Probably the day after we stop tolerating the even more egregious waste of life that occurs every day from mass over consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and, well, food.[1]
Accidents are only 7th in the top 10 killers, and automobile accidents are a fraction of that category[2].
If we want to tackle major causes of death, this is the place to start:
On the other hand, when it comes to alcohol and, to some extent, tobacco, one can at least make the plea that most of the damage isn't external. I can't kill anyone other than myself if I drink too much, whereas if I'm speeding on the road, chances are I'm going to kill whatever I smash into, not only myself. Of course, there's the added penalty related to the social consequences of alcohol consumption (e.g. alienating those around me and wrecking a couple of lives).
Don't get me wrong -- I agree with your premise and with the point you are making -- but I think that, as far as the legal and public safety systems are concerned, traffic issues don't go into the same category as alcohol consumption. Alcohol consumption is primarily self-destructive, whereas dangerous driving is not (arguably, someone wearing a seatbelt and protected by airbags is probably safer than someone riding a bike when they get hit by a car).
A good first step would probably be to discourage the superfluous use of cars. I passionately hate people who absolutely have to drive their cars over a distance they could cover, on foot, in thirty minutes, when they aren't really rushed by anything. Seriously, get off your lazy ass and walk, or at least take the bus...
There are real dollar costs to our overall quality of life from society's health self abuse expense. Excuse the graphic image, but a car accident is generally walk away or dead, while health care for the long term unhealthy keeps bleeding once it starts.
"The motorist advocacy group AAA said accidents cost $164.2 billion each year, which based on the methodology used in the report comes to an annual per person cost of $1,051." (2008)
By comparison, some other systemic costs:
- $190 billion in annual medical costs due to obesity (2012)
- CDC reports excessive alcohol consumption cost the U.S. $224 billion (2006)
- Total annual public and private health care expenditures caused by smoking: $96 billion
- Productivity losses caused by smoking each year: $97 billion
Obesity alone or alcohol alone cost us all more than accidents. I for one have other "quality of life" things I'd like to do with my money than subsidize "self destructive" choice.
> I passionately hate people who absolutely have to drive their cars
I clock under 4K miles a year, mostly long distance trips with four or more passengers. But I'm fortunate enough to live near NYC and use public transportation. It's a lot harder in most of the US. Comparing communities across the US and Europe, it seems the best way to affect driving culture is with community layouts that put food (groceries and restaurants) within easy walking distance.
> There are real dollar costs to our overall quality of life from society's health self abuse expense. Excuse the graphic image, but a car accident is generally walk away or dead, while health care for the long term unhealthy keeps bleeding once it starts.
Agreed. But there are other factors at stake in alcoholism or obesity, too. Excluding drunk driving, which is in a league of its own (and alcoholism definitely plays a factor there!), most of the people who drive dangerously are simply jerks. Many alcoholics have legitimate economic, social, personal or even psychical problems that lead them on this track, and many obese people are obese as a result of, or partly due to underlying conditions (e.g. endocrine system problems) or simply due to not being able to easily get the amount healthy food and exercise they need. Whereas a lot of people involved in accidents like this one are just idiots.
Personal consumption is a completely different realm than dangerous systemic infrastructure decisions. I'll give someone the right to die fat and drunk on their own, but I absolutely abhor how our roads make murderers out of us.
I am willing to wager that there are more alcohol related deaths involving chronic drinkers than there are binging college students who forget to vomit.
We've just termed those deaths "acceptable" or pretend that they are "natural causes" because the victims tend to be in the second half of an expected lifespan.
Well, I'm curious what the numbers actually are. Either way about it, I agree we should fight for addicts. I've lost two dear people to alcohol, and I'm fighting for a third right now.
However, other than increased mental health care funding I struggle to imagine what governmental policy would have helped those I've lost. A sin tax would have done nothing for these people (hell, prohibition wouldn't have worked either).
Legislating 1 meter barriers between auto and bicycle traffic is incredibly simple compared to attempting to legislate the psycho-social forces of addiction. We don't have to limit our social change to legislation but that's the mindset from first reply was made in.
Exactly this. Alcohol is linked to over 75,000 deaths per year [1] while bicycle related deaths are around 700 per year [2]. There needs to be much more focus on alcohol/tobacco related injuries than deaths.
Worship? Hyperbolic bullshit. The automobile, and the high mobility it affords, is the primary cause for a lot of social and economic progress over the past century for the average person.
When we can find a viable, safer alternative. The automobile has been a staple of growth of modern society since it's invention. There's no other current form of transportation that can be a drop in fit.
