randya

https://www.copenhagenize.com/2010/02...-reckless.html



https://www.copenhagenize.com/2010/02...hology-of.html

crackerdog

Imagine suggesting a mode of transport which killed 40-50,000 people a year in the U.S. alone. Pollutes air and water and the noise and smell will be terrible. Oh, on top of that, we will tax everyone except the users of this transportation system. We will fight wars to keep this going. Think you could get that started today? People freak out when a plane goes down or a train derails.

The Human Car

And further image in order to make this more affordable cut out safety measures to save 1% or maybe 2% of the cost so this system can be the leading cause of deaths for kids.

I-Like-To-Bike

Take it to P&R, Foo; or Car Free Living. The regulars there love OT Kar Kulture bashing rants.

Mos6502

I have to wonder, what it is about seat belts that causes cars to become so dangerous?

cZa

A fealing of increased saftey???

Mos6502

Doubt it.

The Human Car

Risk compensation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation

cZa

yeah like how the wider the road is built the faster the cars move. throw in crumple zones and airbags YIKES! the safer it gets the more reckless the behavior

Mos6502

So, the idea is anachronistic - being based on a study that is a quarter century old now - which may have shown that potentially - some accidents may have been displaced to pedestrians etc. by the passing of seat belt laws and not simply the presence of seat belts themselves.

Well, that's a stretch.


So there's no real practical, measurable info on whether or not seat belt laws make any difference.

So drivers who normally do not wear seatbelts drive less carefully when wearing seatbelts.

So the question then, is how many people in the U.S. don't normally use seatbelts?

If somebody is claiming seat belts make for less safe driving, they're apparently twisting the facts around. The only support for the idea that seatbelts make drivers drive less carefully seems to be related only to people who normally don't wear them.

invisiblehand

The concept of risk compensation has been broadly studied across many disciplines in a variety if situations including transportation. If you believe that people respond to incentives on the margin -- particularly incentives that are easy to perceive -- then changing behavior as a consequence of changing risk naturally follows. THCs Wikepedia reference is probably just for convenience. The literature on the topic is extensive ... meaning thousands of publications ... showing evidence for risk compensation under certain conditions.

My first reading of the seatbelt phenomenon was by Peltzman. A famous argument of the principle given by Walter Oi who considered what would happen if you made cars more dangerous by putting a big spike in the steering wheel facing the driver. Would you expect drivers to tailgate as much as without a spike? If you believe that they would tailgate less -- i.e., making the car more dangerous results in safer driving -- why do you believe that the converse is false? Again, if you simply want to talk about seatbelts (or automobile safety in a variety of situations), there are publications up the wazoo looking at the topic.

If you want to argue about risk compensation in some situation, I think that you can argue whether the change in risk is perceivable by the agents, whether the magnitude of the effect is significant, and so on.

Now, I don't recall a careful study that directly looked at the effect of riskier driving on pedestrian or cycling injuries over time. Mind you, the topic is quite casual for me. But I think that a model that says we made cars safer, leading to riskier driving, and resulting in more cycling and pedestrian injuries/deaths is quite logical. Whether the effect is big or meaningful is an empirical argument.

closetbiker

... and of course this is one of the arguments when it comes to bicycle helmet use. It's not conclusive why it is, but it is conclusive that head injuries have not dipped with increased use of helmets.

I think the obvious point is we may be looking at the wrong things to increase safety. There are better ways of increasing safety for all than what the focus has previously been. A change in perspective may be beneficial.

Mos6502

My point being that the argument is built on a study that is decades old. That's anachronistic thinking - it's the same thing with people who say that it takes more energy to make alcohol fuel than can be released from it - citing information that was gathered in the early 1970s...

Think about this, in 1981 cars didn't even have shoulder belts for back seat drivers - seat belt use was casual, and few places required mandatory seat belt use. So the mindset of "if I use a seatbelt I'll be safer, and those don't need to drive so carefully" makes a lot more sense two decades ago, than it does now when generations of drivers have always been wearing seatbelts.

Unless somebody does an up to date study on the subject of seat belts making drivers more dangerous to non drivers, I can't really buy into a word of it.

I'm not debating the existence of risk compensation, but rather how relevant the idea is here.

invisiblehand

I didn't read the book the original post referenced. So it isn't clear to me why this one study is so instrumental to the argument.

