If Phones Are Killing Pedestrians, Why Is It Only Happening in America?
https://www.thedrive.com/news/if-phones-are-killing-pedestrians-why-is-it-only-happening-in-americaOpen linkView original on lemmy.today223
Comments73https://www.thedrive.com/news/if-phones-are-killing-pedestrians-why-is-it-only-happening-in-americaOpen linkView original on lemmy.today
I thought big trucks and SUVs were doing it - at least that's what a different headline said.
Big Trucks and SUVs are much deadlier than proper cars in case of accidents. Pedestrian infrastructure does not exist in most parts of the US or is very dangerous to use and those parts of the US that do are often unaffordable for regular people to live in. People also do not expect pedestrians even if there is infrastructure of that kind. Roads in the US are designed to maximise the danger to pedestrians even if there is pedestrian infrastructure because of car first regulations ...
My hypothesis is that the rise in distracted driving was just as bad in European countries but they have safer infrastructure that limits cars' speed and otherwise protects pedestrians, and I think that could be tested by looking at the rates of car crashes overall in Europe (if those went up at the same time as the US without a corresponding rise in dead pedestrians I think that'd suggest their infrastructure is the difference)
Because we basically drive tanks everywhere on roads designed for incredible speed.
So basically our cars are the main culprit making the side issues worse.
We have pedestrian friendly infrastructure and we don't drive penis size compensating trucks. Cars close to pedestrians are forced to go slow and if they would swivel off the road, the curbs and other stuff like trees are there to stop cars before they hit anyone, or force the wheels away from the sidewalks to steer the car back on the road. So even when people are dumb enough to be on their phone, the risk of a fatal accident with a pedestrian is limited. Giant trucks just ram over and through everything, splashing any pedestrian in their path. Especially if there aren't any sidewalks and cars are allowed to drive really fast. Contrary to the US we actually value human lives so we built our cities to be safe for bikes and pedestrians.
That was stated very plainly here. Cars are getting bigger and heavier. And pedestrians being killed equals weight of car multiplied with speed. Weight up, so speed down. Small roads everywhere now 30kph/20mph.
All fair points and true, but those trucks are still a sizable minority on the road. I think the infrastructure and low speeds are the main reasons
It's a combination. And even though those trucks might be a minority on the road in the US, the percentage of those monstrosities is still more compared to in europe. Over here they are a rarity. I bet if you compare those percentages to the percentages of accidents with fatalities that you see a similarity.
Include SUVs in your computation and rerun the numbers. Yes, the big fuck off trucks are still a minority, but they push everything bigger the bigger they get. And bigger is the only thing they're getting.
I drive a MINI, bought it in 2018. Then, I was comfortably in the majority of car sizes (new minis are comfortable hatchbacks). Now, there's maybe 10% of cars that I'm comparable to, everything else has windows with bottoms that are at or above my roofline.
I think the number of large trucks on the road is very dependent on location. I'm in the Deep South, and they are everywhere. I'm actually one of only two people at my job who don't have a giant truck. The other is my boss. Coincidentally, we are also the only two women who work here. She's got an older minivan, and my car is 15 years old. Oh wait, one guy drives his girlfriend's Jeep. I forgot about him.
Since the article clearly states that even Canada—where we drive the same vehicles and have some similar infrastructure issues—isn't showing the same uptick, the most likely reasons are legal/regulatory or cultural rather than physical. In other words, there's more going on here than just oversized SUVs with bad collision outcomes for pedestrians (although they certainly don't help).
In Canada our distracted driving laws are pretty harsh and they do actually enforce them. Insurance is also mandatory and a distracted driving ticket is very expensive for a couple of years.
Where are people getting the idea that insurance isn't mandatory in the US?
You kind of do everything the opposite way of developed countries
Where in Canada are police doing their jobs? Not in Ontario.
Insurance is mandatory....but many are driving without it as some idiot in Ontario got rid of visible licence validation in 2018.
I have seen it in Ontario and Quebec. They do it with seatbelt check campaigns. I have never seen it in Toronto though but in Toronto I don't think you can even get pulled over for a moving violation anyways, unless you are speeding exceptionally fast.
Doesn't mention anything about infrastructure and I'd guess that has a lot to do with it in the US. Very, very few cities are setup with any type of pedestrian traffic or public transport in mind.
Yeah I'm pretty sure this is why https://vger.to/lemmy.today/post/55397665
Screenshot for compatibility reasons on fedi. So that it's loud and fucking clear
https://lemmy.today/post/55397665
I wonder why voyager does this?
Settings > General > Other > Share Links
Thanks! I didn't realize we could change that.
I'm not sure what you mean. I don't use voyager, and find it to be off putting that voyager would share a link in such a way that is essentially an ad for itself.
I shared the direct link for the rest of us 🙂 it doesn't seem that ! is needed anymore.
