Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
American drivers are now even more distracted by their phones. Pedestrian deaths are soaring.
https://www.vox.com/24078289/us-drivers-distracted-driving-cellphone-road-deaths-pedestrians
“Texas border enforcement cops killed 74 people and wounded almost 200 more during vehicle chases over a 29-month period, according to a report released yesterday by Human Rights Watch. The chases occurred as part of Operation Lone Star, a controversial program that has spent over $10 billion in taxpayer funds to militarize Texas’ border with Mexico.
Operation Lone Star (OLS), which was launched in March 2021 by Gov. Greg Abbot, has devoted a tremendous amount of taxpayer dollars to increasing Texas’ border security, often using extreme tactics. Recently the program came under fire for using razor wire and blade-topped buoys on the Rio Grande in an attempt to keep out migrants.”
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“According to the report, Texas Department of Public Safety troopers working under Operation Lone Star frequently engage in unnecessary vehicle chases and other dangerous driving maneuvers when attempting to make arrests. As a result, unnecessary police chases have increased by as much as 1,000 percent in some Texas counties.”
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“In all, from March 2021 to July 2023, 74 drivers, passengers, or bystanders were killed in these chases, and 189 more were wounded. Those killed include seven bystanders, including a 7-year-old girl and her 71-year-old grandmother.”
https://reason.com/2023/11/28/texas-troopers-killed-74-people-in-vehicle-chases-since-implementing-controversial-border-program/
“The lives of wild animals are defined by mobility. You have all of these different scales, both spatial and temporal, in which animals are moving. They’re moving daily, as they roam around their territories looking for food. They’re moving seasonally, as they migrate between different habitats as the year turns. They have to move, in some cases, once in a lifetime, to disperse through new territory, or in search of a mate.
All of those movements are absolutely imperative to the survival of both individual animals and wildlife populations. Roads terminate or truncate those movements, by killing animals directly, as roadkill, but also by creating a barrier of traffic, what some researchers call a “moving fence” — this kind of impenetrable obstacle that prevents animals from navigating their habitats. To take a really dramatic, stark example, there are herds of mule deer and pronghorn in Wyoming that starve en masse while trying to reach low-elevation valleys to find food in winter because highways have blocked their migrations.”
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“One of the really eye-opening experiences that I had working on this book was taking part in some bicycle surveys of roadkill in Montana. When you’re rolling along at 10 miles an hour and you’re much lower to the ground, rather than seated in the captain’s chair of an SUV, you see all of those small lives that you would never see at highway speeds in a car. I was struck by how many birds we saw: raptors, magpies, ravens, songbirds. The avian life along the side of the highway was really, really visible.”
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“Hearing is one of the most important senses that wild animals have. It’s absolutely imperative for both predators and prey.”
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“Wildlife crossings are incredibly effective, paired with roadside fencing that guides the animals to the crossings.”
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“For the most part, the wildlife crossings that we’ve built are aimed at large, common animals that endanger driver safety, like deer and elk and moose: the animals that will wreck your car and maybe end your life if you hit them. We need more of those. But we also need more crossings that benefit the animals that don’t kill drivers on a regular basis, especially reptiles and amphibians, which are some of the most road- and car-endangered groups of animals in the world.
There are turtle culverts and toad tunnels out there, but they’re few and far between. There’s a lot of focus on wildlife crossings that pay for themselves, that prevent enough car crashes to recoup their own construction costs. But I think we’re also starting to see the rise of wildlife crossings that are aimed at conservation, rather than cost savings.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23868483/cars-roads-roadkill-crossing-goldfarb-national-parks
https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/8/19/23837648/self-driving-taxis-gm-cruise-alphabet-waymo
“In the EU, car fatalities, already far lower than America’s, were down by 22 percent over the last decade. Car crashes are just behind guns as the second greatest killer of US children. Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous Americans are disproportionately likely to be killed by a car. Merely taking a walk outside is becoming particularly dangerous: about 7,508 pedestrians were killed by cars last year, the highest number since 1981 and a massive increase over the last decade”
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“there’s a lot we can learn from the aviation system’s approach to passenger safety.
The most obvious is that we shouldn’t accept carnage just because the activity seems inherently dangerous. If we can figure out how to make it exceptionally safe to hurtle through the sky at over 500 miles per hour, we can definitely figure out how to keep people alive on the ground, especially because other countries have done it already. The Netherlands is a famous example, but others, including Canada, with an urban geography much more similar to ours, have steadily decreased their death rates to levels far lower than ours.
A second lesson from the aviation sector is that safety is a systemic responsibility. “The [air] safety regime, with its built-in redundancies, is known in aviation circles as the Swiss cheese model: If a problem slips through a hole in one layer, it will be caught by another,” the New York Times explained, which has added up to a near-spotless safety record.