But in reality, no matter the form of transportation, there will be deaths involved, be it accidental or not. It's a fact of life. Sad, but inevitable.
The bicycle could have been, and is in many cities (see Copenhagen or Amsterdam). The decision to include the automobile as "a staple of growth in modern society" is the reason it isn't a drop in fit. We designed our cities around dangerous, pollution producing power tools, and in doing so squashed out any hope of implementing something better.
If you think about it, the only reason the bicycle isn't a safe alternative is because there are cars on the road. I don't have statistics on this, but you almost never hear about solo bicycle accidents resulting in fatalities, only ones involving cars.
We're on our way back now, but it's a long road (so to speak).
I agree that in a dense urban environment, the bicycle could be a much better fit for personal transportation. But as someone who has lived in smaller Midwestern cities, many more lives that some people care to think about depend on the automobile as a livelihood. Even in smaller metro areas, a bicycle would not be a viable option in the least. Cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam precede automobiles by hundreds of years, and are a better fit for bicycles and smaller personal travel mediums. That's where the disparity between the how the US travel system is structured compared to one with a much longer and storied history, like Europe.
Many smaller Midwestern cities (speaking as someone who grew up in one and went to college in another) were founded and to a significant degree built out in the streetcar era, and have a physical form in the central city that reflects that. In architecture and urban form, the neighborhood I grew up in quite resembles the walk/bike/transit hotspot inner neighborhoods of Portland, Oregon, for example.
In many of those cities, the older, walkable neighborhoods have been left to decay, with gutted transit service, failing schools, and many fine old structures demolished to build parking lots or simply let to collapse., while many residents and jobs have decamped to auto-oriented exurban areas. But that is to a large degree a policy choice designed to maintain residential segregation, and something which can and must be reversed by different policy choices.
It is more the Sunbelt than the Midwest where a vast majority of the infrastructure was built in the postwar automobile era, and most neigborhoods (if you can even call them that) are nearly inaccessible to the pedestrian, cyclist, and mass transit user.
That's my point though, the US travel system didn't just become structured this way arbitrarily, it was a conscious decision to design our infrastructure in a way that was hostile to anything other than cars (pedestrians, bicycles, even horse-powered transportation). Cars were the way to the future, or so they thought.
Now, we have a hundred years of data and experience with the automobile, and it's become obvious that the fossil fuel powered car isn't a good long-term solution to the urban and suburban transportation problem. Literally everything about them is bad for the world, gathering and burning the fuel, the destruction required for their roads, the massive amount of space needed to store them, and the death and destruction they cause daily. Electric (and other alternative fuel) cars are less bad, but only in one small way, they address a single issue in an inherently flawed model.
You say that Europe has an advantage because it's cities are much older, but it's important to understand that the Netherlands and Denmark were both on the same auto-centric trajectory that the US was on coming out of the World Wars and industrialization. Denmark only started rebuilding their cycling infrastructure after decades of disuse when the energy crisis in the 70s made using a car extremely expensive. In both countries, people realized just how bad cars were. The deaths of cyclists (especially children) sparked mass protests where people demanded cycling infrastructure, and they got it. They were able to convert a car-focused city (perhaps less so than Los Angeles or New York, but still) into a bike focused city. They were able to do it, why can't we?
Modern Rotterdam was built almost entirely after World War II, the same era that many American Sunbelt cities were built to their current size. In Rotterdam, the mode share is: 5% pedestrian, 14% cycling, 25% transit, 56% automobile. This is very auto-oriented for the Netherlands, but still more than twice the 6% bike mode share of Portland, Oregon, a mid-sized American city famous here for loving bikes.
That illustrates quite well that America's near-exclusive automobile use in many cities is a matter of city planning and development policies in this country (wide, high-speed roads optimized for moving the maximum number of cars, minimum parking requirements, minimum lot size requirements and setbacks, strict zoning laws separating residential from commercial uses and single-family homes from apartments) mandating a suburban form that makes non-automobile transportation difficult or impossible. It's not simply a question of the age of a city.
"But in reality, no matter the form of transportation, there will be deaths involved"
Sure, but:
1. This was a hit-and-run, a problem that is unique to automobiles. Buses and trains do not have a significant hit-and-run issue; they are operated by people whose job is to operate them, and they are on regular, organized schedules.
2. Automobiles are among the most dangerous forms of transportation.
On the whole, though, I agree with the sentiment: Seth's death would be just as terrible if he had been hit by a bus, train, or airplane. This is not a story about how terrible cars are, it is a story about a man's tragic death.
> When we can find a viable, safer alternative. The automobile has been a staple of growth of modern society since it's invention.
