time with "experts". As an example, the financial world is full of economists who just "know" all there is to know about finance...yet none of them are billionaires and few (none?) run successful businesses at scale.

Yes, of course, road safety is important. I just think that the solutions include far more variables than what this guy trying to sell a book seems to be focusing on in this article. In a few decades, self-driving cars might solve this problem nicely. Don't know.

For those of you that want small vehicles, they exist for the buying. For those of you who want big vehicles, you’re in luck, they also exist for the buying. Anyone that wants to limit people’s choices can shove it up your arse!

<< These are the sorts of systemic conditions that lead to many so-called road user errors.

There is certainly an argument to be made that we are all outcomes of the system in which we operate. That is to say, we all victims of circumstance. Does that, however, mean bicycles should swerve between cars like motorcycles in CA ( and lately -- illegally -- in IL ) or go against the traffic diagonally?

Both examples are admittedly anecdotal, but very recent and both from recent trip downtown.

At the end of the day, it is the user error. Having a tank to drive just happens to be re-assurance that whatever happens, the other user will bear the brunt of their bad decision.. which is supposed to be deterrent. But, apparently, it is not.

I honestly do not know what it is about bikes, but not completely unlike BMWs and Teslas, they seem to attract oddly aggressive drivers.