this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
138 points (92.1% liked)

Fuck Cars

9604 readers
663 users here now

A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

Rules

1. Be CivilYou may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.

2. No hate speechDon't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.

3. Don't harass peopleDon't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.

4. Stay on topicThis community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.

5. No repostsDo not repost content that has already been posted in this community.

Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.

Posting Guidelines

In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:

Recommended communities:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (4 children)

If cars are safer for pedestrians than ever, then why are pedestrian deaths increasing?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Vehicle sizes. SUVs and trucks kill pedestrian more often than sedans and coupes do

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Number of cars. Increase the number of cars, you increase the number of deaths. But any given collision is more likely to be survivable than in the past.

Also, it's not a perfect analog, but a quick search for deer hits and you can see modern cars crumple just fine.

Don't get me wrong... I'm not saying this deer was out dancing that very night, but if you're gonna hit me at 30 MPH with either a flat, unyielding piece of steel with potentially sharp edges and/or rusted spots, or a soft piece of plastic or fiberglass formed to cushion my impact into the engine where the REALLY hard parts are, I'm going to choose the plastic/fiberglass every time.

Edit: Here. Just to back up the information I'm giving you...

The ABSOLUTE number of deaths are increasing, because the number of people and cars are increasing. But as a function of percentage of population they are only slightly above the lowest they've been since the 20's. Modern cars are much safer. Even a bad SUV with horrible visibility is safer to all involved in a crash than an average car in the early 80's. The numbers don't lie.

Source

Edit again: To give pedestrian numbers to go with that:

You do have a point... there ARE increases in recent years, but overall the rate is still nearly half of the rate in the 80s. You are correct the most very recent trend is worrying, however.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Simple answer is an increase in the number of cars and the number of pedestrians. If cars are 10x safer for pedestrians now, but there are 1000x more interactions...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't think the poster was speaking in the context of pedestrian safety?

Also, typically pedestrians aren't anywhere near highways and other high-speed roadways. So not really a concern in this context.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

cars are safer now than they've ever been for both drivers and pedestrians

Cars don't need to be going high speeds to be dangerous to pedestrians. Roads near pedestrians can be designed poorly allowing drivers to go significantly faster than the intended limits.