I wonder what the right "if everybody drove this.." is? It is probably not a lotus 7 clone. What is the smallest vehicle with superb crash test ratings?
A bike. If everyone just rode a bike, not only accidents would be less lethal, there would be a lot less congestion and pollution. Also we might get fitter too.
If everyone rode a bicycle, there would be a lot more bicycle deaths. According to table 6 of this study, https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/21/1/47, 71.4% of the fatalities involved motor vehicles. If we apply that percentage to todays number of bicyclist deaths (900) in the USA, we get 257 deaths that do not involve motor vehicles.
If we add congestion into the mix since everyone is bicycling, I imagine a higher number of accidents would occur. Right now an estimated 67 million people in the USA ride a bicycle for an estimated 15 billion hours combined per year. 228 million licensed drivers times 290 average hours on the road equals 66 billion hours per year. Let us assume the bicyclists will have to spend three times more travel time due to lower speed of bicycles. That equals roughly 200 billion hours of bicycling per year. 200 billion hours divided by 15 billion equals 13.3. 900 257 deaths per 15 billion hours equals 3,341 deaths per year. The average number of deaths per year from automobile crashes for the last few years is about 36,000.
Even if this is a conservative estimate. I think it is safe to say you are essentially correct.
Netherlands has ~200-250ish cycling deaths a year with a ~30% modeshare.
Half are elderly.
About a third are on ebikes
87% involve a car.
That's around 0.8 deaths per hundred thousand people worth of bike modeshare not invovling a car. 1/15th of the USA and a quarter of netherlands road deaths.
This is with drunk cycling penalties being almost completely unenforced (although not sure how it compares to US drunk driving prevalence).
Granted cars are used for the longer trips so it's not completely sound, but bikes are used for congested trips. Small vehicle modeshare also shortens all trips.
My guess is the safest vehicle would look like a train followed by lightweight velo no heavier than a dutch bike (and not optimized for aero) or a recumbent trike with a roll cage and a lap belt. Also we can conclude that either current ebikes are too fast and heavy, or they result in people cycling who would be too frail otherwise.
I see parents bring toddlers in trailers to grocery stores and farmers markets routinely these days. They make these big ebikes that can even haul kids directly without the trailer now and millennial parents have been buying them.
Lots of things could be, but removing cars from the average American's life will limit job opportunities, limit economic choices, and consume a lot more of our time.
It's not about removing cars, its about limiting them and choosing a more appropriate tool for the job. Sometimes you can get away with a hand trowel instead of an excavator.
Yes, but if you own a car, then you're already paying for something that can save you time and personal energy so you can do things you enjoy, like playing with your kids, or tending your garden. Often times the quickest and easiest tool to use is what you're going to reach for, and that's a car most of the time.
And the whole thing is that the personal convenience you get comes with great costs to every other facet of life when you account for the negative externalities that a car centric lifestyle brings. Now you have a bunch of black particulate on your window sills because everyone in your neighborhood has a heavy car that produces tire dust. Maybe you live a few years less on the whole because you a literally hardly moving around all day when all the walking you do is in your home or on the way to the car, when you could have been working in at least some time cardio wise riding a bike or merely being a pedestrian for all those decades. Often times for short trips on surface streets, like what would be a 10 minute car ride turns into a 12 minute bike ride or so, because stop lights eliminate all the advantages of a powerful car on city roads and perhaps effectively set the speed limit for everyone to like 15mph regardless of the signed speed. Four minutes a two way trip on the whole is not much time wasted away from your children or your crops.
For my commute to work, its something like my choice of a 35 minute drive (not counting the circling I will have to do finding a parking spot at the other end) or a 45 minute bike ride. I probably save time on the whole even without counting the parking fiasco, considering now I don't need to find time in my schedule to work in my cardio.
“Collectively, cars and trucks account for nearly one-fifth of all US emissions, emitting around 24 pounds of carbon dioxide and other global-warming gases for every gallon of gas.” (Source: epa.gov)
So to answer your snarky question with snark in kind, mostly from the other 4/5 of emissions.
