{"id":11634,"date":"2023-09-06T16:23:37","date_gmt":"2023-09-06T16:23:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=11634"},"modified":"2023-09-06T16:23:37","modified_gmt":"2023-09-06T16:23:37","slug":"america-has-the-worlds-safest-air-travel-but-sucks-so-bad-at-car-safety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=11634","title":{"rendered":"America has the world\u2019s safest air travel but sucks so bad at car safety"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\n\n“In the EU, car fatalities, already far lower than America\u2019s, were down<\/a> by 22 percent over the last decade. Car crashes are just behind guns as the second greatest killer<\/a> of US children. Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous Americans are disproportionately<\/a>likely<\/a> to be killed by a car. Merely taking a walk outside is becoming particularly dangerous: about 7,508 pedestrians were killed<\/a> by cars last year, the highest number since 1981 and a massive increase over the last decade”
…
“there\u2019s a lot we can learn from the aviation system\u2019s approach to passenger safety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most obvious is that we shouldn\u2019t 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<\/a>, 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<\/a>, but others, including Canada, with an urban geography much more similar to ours, have steadily decreased their death rates to levels far lower<\/a> than ours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A second lesson from the aviation sector is that safety is a systemic responsibility. \u201cThe [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,\u201d the New York Times explained, which has added up to a near-spotless safety record.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> coverage<\/a> 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\u2019s a widely circulated myth that the vast majority of crashes are caused by \u201chuman error,\u201d transportation writer David Zipper explained<\/a> in the Atlantic in 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, individuals making unsafe choices \u2014 speeding, say, or driving drunk \u2014 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,<\/a> known among traffic safety advocates as \u201cstroads<\/a>,\u201d 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\u2019s inevitable that collisions will happen.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“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 \u2014 SUVs and pickup trucks \u2014 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\u2019s tax on oversized cars).”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.vox.com\/future-perfect\/2023\/8\/25\/23844717\/america-safe-air-travel-car-safety-accidents<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“In the EU, car fatalities, already far lower than America\u2019s, 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”<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

“there\u2019s a lot we can learn from the aviation system\u2019s approach to passenger safety.
\nThe most obvious is that we shouldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

A second lesson from the aviation sector is that safety is a systemic responsibility. \u201cThe [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,\u201d the New York Times explained, which has added up to a near-spotless safety record.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s a widely circulated myth that the vast majority of crashes are caused by \u201chuman error,\u201d transportation writer David Zipper explained in the Atlantic in 2021.<\/p>\n

Of course, individuals making unsafe choices \u2014 speeding, say, or driving drunk \u2014 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 \u201cstroads,\u201d 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\u2019s inevitable that collisions will happen.”<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

“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 \u2014 SUVs and pickup trucks \u2014 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\u2019s tax on oversized cars).”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[1092,1844,53,1247,1250],"class_list":["post-11634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-cars","tag-crash","tag-deaths","tag-infrastructure","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11634"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11635,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11634\/revisions\/11635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}