Compare that to the situation in car safety, where high death rates are accepted as a baseline part of how the system works rather than an institutional failure. Media coverage treats surges in crash deaths as if they are uncontrollable fluctuations in the weather and blames people driving recklessly for getting themselves killed. In the American traffic engineering bureaucracy, there’s a widely circulated myth that the vast majority of crashes are caused by “human error,” transportation writer David Zipper explained in the Atlantic in 2021.
Of course, individuals making unsafe choices — speeding, say, or driving drunk — matters. But these are distractions from what makes the American system of driving so unsafe in the first place: we have a proliferation of fundamentally unsafe roads, known among traffic safety advocates as “stroads,” that combine wide lanes and speeds higher than 25 miles per hour with frequent turns, stops at traffic lights, and shared traffic with cars, pedestrians, and bikes. With all these conflict points, it’s inevitable that collisions will happen.”
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“A third lesson from aviation is that dangerous technology has to be adequately regulated. Empirical research increasingly shows that the rapid takeover of big cars — SUVs and pickup trucks — is a major factor behind our car safety backslide over the last decade. But US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has declined to call for policies to discourage the proliferation of these vehicles (like Washington, DC’s tax on oversized cars).”
“The move to regulate fuel economy came about a few years earlier, following the 1973–74 Arab embargo that suddenly ended the flow of oil from OPEC nations. In the face of skyrocketing oil prices, Congress froze gasoline prices to protect American consumers from pocketbook shock. Then came the hard part. Elected officials sought to require U.S. automakers to build the smaller, more economical cars that unquestionably would have been built had gasoline prices been allowed to rise freely. Yet the fuel economy standards hit passenger sedans hard while leaving light trucks, which were not seen as passenger vehicles, almost untouched.
As the fuel economy standards began to bite consumers, they found that trucks provided comfort and safety no longer available in the downsized sedans. Truck sales surged, and in 1990, Ford placed a four-door body on a Ranger truck frame and introduced the Ford Explorer, a passenger vehicle that satisfied the government’s truck definition. This inspired an explosion of similar SUV production across the industry. Trucks became beautiful, expensive, and highly desirable.”
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“All the while, the fuel economy standard for trucks remained less strict than for sedans. To make things even better for U.S. producers, almost-prohibitive tariffs on European light trucks were extended to the rest of the world. Many foreign producers eventually jumped the tariff wall and built trucks and cars here, but the home-grown industry enjoyed an early advantage.”
“What if I told you there was a fairly simple policy initiative that would reduce auto traffic by 15 to 20 percent in the heart of America’s most congested city, raise $1 billion annually for the country’s biggest mass transit system at a time when such services are on the edge of a financial death spiral, and improve air quality for urban neighborhoods that have long suffered disproportionately from pollution?
I have good news: Such a plan exists. It’s called congestion pricing, and at the end of June in New York City, the plan cleared its last federal hurdle. As early as next spring, motorists will be charged a fee — perhaps $23 for a rush-hour trip and $17 in off-peak hours, according to a report released last year — to enter the most crowded parts of Manhattan south of 60th Street and below Central Park.”
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“congestion pricing demonstrates two things: one, that the US can implement smart solutions to some of the most difficult climate and urban problems we face today. And two, that the byzantine review system we’ve created — ostensibly to protect the environment — has made it so, so, so difficult to do so.”
“There’s no single explanation for why it’s getting more dangerous to walk on US roads, but there are a few major contributing factors. One is deadly road design. In the decades after World War II, new communities emerged, centered on the premise that inhabitants would drive everywhere. Governments and regional planners designed wide, multi-lane arterial roads for high-speed travel. In the years since, traffic engineers and planners continued to widen those roads and add lanes, ostensibly to address congestion, while local officials approved commercial development alongside them. It led to what former traffic engineer and Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn calls “stroads.””
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“Another major factor contributing to climbing pedestrian fatalities is the American love affair with big vehicles.”
“As of 2021, about 11 million Americans had their driver’s licenses suspended due to nonpayment of fines and fees. It took Moseley-Sayles nearly a decade — by which time she’d paid off her initial ticket plus an additional $5,000 in warrant fees and other fines — to get her license reinstated. In the interim, she faced a conundrum that millions who have suspended licenses must contend with each year: Taking away a license doesn’t take away a person’s need to drive. Moseley-Sayles had to keep using her car and hope that she wasn’t pulled over and arrested for it.”
“54 percent of the approximately 77 million gun owners in the US do not practice safe gun storage, according to a 2018 Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health survey. And one-third of these households with dangerously stored guns are also home to children.
This is a fact that should alarm us. In 2020, firearms surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for American children, with 4,357 children killed by gunfire that year. While the majority of child deaths from guns are due to homicide, an average of 35 percent between 2018 and 2021 were suicides, while 5 percent were caused by unintentional, accidental shootings.”