They are telling Voyager users how to modify that setting. We have options, but apparently the default is a Voyager specific link.
Interesting choice by Voyager. But it is nice that there are apps available for fediverse users who want them!
I find it frustrating that the same author wrote both of these articles, published one day apart, but made no connections between them.
What do you mean? The second sentence mentions their previous article
I had thought the same thing. I can only assume the site is farming for clicks.
Kind of?
It's not just that the outside of the vehicles are big.
The inside is too, so a lot of people can barely see over the dash on the best of days, so glancing down at a phone means taking their eyes fully off the road. In a sedan they'd at least maintain a periphery view of the road, which allows for unconscious sight and reactions.
Like how "daredevil blindness" is real and some people are blind but will duck if you throw a wrench at their head.
Read the room, son! Like, I'm a nonviolent old lady and even I felt a momentary impulse to throw wrenches at blind people. Lotta lemmings with even more impulsivity than me.
The A pillars (the pillar between the windshield and driver/passenger door window) have gotten so massive due to airbag requirements that it blocks a significant view angle. It used to be that they were an inch wide.
I'd rather have the airbag and have to move my head a bit to see than not have the bags. Surely driving instructors teach students that it is a blindspot of a sort and that you should keep it in mind, no?
I'll agree that its a good component to have. I couldn't say about driving instructors, for me that was about 25 years ago when I was driving a car from the early 90s that had the thinner pillars. I keep my head on a swivel while driving, but just as easily I've had a car or pedestrian pop up that I don't see right off the bat in that blind spot, especially turning at an intersection.
Yeah. Some intersections are hard. I go through one daily that has a bike lane with a green light to cross a street while my turn rightinto that street light is also green. That means bikers may be aproaching from behind me at a weird angle, i hate that one. It is a balancing act I guess, safety for the driver and passengers vs visibility. Though nowadays you have all the new tech with sensors and cameras and the car basically yells at you that you're going to hit something so I guess that is not terrible.
IMO that is sheer incompetence on the part of the traffic engineer who designed it.
I agree, but remaking it is probably too expensive for the town sadly. It has been complained about
Drivers Ed is a month for a teenager or a handful of lessons...
The only thing I remember from drivers Ed was when another student was told to turn right up ahead, replied "yep" and then just didn't do it.
When the instructed asked why not, the kid accelerated and said he didn't want to turn.
Scary as fuck. But everything else I was told decades ago I can't remember.
And that's not even getting into how much vehicles have changed in the last couple decades. Especially when the topic involves the continued increase in size in trucks...
You think a boomer remembers what they were told in the 1980s during drivers Ed and will be able to extrapolate the changes to modern vehicles on their own?
Quick edit:
Besides all that, you're putting a distracted drivers "safety" after hitting a pedestrian in a giant truck over them being able to not hit a pedestrian.
You know what's safer for a driver? An Abrams tank.
Your line of logic is literally why trucks keep getting bigger and why were in this fucking mess
Woah, relax. I didn't mention a thing about careless drivers hitting pedestrians, or trucks. I was just pointing out that airbags overall are good, even if you're supposed to put a little extra effort while driving.
This is like if someone said smoking crack in an elementary school is bad...
And you said it's important for people to relax sometimes.
What you said was fine in isolation, just not in the context of the discussion you wandered into and didn't understand
Ok. I literally responded to the a-pillar comment, but it's fine. I don't wnt to engage further, thnks for your insights.
Different countries i guess. Driving lessons last a while over here, and there is an actual test at the end of it that is very easy to fail. But I understand your point and agree with what you're saying about the drivers not appreciating the differences between then and now.
Oversized designs is definitely a big one, but don't forget subpar training and verification of said training (take a driving test once and your set for life) and of course just overall poor design.
I've got a Lincoln mkx and it can be almost impossible to even see out of the windshield on sunny days due to the angle of the windshield catching massive reflections of the dash (like how the hell did that make it past testing)
Vw tiguan rear view mirror goes lower than my shoulders, blockng half the front view.
What in the holy AI slop is that?
I actually took the time to read it. Just to check it out. Wow! It's kinda hilarious how bad it is. It hits right about every AI stereotype. It even references some redditor 😂
This is pure, lazy bait slop
This doesn't read like AI to me, it actually does connect its thoughts together and builds an argument narrative
That said, it is really awful human writing that has some cringey phrasing choices and the kind of grammar/sentence structuring I'd expect from a text to speech derived unedited stream of consciousness, I'm just not getting AI vibes off of it
"Some kind Redditor"
-whew- you weren't kidding
In Australia, it’s illegal to use a phone while driving. (Although police aren’t hesitant to hand out fines and penalties, people do still use their phones while driving). There is also a cultural recognition and discouragement towards phone use while driving which is slowly changing accepted behaviour, similar to the slow change away from tolerating and encouraging drunk driving over the past few decades.