With that in mind, from what I gather the age of the study in this case is irrelevant, IMO. The argument is simply based on whether people take more risks in safer cars resulting in greater risks for pedestrians and cyclists. If seat belts still make cars safer -- my understanding is that conditioned on the properties of a collision the answer is an emphatic YES -- and people believe that wearing a seatbelt is safer than otherwise, then people will drive riskier than otherwise. Perhaps with other changes to the autos and roads, the relative change in risk -- either real or perceived -- due to seatbelts is different such that the marginal effect of seatbelts is no longer the same. But this isn't important to the overall argument.

DX-MAN

There's one simple reason that this 'anachronistic study' is relevant.

The world is still filled with people, who have not changed at their core since the dawn of civilization. It's a truth of life that 'there is nothing new under the sun.'

sggoodri

It seems to me that road safety has been increasingly framed in terms of "safe crashing" at the expense of driver responsibility. As a result, people view "naked" travel modes like walking and cycling as inherently dangerous rather than viewing motoring as inherently dangerous. Guardrails, cable fences, breakaway poles, rumble strips, airbags, seat belts, crumple zones, etc. have certainly the saved lives of vehicle occupants on a per-crash basis at a given speed. But where is the public dialog on driving carefully? The American metric of a good driver is how fast they can go before they crash. Those travel modes that depend on careful driving are considered obsolete. It's time to stop celebrating safe crashing and start celebrating safe driving.

Roughstuff

I think we have begin to do so. Insurance penalties for bad drivers (and good driver incentives) are an example.

hshearer

I read an interesting idea once: as a species, it's good for our survival to be frightened of dangerous situations (in our case, examples could be the dark, heights). People who weren't afraid of heights, for example, fell to their death, winning a Darwin award, while those with a healthy fear were able to reproduce and pass on that predisposition. We have evolved to have an innate fear of certain situations, but travelling at very high speeds is not part of our evolutionary experience, so, in general, it doesn't invoke the same sense of caution being 8 feet up a ladder would, even though it's more dangerous.

genec

Steve, well and beautifully said. +1000

The Human Car

I had a thought about risk compensation and how seat belts and especially air bags have nothing (or at least very little) to do with it. I mean honestly does having a warning sticker about air bag use on your dash really make you feel safer? I will assert no and further assert new cars are increasing the insulation between the outside world and the inside world of the car.

I remember spinning out once in a big boat of a car and it was like "Oh look the world is moving in a way I don't expect" rather then "Oh my gosh we are out of control and are going to crash." I like cars with stiff suspension and manual transmissions so you can "feel" the road but remove all that plus sound proof the thing and you lose touch of changes in the world around you.

The important thing to acknowledge is how the user feels and not the facts of if they are literally safer or not. You feel safe in an environment that resembles your living room couch, which more and more cars are a very close approximation.

genec

I agree with your insulation comments and feel that this is more of an issue than the safety devices... the safety devices are passive, the user is not really aware of them and likely is not responding to them. The isolation from the road however is another issue. The motorist cannot respond to outside stimuli due to that isolation... where once the driver had feed back due to road feel and wind noise, that feedback is now removed.

Noisebeam and I discussed this a few years ago... centering on how rolling down the window in a car can really change the driver's perception of the world.

As it is now a motorist has to rely more and more on basically visual clues for feed back... the speedometer for instance to determine that they are going fast, and the view outside, whereas in the past, noise and vibration would give such feedback. The driver then starts to think, hey the world is spinning (as in that boat situation) vice hey, I am spinning.

mikeybikes

Solution: Mandate convertibles.

closetbiker

and of course all this safe crashing can only be safe for the vehicles occupants. It's not any safer for those outside the vehicle.

I agree, it's time to stop celebrating safe crashing and start celebrating safe driving.

closetbiker

and also one of the reasons a lot of people are more afraid on a bike than in a car. On a bike, you feel the road, in a car you don't. IMHO, I think this awareness contributes to making decisions that keep you safe when on a bike.

cyclezealot

Why is the discussion of auto safety a Foo thing.?..The auto is the immovable object met by some irresistible force. The object could be you or you on your bike..Trivia , Henry Bliss was the first pedestrian killed by an auto in NYC in 1899 at 74 and Central Park West . Since at least 5000 pedestrians are killed in auto accidents. Cyclists are equally vulnerable as are pedestrians ; to that immovable object - the car.