Month: December 2016

Via Money Geek
https://www.moneygeek.com/insurance/auto/road-safety-study/
[B’ Spokes: Interesting that this methodology put Maryland just in the top 10 best for safety states. Could it be we tend to under report issues like speeding and distracted driving? Or could it be that because of sprawl we drive further just to do the same things as everyone else? After all Frederick and Baltimore are bedroom communities to DC. And we do know that different areas have different commute times and different times for being stuck in contested traffic, both of which are strong indicators of more miles driven for some populations than others. I always thought that fatalities per population is a better metric than fatalities per miles driven. Like it’s so much safer to drive 20 miles to work than 10 miles to work with the same fatalities per population. I understand that the more miles driven per the same population results in more crashes but that’s just it, the same population. When comparing different populations I will assert that we all do the same thing, work, shop and play in the cars we drive and it is the frequency of traffic death that happens while doing our daily lives is what is important. ]

By Norman Garrick, Carol Atkinson-Palombo, and Hamed Ahangari
…
Even before that spike upward, per capital traffic fatalities in the US were already the highest in the industrialized world. No other developed country tolerates the level of carnage on their roads that we do. This national failure has been overlooked for far too long. Studying short-term variations in our safety record is important, but it can also distract us from investigating the forces contributing to our horrendous safety record compared to our peers.
…
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/11/30/13784520/roads-deaths-increase-safety-traffic-us

BY DAVID WENCER, Torontoist
The Christmas of 1936 was a black one for Toronto. On December 26, newspapers reported on the holiday slaughter: three people killed, at least six people injured by hit-and-run drivers, and more than one hundred separate traffic collisions. In the years that followed, politicians, police officials, and concerned citizens promoted annual December public safety campaigns in the hopes of making Toronto’s streets safer over the holidays.
Books dedicated to the history of the automobile in Canada often describe Canadians’ “love affair” with the automobile in the early 20th century. Toronto newspapers of the 1920s and 1930s, however, reveal that the new vehicles were not universally embraced. Articles express widespread public anxiety about the growing number of traffic collisions on city streets and highways; many Toronto newspapers featured regular photo arrays of smashed vehicles in and around the city.
In his 2008 book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, Peter D. Norton notes that American cities were similarly preoccupied with traffic deaths at this time. “Even in the United States there is little evidence in cities in the 1920s of a ‘love affair’ with the automobile,” Norton writes. “With the sudden arrival of the automobile came a new kind of mass death. Most of the dead were city people. Most the car’s urban victims were pedestrians, and most of the pedestrian victims were children and youths. Early observers rarely blamed the pedestrians who strolled into the roadway wherever they chose, or the parents who let their children play in the street. Instead, most city people blamed the automobile.”
…
https://torontoist.com/2016/12/historicist-pedestrian-blaming-1930s-style/

TreeHugger: Republican Party goes after bikes, trains, transit, everything but their beloved cars
https://www.treehugger.com/public-transportation/republican-party-goes-after-bikes-trains-transit-everything-their-beloved-cars.html

By Anna Maria Barry-Jester, FiveThirtyEight
…
How speed limits are set
In 2013, 32,719 people died in motor vehicle crashes in the United States, and 2.3 million were injured, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Those numbers were down from the previous year, but motor vehicle crashes remain a leading cause of death, and speed is a leading cause of accidents. The NHTSA estimates a $277 billion annual price tag1 for those accidents, with an additional $594 billion for “harm from the loss of life and the pain and decreased quality of life due to injuries.”
Given the social and economic toll of speeding, one might assume that we set speed limits with careful calculations aimed at maximizing safety. But that’s not exactly how it works, and a history of questionable applications of data is partly to blame.
…

Why The Rules Of The Road Aren’t Enough To Prevent People From Dying

…
We know that achieving the goal of zero traffic fatalities and serious injuries can’t be achieved with a “business as usual” mindset. While Vision Zero is indeed a set of strategies, it’s also fundamentally a new approach, a different framework, that starts from an acknowledgement that severe traffic crashes are preventable.
…
https://visionzeronetwork.org/project/9-components-of-a-strong-vision-zero-commitment/
[B’ Spokes: While there are some good points in here I personally think our biggest obstacle will be getting rid of the mind set that I dubbed “Since cars like to go fast, we should do everything we can so they can go faster. Slower modes, since they are so much slower will not mind going even slower.” From this we get the victim blaming from police and our safety office like it is the slower modes duty not only to stay out of the way of cars but slowing them down, even for a few seconds is a crime against nature. With never a mention that it is cars duty not to hit things with their cars

By Joanne Chianello, CBC News
The City of Ottawa bypassed the advice of international consultants when designing the O’Connor Street bikeway in order to make more room for cars, choosing an option the firm described as “less safe” for cyclists.
In the first three weeks since its opening, there were three reported collisions between bicycles and vehicles in the section of the bike lane stretching from Laurier Avenue to the Queensway.
The city insists the lane is safe. But it doesn’t deny it chose an option that was somewhat less safe for cyclists, and did so because the optimal choice would have been untenable for drivers — and may have killed the project altogether.
…
In its report submitted in July 2015, Mobycon concluded that Option 1 — protected bike lanes on both sides of O’Connor — was “the safest and most direct for bicyclists.”
The firm acknowledged that its first choice could result in less room for cars and “slightly less optimal flow in the downtown area.” But from a Dutch cycling perspective, inconveniencing motorists is “considered an acceptable trade-off.”
…
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/city-of-ottawa-chooses-less-safe-option-for-o-connor-bikeway-to-make-room-for-cars-1.3855100

by: Tony Dutzik, Frontier Group
…
For a decade, the United States seemed to be creeping away from our extreme dependence on fossil fuel-burning cars and trucks. Between 2004 and 2014, the number of miles driven by the average American fell by about 7%. Vehicle fuel economy increased and transportation carbon pollution declined. Traffic deaths fell. Congestion stagnated. Cycling and transit use surged. Meanwhile, new technologies and services emerged that promised a potential break from the nation’s dominant model of mobility based on personal car ownership.
Then, everything changed. Gasoline prices collapsed to the lowest level since 2003. Vehicle travel and the congestion that comes with it increased. Traffic deaths rose alarmingly for reasons ranging from rising travel to distracted driving to a surge in the number of bad drivers on the roads. Americans launched into a debt-fueled SUV-buying bonanza that has stalled improvements in fuel economy. Congress put $300 billion more behind the failed transportation infrastructure investment policies of the past via the FAST Act in late 2015. And the future of new models of mobility such as carsharing, Lyft and Uber remained in question.
And then came November 8. Voters gave virtually unchecked federal power to a Republican party that has frequently proven hostile to transit while embracing an “asphalt socialist” approach to highway construction. The transportation priorities of our incoming president are as yet unclear, but the tentative steps toward a cleaner and more efficient transportation system that the Obama administration took over the last eight years would seem to be in jeopardy.
…
https://www.frontiergroup.org/blogs/blog/fg/road-ahead-transportation