I thought it was illegal in the US as well so I checked Wikipedia and found out that it's not illegal at the federal level but it's at the state level which means it varies between states. Some make illegal any phone use, except hands free, some only ban texting and internet use and Montana is the only state where it's not illegal in any way. WTF Montana.
Though from what I see most of the punishment is fines. Where I live it's a fine and a penalty point on your driver's license. A point lasts for 3 years and if you get 3 in of them you can't drive anymore. You then have to take a driver's exam again to be allowed back on the road.
Why are phones even working in cars? These devices have sophisticated 6 axis sensors, and it is easy to tell if a user is a passenger or a driver. Or just fucking disable them once they are moving at a set speed. The world can survive without phone connectivity for a car ride.
30,000 a year are slaughtered in the US alone, despite ABS, TC, ESC, various air bags, etc. but the solution is to make them more like tanks without addressing the actual cause of the problem.
I'm kinda surprised the US lawyer industry hasn't tried a class action suit.
when I need to call emergency services in the back of the crashed van but my phone is locked for 30 minutes because of the crash
So all passengers in any vehicle can't use their phones? That'll be wildly unpopular.
I have a love hate relationship with my husbands car because of this type of "feature". Love that its a 2012 with no online connectivity or tablet displays of any kind. Hate that i, as the passenger, cant connect a device via bluetooth or change other media related settings if its in drive, only while its in park. Youd think that "feature" would disable when it detects a passenger, but no, i guess the passenger is driving just as much as the driver themselves.
It feels like people have gotten much worse at driving in general over the last four years. Distracted driving is a big portion of that, but I think everyone is getting dumber, less empathetic towards others and they are incapable of feeling shame now.
Every time I drive to work on the highway there’s a ton of traffic in the left lane and then there’s always some clueless idiot driving slower than the people in the middle lane holding up all the people behind them. This happens at least three times in each direction of my 30 mile commute.
People sit at the stoplights on their phones and when you honk at them a few seconds after the light turns green, they get mad at you.
Can’t remember what podcast they discussed this on, but prevalence of stick shift in Europe was one of the theorized factors.
Automatic transmission has been standard for sports cars and luxury sedans for many years though. Not to mention the ever increasing number of electric cars.
And smart brake assist has also been included in most option packages for several years now.
Because android is more popular in Europe?
If I'd have to venture a guess, it has much more to do with the abysmal infrastructure of the USA than with the phones, those are just a cherry on top of a horror cake
From personal experience, I have had to dodge people outright walking into traffic to cross a road, ignoring all the cars and staring at their phones. This has s happened serval times in the last year for me. The worst offender was someone walking across a 10-lane highway (5 lanes each side with a grass divider) during rush hour traffic.
You should be higher on the list. It's a complex problem with a lot of moving parts - while the emotional support truck designs certainly have a fault in accidents due to physics and blind spots, people not paying attention and crossing the road with the assumption traffic will stop for them, or the lack of awareness of traffic when crossing, has taken many lives as well.
We should control what we can - limit crossings to safer zones (crosswalks, dedicated traffic light crosswalks, crossing bridges, tunnels or underpass), require visibility rules for vehicle safety (reverse cameras, blind spot detectors, automatic emergency braking is what we have, we need driver visibility requirements better defined), separate vehicle and pedestrian traffic physically (barriers, natural and/or artificial), and teach driving and walking lessons to kids in school so they learn how to do these things, instead of letting the school of hard knocks teach them.
Same. Daily. WTAF is so important you have to stare at your phone in a crosswalk?
don't pedestrians have right of way on crosswalks??
Cemeteries are full of people who had the right of way. You still have to pay some basic attention to your surroundings.
I think what the experts are saying is that bigger cars are more deadly. Being distracted wasn't always a death sentence.
The simplest method to get away with murder is causing a car accident.
Yes, but I guess your family can argue that you had the right of way when a giant truck turns you into a hood ornament because you were watching Facebook shorts instead of looking both ways before crossing a street
According to the laws of man, yes.
According to the laws of physics? Nope.
Phones are an addiction. Every moment of your attention is demanded by social media.
In my cases, there was no crosswalk. Straight up reckless jaywalking.
Poor pedestrian infrastructure and too many fucking morons driving around in oversized brodozers...
Two reasons (at least): we don't have that many SUVs and monster trucks on our roads. And police here is rather strictly enforcing the law with regards to cell phones.
I feel like the strictly enforced cell phone laws are also strictly enforced in America. I think it really is just down to how big vehicles are here and how bad the sight distance is in those larger vehicles, combined with municipalities not investing in infrastructure that prevents or mitigates crashes and pedestrian fatalities. There was recently an article about a town that did do this and hasn't had a pedestrian fatality in like a decade here in the US and I think that's proof of what I'm saying.