And maybe an electric motorcycle or trike for when you have to carry more stuff. And an electric car for big families, and an electric van for vacations…
The right answer is the tool for the job. Chances are you don't need a huge pickup truck when you buy $200 of groceries. I can do it in a bike with some panniers so that means everyone can do it with an ebike. Need more than $200? Just take multiple trips a week and cancel your gym membership. Need to haul a few hundred pounds of manure? By all means take the truck. It's just when you look around at the modern world today, a lot of people are sitting in traffic by themselves in a vehicle on their way to work less than 10 miles away, or buying a few things from the store less than 2 miles away as soon as the need arises. Its a lot of wasted vehicular capacity. If you were a business buying a machine that you only used a fraction of its capabilities, you'd consider getting away with a leaner machine for most use cases.
For a lot of people I talk to about getting around when it comes up, the major stopping point with biking is just the lack of infrastructure and feeling afraid of cars. Most people aren't comfortable taking the lane while biking so it becomes a dangerous experience when they don't. As the saying goes, though, if you build it, they will come. Any city I've been in that has built out a gridlike network of bike lanes seems to have a lot of people riding around. Once you build them that network you enable a lot of trips for those people uncomfortable with the existing road network.
Are there any good examples of how to do this infrastructure? In my neighborhood they took the major street in the neighborhood and took one of the lanes and painted it to be a bike lane mext to the sidewalk, and parking spots further out. No physical median, just white paint on light concrete. No one parks in those spots, they would get demolished by cars. And no one bikes there, they bike on less busy streets one block in either direction. Also, at every intersection the parking spots disappear for a right turn lane. The bike lane doesn't, but it is hard to see so the cars go over the whole way.
A nearby neighborhood did something similar but with physical medians. Much better, but still people just use less busy streets mostly.
My main issue getting to work is not those streets, but post ww2 neighborhoods that have one entance and exit forcing me on to highways with glass covered shoulders and speedlimits over 55. That is what I want them to fix. But that would actually involve earth moving and eminent domain, not just a bit of paint or concrete.
What about trucking and shipping? The US - where this study took place- is huge, and most of it is very far from ports. 18 wheelers/semis are the biggest users of the American highway system and are necessary to get goods to/from production and consumption sites
These trucks also contribute to the rise in vehicle size. I did not like driving when I was in a sedan sized car sharing the high speed highways hours from cities on those highways
Well put the trucks moving stuff in places where the people koving themselves aren't.
If they're going extremely long distances you could even have some kind of dedicated hard wearing road surface. And if lots of them are going to the same place you could get them to move in a convoy. And once they're in a convoy you could hook them together...
Unfortunately not all goods are going to the same places. Nor are all goods moving at the same pace. Freight trains are a great piece of logistics infrastructure, but they can't just be US logistics infrastructure.
The US rail system is very well established and has been well built out since before the rise of the automobile. But goods need to get from the rail depot to the end destination and right now the best we have is enormous 18-wheelers and as long as those are on the road, it's too dangerous for me to want to take a smaller car
Come on. The USA has one of the best freight railroad systems in the world. A large percentage of our cargo moves on rails. But rails can't extend everywhere, and it will seldom be practical to carry perishable, time-sensitive cargo in trains. That stuff pretty much has to go by truck.
Trains can be far faster than trucks. There are various serious deficiencies in the US train system that mean that transit speeds are far, far lower than they could be. There is no real technical reason why trains can't be faster than trucks with a similar marginal cost as to today. The infrastructure and systems are simply deficient.
That’s extremely realistic. The Netherlands has a separate system for bikes. The truck system would just be what the motorized traffic system is now, be it a bit scaled down.
I think you and I have different concepts of realistic, ha. How do you propose people travel from rural place A to rural place B? Public transportation? That would be extremely expensive to implement, and would operate at a massive loss to service the entire US.