This is true in areas where car manufacturers bought up all of the light rail and ripped it out. GM was convicted in the 50s and paid a $1 fine for anti-trust behavior. The US gov't has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on roads and highways, so that might be why it looks so viable.
He was killed by an automobile driver. The U.S. is notorious [1] for bicyclists (and pedestrians) being hit by cars at a relatively high rate, because it prioritizes automobile infrastructure and speed (and culture) over bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure/accessibility/safety.
[1] Not to say it's the worst, just relatively bad for an advanced country.
The U.S. is huge and spread out. Not everyone has the luxury of having all their needs within a 10 minute bike ride. We need that automobile infrastructure to get places so it makes sense that it is prioritized.
But you've got it backwards. The point is that the "spread out" nature you're talking about was created with the idea in mind that everyone will have a car and will drive. That was a conscious decision, and not a necessary one.
Also realize that it was by design that you don't view having a car to be the luxury.
On a large scale, yes. But urban sprawl is directly caused by the automobile.
The design of US cities is just godawful from any perspective (environmental, social, business efficiency, crime rates, ghettoization, etc), compared to those in Europe. I'm fairly certain that Manhattan and San Francisco are so vibrant and livable largely because they're constrained by geographical barriers.
The urban cores are very old, but many of them are surprisingly small, with the bulk of the city dating to the past 100-150 years. Copenhagen's old center, for example, was less than 10km across (confined within city walls until the 1850s), so nearly the entire city was laid out according to 19th- and 20th-century urban plans (the 20th-century one was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_Plan).
The city where it's architecturally most visible is probably Barcelona, where you can see the medieval core's winding streets, and then a massive expanse of centrally planned regular squares outside of that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eixample_aire.jpg
I thought it was people fleeing the inner city for the suburbs that caused sprawl.
It sucks, but so do the cramped cities like SF and Manhattan. You can never get a moment's peace and contemplation, and they're even more crassly commercial than your average strip mall.
Sure, it was always large, but suburban sprawl was not always a thing. As cars became ubiquitous, things got more spread out, and designed with cars as the assumed primary mode of transportation. This was not necessarily a good idea.
Or it could be that not everyone wants to live in a crowded city in a small apartment. Some people prefer to be a bit more spread out, perhaps near nature.
The US was huge and spread out before the automobile was invented. People used to live close enough to local markets that they could get by on foot, bicycle, or horseback. We used to have train stations everywhere, enabling long-distance travel, but day-to-day travel did not require mechanization.
There is no reason we cannot create towns and cities where people do not require cars. New York City is like this (having grown up there, I did not get my driver's license until I was 25 and living in a different state). We can create local transit systems with buses, trolleys, and light rail. The only place where cars really make sense is in very rural areas, where the population is extremely sparse.
Without living in the US it is hard for you to come up with a valid argument against prioritizing automobile infrastructure.
Population density alone makes it an issue outside of large cities like New York, because of that you'll also find most cities have pretty lackluster public transportation.
It is tragic that people are hurt and worse because of automobiles but they are a fact of life in America and cyclists are a very minor subset of the population for which taxes rarely cater.
One of the major problems with bicycling is the lack of respect between the cyclist and the motorist, it goes both ways but there are plenty of motorists who do not understand the laws and despise cyclists. But there are also many cyclists who fail to follow the laws which helps perpetuate the hate from motorists.
If more cities had the budget for dedicated cycling paths and road usage I'm sure they would use it but as it is now only some "greener" cities are able to do anything.
> Without living in the US it is hard for you to come up with a valid argument against prioritizing automobile infrastructure.
I'm American, and have lived in the U.S. for about 90% of my life, so I'm pretty familiar with the issues. Even leaving aside major change, and just taking cities as they exist today, pedestrian/bicyclist access and safety is just not prioritized even within cities. I lived in midtown Atlanta for three years, and two people I know were hit by automobiles while crossing in a crosswalk (fortunately neither killed, but one injured seriously). Bicycling safely was pretty much impossible, because the roads were designed exclusively for cars. And god help you if you were anywhere worse for pedestrians than midtown, which was relatively good.
It's partly infrastructure and partly culture imo. If you compare how drivers and pedestrians interact in, say, a German city center, with how they interact in Atlanta, the German intersections give much more formal protection: more crosswalks have lights, whereas many Atlanta crosswalks are not signalized, and the lights will typically give at least a short fully protected period to cross, while the Atlanta ones leave you dodging left/right turning cars even on a 'walk' signal. And culturally, the German drivers are just much more conscientious about yielding right of way when the law says they should. Pedestrians in a crosswalk are supposed to have right of way in the U.S., too, but at least in Atlanta you can't rely on it.
