sggoodri

That's entirely possible. It might be more interesting to see past and present data just for multi-vehicle collisions per mile rather than that including single-car collisions, in order to filter out some of the 2AM stupidity.

I personally feel more comfortable with AM rush-hour drivers than drivers at any other time. 5 PM rush-hour drivers seem a little nuts, but it doesn't seem to be all that much cell-phone related. In any case, I support increased awareness of or even restrictions on use of communication devices while driving as well as limitations on passengers for beginning drivers. I also think car radios should be designed to be much simpler and should have many features disabled while the vehicle is in motion.

Whether things are worse now than in the past or not doesn't mean they shouldn't be made better.

larryfeltonj

Hi Steve. I appreciate your attempt to drag meaningful data into the discussion, and started digging into the NHTSA reports on crashes. I won't have time to drill down into the tables which indicate year-by-year trends in all crashes (not just fatal) until after Tuesday of next week, but the stuff I found indicates that the DOT has been compiling enough info to really track the trends.

An example from 1996 can be found at this link

Bekologist

I'm still wondering, Larry if you continue to assert

a) there's no difference in traffic conditions between the post WWII era in Atlanta and today
b) drivers there are no more distracted
c) roads in Atlanta have not become increasingly arterialized and congested

and

d) all Atlanta bicyclists ride in the VC-approved manner.

Larry, I'll give you this much:

DESPITE sweeping changes in road design, traffic congestion, driver distractions and road rage in the last sixty years, the basic tenents of bicycling have not changed. slower traffic keep right, destination position, avoid door zone, be cautious at intersections.... big news flash, larry.

The other Inane

Here is a link to an international comparison of road fatalities from 1975 to 2005 for OECD nations (including the US). It has data for

deaths per 100,000 population (table 2)
deaths per 10,000 registered vehicle (table 4), and
deaths per 100 Million km traveled (table 6).

https://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/...nt_comp_05.pdf

genec

Road deaths do not tell the whole picture... especially if the vehicle is equipped with air bags... the passengers inside could survive what at one time would have been a very deadly collision. So have the number of collisions increased while the death rate has declined... that is what would tell us if motorists are improving driving, or the vehicles are just better at protecting them.

invisiblehand

Let's not forget that seatbeat use has increase during this period.

invisiblehand

I looked on the linked page below and did not find similar documents for other years.

https://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/CMSWeb/...ShowBy=DocType

In general, I found little accident/collision data but a lot of data on fatalities.

There may be issues with accident/collision data anyway. My initial thought is that not all accidents are reported. Moreover, auto construction and cost of repair may have changed over time altering the propensity to report accidents. So we would probably only observe serious accidents--i.e., "fender benders" are censored--but in my view all of these accidents are serious to cyclists.

bmike

agreed. safety features save more lives, meanwhile we drive more miles, at faster speeds. at some point i suspect we become a bit overconfident in our skills and the technology that we employ... belts, side impact bags, air bags, crush zones, AWD, ABS... (also, fuel economy causes people to drive more - i'll have to dig up the study i found out there...)

so, deaths may go down - but where has accident rates gone?
and how to sort this out against miles driven? per capita? etc.
against increased speed limits? right turn on red? road widening? (how many 8 lane arterials were there pouring into the commercial district in towns in the 1970s?

and this only tells part of the story. what we are trying to get at by looking at this data is if drivers and road usage has changed in the time frame we are discussing. miles traveled and increased speeds should be easy to find, but how do we quantify road rage? anger at cyclists, peds, farm machinery, trucks?
near misses, swerving, etc. that keeps cyclists from the roads? distractions?

invisiblehand

OK. I can accept quite a bit of this statement. But I recall that driving distances--both for recreation and commuting--and auto density have changed significantly during this same period. Here I am writing broadly and not referring specifically to Atlanta.

If we took the same person from the 1960s Atlanta and had them drive a 30% longer distance with 30% greater density, would you say that the driver would also be more likely to be rude and aggressive? Mind you, I made up the 30% figure. I don't recall what the precise change has been. If the answer is yes, then we would consider the question, "how much more rude and aggressive?"

Personally, I think it would be foolish to dismiss older cycling experiences as irrelevant. However, I do think that we need to apply an extra filter by considering the auto, social, and environmental changes that have occurred.

Bekologist

Hear, hear.

Larry purports static road and driver conditions,yet the differences are glaringly apparant, all over the country. change HAS happened, larry....unless you're living in county Mayberry, state of Denial. -or is that the commonwealth of jhon???

However, larry does allude to something valid in his OP....the basic tenents of bicycling haven't changed much from the 1940's to today. HOWEVER, the road and traffic conditions they get applied on have, in some places dramatically.

mandovoodoo

Interesting. I was mulling over the differences in opinion. May depend on what kind of riding one does. 35 years ago I was riding in rural areas on small roads with mixed commuter, service, & farm traffic. Just like I ride now. The differences are quite apparent. Most people know how to pass me and are very polite now. More than 35 years ago. Less people try to kill me on purpose. Very few. One so far. A higher number of people scare me through doing stupid by combining cell phone with SUV. That may be the biggest hazard and didn't exist. I find I'm less worried about attack and accident now. And more worried about urban transplants with common sense deficits.

