A lot of danger to pedestrians and cyclists actually comes from the design of the car. It's currently cool to have like some sort of livestock-rammer over your front bumper that just crushes pedestrians instead of sending them up over the hood. People don't have those for safety, they just think it looks cool. We should really make those illegal on city streets. (If you drive a pickup truck out on your farm, this doesn't apply, I can see the legitimacy of that sort of vehicle choice and that sort of mod. It's for actual productivity, not style.)
Basically, the industry puts 0 thought into protecting other road users, and it's a really big problem. We should start mandating safety features for those outside of the car.
The big problem is that driving isn't just for rich people. It's a lifeline for the poorest Americans that have no choice but to trade free time for commuting time to be able to afford to live. So if we mandate expensive safety features, it's just a tax on the poor. People might be willing to pay the tax to save their own bacon, but they certainly aren't going to do it to save some random person riding their bike to work. That's why we have to dramatically rethink how we build our cities and suburbs. Things like electric cars to combat climate change are a distraction from the real issues. Fossil fuels aren't smashing pedestrians, dividing our cities into unliveable neighborhoods with 20 lane freeways, or mandating 1 parking space for every person in a 10,000 person office building. That's just cars, and electric cars fix none of it.
The good news is, it looks like all the suburbs built in the 50s are due for things like water main replacement, street replacement, sewer replacement, etc. and nobody can afford it. So we'll have a chance to densify and cut cars out of our culture for good. Until then, hide your children and hide your wives, so that people can freely rampage through your neighborhood on their way to a meeting they're already 20 minutes late for. In a carbon-sensitive way, of course.
> Basically, the industry puts 0 thought into protecting other road users, and it's a really big problem. We should start mandating safety features for those outside of the car
The Euro NCAP rating has been evaluating pedestrian safety for some 20 years now. That’s why all modern cars have tall fat noses – it distributes load across more of a person’s body and reduces injury rates. Fifth Gear did a great segment about this in the early 2000’s where they found it’s better to be hit by a 4x4 (term SUV didnt’ exist yet) than by a sedan.
There comes a point where all those safety features increase the cost of the vehicle, putting them further out of reach for those poorest Americans. Technology does not solve ALL problems. Safety improvements must come from more driver responsibility just as much as technical improvements.
I'm not sure people care what the result of the test is, if it costs them money or a feature they want more. That's just how Americans are.
I will say that people seem to put up with emissions standards, so it wouldn't be unthinkable to add some standards that improve the safety of other road users. But as the other comments mention, it's a hard sell; most Americans think the people on the sidewalk or on bikes should be driving instead.
Well, the safety features are for the purchaser in that case. If you let your cat drive and he goes off a cliff, you survive. That's worth an extra $1000! We're talking about a new thing; safety for people other than the people in the car.
That's what the original article is about; people buy heavy cars so that they are more likely to survive the accident than whoever they hit.
Probably the idea is to somewhat sneak that in through the back door, i.e. hope that car manufacturers would be too embarrassed to advertise with a bad crash test result, even if the bad result was "only" due to lack of pedestrian safety.
If even one car model gets changed as a result of this, that would already represent a possible decrease in deaths. It doesn't have to be a total, dominating success to be a net positive.
I wouldn’t even really call it a backdoor. The equivalent European and Australian tests already have this, and they have not seen our recent uptick in deaths.
Well, Obama mandated pedestrian safety be included, then Trump blocked the change. Finally (hopefully) congress forced it through as part of the infrastructure spending bill:
Other fun fixes: tax by the weight of a car. Disallow individual purchases of vehicles where the dashboard is over 6 feet off the ground (yes, some people would make an LLC just to buy the giant car. It would stop a lot of it). Place a price cap on cars!
My favorite pie-in-the-sky-impossible-in-practice thing: force cars to be ugly as sin. Would help with the huge cars, but also has a nice side effect of getting rid of sports car drivers as well.
Comments like this make me think we should have a “speech tax”, online comment licensing requirements, and a real-name mandate.
My favorite “pie-in-the-sky-impossible-in-practice thing”: force anyone advocating for this kind of petty authoritarianism (my sardonic comment included) to wear a neon pink t-shirt in public, labeled, front and back, with “I tried to be a little dictator on the internet and all I got was this stupid t-shirt”
Yeah, clearly my comment about making all cars ugly is a serious policy proposal that I have any power to enact, instead of me just venting about driving skills and safety. Sports car driver isn't a protected class
Everyone can act like piloting a multi-ton machine through city centers is their god given right, but I like thinking about the alternate universe (and hell, the _actually existing universe_ in many places in the world) where people can feel safe, even if it means that city driving is a slog.
No more juicing your safety rating by adding more mass.