The interstate system and truck delivery seems to be pretty fantastic at servicing the continental US when paired with freight trains, cargo planes, etc. And it is similarly effective for delivery of all other kinds of things including people.
These systems would be good to implement in many cities, but interstate shipping and travel is another thing altogether.
Even in the Netherlands cars are not dead. A few years back (pre pandemic, maybe wfh will last, maybe it won't), I was staying with a friend. They all had cars, but one had just sold their car and committed to public transportation and bicycle. Even there he was really regretting his choice. In the US it isn't even a question. The vast majority of people need a car. We can make a goal of changing that, but it will be a while. So for now, what is the least bad car?
Right: buses, despite their size, kill far fewer pedestrians and passengers. Size is a factor for personal automobiles because individuals lack the training (and restraint) that's key to bus driving. It's hard to see a world in which the US accepts that and increases the restrictions on obtaining a license, however.
> buses, despite their size, kill far fewer pedestrians and passengers.
Is that still true after you adjust for the number of buses on the road vs. the number of cars? If not, then this is like saying driving drunk is less dangerous than driving sober since only 30% of car crash fatalities involve drunk drivers.
Yes because of the driver itself is behaviorally different between the bus and the car. The bus drivers are profesionals who drive no higher than the speed limit, they heed all traffic laws, they generally keep to the right or otherwise drive predictably, and some times they even have dedicated bus lanes. Your average car driver is not all of those things at once, if they were there would be a lot fewer people going 5 or 15 over the speed limit and driving drunk.
Those are a lot of reasons to think it's plausible that it might still be true after the adjustment. Is there actual data that shows it is true, though? Also, I've seen buses break traffic laws before, so don't pretend they never do.
According to that figure, while transit buses are safer for "Users (passengers and employees in a vehicle)" than passenger cars and light trucks are, they're more dangerous for "Others (e.g., pedestrians and passengers in other vehicles)". And isn't that exactly the same thing going on with big vs. small cars? Buses are bigger than cars and SUVs, so they're safer for their own occupants at the expense of everyone else. (Note that the figure measures fatalities per passenger-mile, not per mile, so the advantage that fewer buses would be needed than cars to move the same number of people has already been factored in.)
The USA has very pedestrian hostile laws/infrastructure and buses definitionally stop and start where there are a lot of pedestrians (and many of them will be crossing the road in a rush because they saw a bus).
That data could be representitive of buses being big and heavy or it could be representitive of them sharing space with pedestrians.
Compare the same dataset for busses on a grade separated RBT with well paid/trained drivers and platform doors and you get a very different story.
I'm highly disappointed that electric vehicles haven't taken advantage of the "no need for a engine in the front" and make vehicles that are different. Many trucks have the driver in FRONT of the front wheels, but very few passenger vehicles do that, even though without an engine there's really no reason not to.
"Die" is a bad target. I don't want to be a quadriplegic if I don't have to be, and a car going 30 MPH (realistically 40, if the limit is 30) on a residential street is more than capable of doing that to me.
They absolutely can. People can and do die from falling over and hitting their head. A 30km/h impact is not trivial, it can be expected to break bones and cause internal bleeding that can be deadly. An impact to the spine or head can be very easily be life changing.
Also, residential roads in the US are usually 40km/h
I personally know someone who was hit at about 10-15hm/h and they were hospitalized and broke their spine.
My college girlfriend was hit by a car right next to me going those speeds during a turn. It seems slow, but meat on steel is pretty brutal at any travel speed. It was a four or five month recovery. Remember that the velocity of the vehicle is only a part of the picture — mass is the damage dealer here.
Mass is what contributes to inertia which allows the speed to be carried for longer... The acceleration, which is the difference in speeds, is the real damage dealer.
They spent a lot of time marketing how safe the SMART car was for a small vehicle. I believe they even showed putting a semi tractor on top of the SMART car to show how rigid its safety shell was.
Which is misleading. Which would you rather do: gently set a 50lb rock on your toes, or drop a 5lb rock on your toes from 4 feet in the air (equivalent to an 11mph collision)?