I may be seeing the result of 35 years+ of continued road bike presence in rural areas. I'm not an oddity. And our road bikers are pleasant, ride well, interact with cars well, and even wave at other cyclists, regardless of the fanciness of their kit.

Shifting to an urban environment, I don't think I'd like to ride in a city anymore. They look worse to me. Hostility and aggression seem greater. I have ridden a bit in DC, terrorizing the MUPs by going way too fast. I'd no longer pop up onto Wisconsin Ave or anything like that, as I would do in the 1970s.

sbhikes

I can't say what it was like during WWII, but the main differences I see between the 70s and now, living in the same exact city all this time:

- Less glass in the street than in the 70s
- More plastic litter than the 70s
- Now there are cell phones and all the bad driving they cause - a regular occurrence, almost daily
- Less drunk driving, more erratic driving and you don't know what is causing it
- More car traffic in general now
- Less dirty-old-men looking to lure you away for sport, and more gangs driving around looking to mess with you for sport
- Less children in public now

Helmet Head

Both look great for bike riding to me.

noisebeam

To add to what Gene and invisiblehand noted, so has medical technology (and likely medical response time, with some of that added technology available now on accident site) I understand this is particularly improved for traumatic type injuries (head, vital organs) that today result in life changing injury vs. certain death decades ago.

Al

LittleBigMan

You ain't kiddin'...

But I remember when Stone Mountain's N. Hairston was a narrow 45 mph. two-lane ridden with potholes. Now it's a median-divided 4-lane, smooth as silk, and wide as Gramdma's rear-end.

(No offense, G-ma. )

I rode that road in the mid-70's with my teenage bud's in those overpowered GM cars.

The only thing that's changed is that there is more space now for me on my bike.

invisiblehand

Passenger Car Log Accidents to Log Miles on Highways



The Ratio of Passenger Car Log Accidents to Log Miles on Highways



Source ...

https://www.bts.gov/publications/nati...ble_02_03.html
https://www.bts.gov/publications/nati...ble_01_32.html

Note that the count of accidents considers multiple car crashes as a single accident.

I am uncertain what "highway" means in this context.

genec

Ya wanna back that chart up a few decades... maybe at least back to the '70s... possibly back to the 50s. Almost every change we have discussed had occurred by the early '90s. Although admittedly cellphones did not make major inroads in the US until the early to mid 90s, and text messaging until the late 90s.

But primarily you are only viewing about a decade. That is pretty much less than half a generation. Just for reference, air bags were introduced in autos in 1988... and production of airbags ramped up in 1994, with mandatory airbags put into law in 1998.

Kestrelman

Less bombs, bomb craters, and snipers. Haven't been strafed by plane in years. Oh - and those pesky ruts left by tank treads are virtually nonexistent.

invisiblehand

Look at the source data ... I would have loved to copy and paste more years.

You will also notice definition changes over the longer range as well.

I-Like-To-Bike

I didn't notice, and I am still looking, for any relevance of this data to the subject of changes in cycling conditions over time.

Bekologist

wow, the ratio of accidents to miles on highways is down 1 percent in a decade. impressive??? statistically insignificant, I'd say.

what DOES that have to do with bicycling conditions, anyway?

invisiblehand

Well ... someone asked for an accident to miles driven statistic. I compiled such a statistic as a service to the community for the data available. Time is changing over the horizontal axis although the range fails to cover the entire period we are interested in.

I recall that the argument is that motor vehicle fatalities per mile driven is a poor proxy for how safe motorists drive and the risk to cyclists. Accidents per mile driven might be a better proxy for this question.

Larry wrote that people claimed that conditions have changed drastically--for the worse--in the recent past such that his older experiences were irrelevant. One could say that the table is suggests that (nationally) conditions are getting better or at least not getting worse in the recent past.

I-Like-To-Bike

Guess I wasn't clear. What is the relevance of data about motor vehicle accidents/miles driven to bicycling conditions?

invisiblehand

If those are population figures, it would be statistically significant. Even if they are based on national surveys, there is a good chance that the change is significant. But I really don't know much about the source data such that measurement problems could swap the percentage changes. The data is in logarithms by the way.

My understanding of your argument Bek is that life on the roads was getting much worse over this period (unless you believe conditions changed a lot in 70s through 80s and remained the same henceforth). At least in these rough tabulations, one does not observe such an effect. In a perfect world, we would want to break this down further by smaller geographic areas over the longer period. But it appears that such data is unavailable.

Fatalities, as someone else mentioned, per mile has decreased over this period as well.

Mind you, there is an issue of reporting an accident in the first place. The propensity to do may have changed over time as well.

invisiblehand

In short, earlier in the thread, people argued that drivers were less attentive making cycling conditions worse. One might expect more accidents if they were less attentive.