Sunday, February 5, 2017

Traffic Violence Story Misses Biggest Ingredients: Too Much, too Fast Driving

Front pager on traffic violence

Focus on "distracted" or "impaired" driving


December 2016 - It's always about "distracted" driving

But phones may not be as important as we think
(via Pacific Standard)

Look! A strong correlation: More driving = more death

And in fact, in Oregon, driving correlates strongly with death
(from the online version; red comments added)
The best way to reduce deaths from driving is to make it easy for people to drive less or not at all.

Every time we talk about driving, whether it's about emissions, public health, safety - every time, we assume that driving is inevitable, and we talk around the fact that the strongest move we could make is to drive less.

via Placemakers
The next factor? Reduce urban speeds.

Because we feel we have to retain our commitment to hydraulic autoism, we are unable to recognize and act on the most important risk factors - the chief of which is the act itself of driving a big, fast, and heavy vehicle.

August 2015
Even big buildings aren't safe.

3 comments:

Evan said...

This is the effect of pre-existing biases.

We think staring at our phones is changing everything and is the biggest problem, and we've normalized speeding traffic that kills.

So the data say the latter is a bigger problem, but the story's almost all about the former.

Anonymous said...

A while back streetsblog wrote about the effect of better transit (and less driving) on reduced traffic death -

http://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/09/08/america-has-a-terrible-traffic-safety-record-because-we-drive-too-much/

Salem Breakfast on Bikes said...

Hey, it's a brand new report from Todd Litman:

"The current paradigm favors targeted safety programs that reduce special risks such as youth, senior and impaired driving. A new paradigm recognizes that all vehicle travel imposes risks, and so supports vehicle travel reduction strategies such as more multimodal planning, efficient transport pricing, Smart Growth development policies, and other TDM strategies."

A New Traffic Safety Paradigm from the Victoria Transport Policy Institute.

So yeah, the solution for safety is fewer car trips, shorter trips, and slower trips. Maybe this will start to gain some traction!