I could tell you about the years I lived in Houston or Los Angeles if you prefer. The situation for pedestrians there was not any better. I've also, more relevant to this article, spent a little time in Raleigh, though I haven't lived there. There is about a 2 block by 8 block area of downtown Raleigh that is reasonably safe for pedestrians.
Maybe somewhere like Portland is different; I haven't been there.
I don't find any difficulty when being a pedestrian in L.A., besides actual distances.
As a pedestrian you don't need to "share the road", only to cross it. Sidewalks seem plentiful, even if underutilized, and most road crossings have been well marked and signaled. Cars have generally been respectful when I cross.
Cycling here would certainly make me more nervous, outside of the corridors with well-spaced dedicated bike lanes. But walking is fine. It's good exercise and the weather's great.
All three of the cities you've lived in are notorious for sprawl. It would be reasonable to strive for improvement in those cities, but don't make the mistake of thinking that the problems those cities have is representative of the rest of the country.
It's like living in rural Idaho then complaining that America needs to learn how to pave roads because packed dirt just isn't cutting it.
Drivers are courteous to pedestrians to a fault in the north-west US.
Sometimes several times a day I will be approaching (as a pedestrian) an intersection (double stop-sign), say 10 to 15 feet away, and a car will stop and refuse to move until I reach the intersection, step into it, and fully cross it.
Contrast this with the east coast where a car will stop and pause for one second. If after that second nobody is in the crosswalk, they will continue. This allows pedestrians to comfortably stand in the general area of intersections without feeling as though they are holding up traffic. It also allows considerate pedestrians, like I consider myself, to allow a car to continue first (I often (try to) do this when I notice that a car has waited for several pedestrians already by the time I arrive). It also allows cautious pedestrians (as I am) to courteously opt-out of stepping in front of a car that seems impatient but begrudgingly stopped, or cars that appear distracted.
It drives me crazy. It reminds me of my mother/aunts all arguing that they should be the one that pays for everyone's meal; trying to be "polite" but ultimately just making the situation worse for no reason. Absolutely maddening. Cars and pedestrians should have a safe but adversarial attitude towards each other, it just makes everything run smoother for everybody involved.
Even in this article, the driver didn't seem to have done it because of disregard for cyclers or pedestrians. It claimed s/he moved out of the way to avoid traffic, and probably didn't see the cycler.
In China, they might actually go on the sidewalk intentionally and drive at you assuming you will move out of the way for them.
I do not think you understand the definition of hyperbole.
I live 40 minutes outside of Seattle, in a rural area that is considered a great destination for a full day weekend bike loop. Our highways are curvy, have very little shoulders and are regularly traveled by speeding logging trucks. I am a former biker. I know what I have seen and it is just not a safe hobby. Your disagreement with the reality of a 50 ton truck traveling blind corners at high speed will be of little solace to your family at your funeral.
Hyperbole is a word reserved for exaggerated claims. I am not exaggerating. It is a dangerous hobby here in the states, and the biking community might as well be shaking their fists at rain clouds.
You're letting your perception of a local situation determine a proposition about the entire concept of bicycling. That is exaggeration and that is hyperbole.
For the population as a whole maybe. That doesn't take away the not insignificant risk to any one individual of being killed or crippled.
Biking "could" give you an increased life span of 5-10 years IF you don't replace it with other exercise. In exchange for this, you have a slightly increased chance of being crippled or killed far sooner. There are arguments to be made on both sides, but don't dismiss his argument as being unreasonable. It's not unreasonable at all. I can happily get the benefits on biking on a closed course or at a gym while not subjecting myself to the dangers of biking near people in cars that don't always pay enough attention.
No, this is not a joke. Having heavy motorized vehicles zooming around our urban landscape is incredibly dangerous and violent. Worse, the pilots are inattentive and feel entitled to the asphalt in front of them. Automobile worship has completely dominated city infrastructure, demanding that cyclists and pedestrians simply learn how to use a road designed for automobiles. Automobile worship has also reshaped how we've done city development, making it more difficult to do anything but drive.
If I could transport myself and goods without driving, I would. But in my present life/location, it's not possible. I could give a fuck about automobiles except for their utility.
I completely appreciate that and am not automobile free myself! I just want 4 wheel solo travel to be the exception, and treated with constant caution.
If you want to save lives, ban bikes. Bicycles are responible for 2% of transportation-related fatalities, but less than 1% of trips. On a per-mile basis it's even grimmer.
