Monday’s Headlines: Last ‘Headlines’ of the Year Edition

Re: Road deaths, Steve’s tweet said Queens pedestrian fatalities were up 14.5%, but the article said Queens “traffic fatalities” were up by that number, with traffic fatalities seeming to be defined as those who died while driving or riding in vehicles.

Does anyone have the actual number and year to year numbers for the Queens pedestrian fatalities vs traffic fatalities?

What nonsense. The public advocate job is meant to be a kind of ombudsman evaluating all aspects of City government. The bully pulpit alone can influence policy; but remember the public advocate is still a legislator, with the power to introduce bills in the City Council.

If the holders of the office of public advocate have so far not used the office to its full potential, that is entirely on those individuals. There’s no reason that an engaged public servant couldn’t take hold of that office and make valuable contributions from it.

Thank you for proving my point so eloquently, @FerdinandCesarano:disqus .

Given that the editors of Streetsblog refer to Public Advocate as “the city’s greatest no-show job”, I think I’m in good company. But if you’re interest is just name-calling, hey, it’s a free country (but isn’t that what Twitter’s for?).

Hitting the New Years Eve champagne a little early, @FerdinandCesarano:disqus ? Or maybe you’re just confusing me with someone else? I’m a fan of speed cameras, and probably 95% percent of what Streetsblog stands for (seriously, when did I ever speak out against them? I think I would remember that).. Or are you just thinking about running for Public Advocate yourself one day?

Unfortunately, for some people unless you agree 100% you’re a traitor to the cause. As my long post above indicates, I personally feel we’ve focused far too much on speeding and not enough on other things which might have been more effective.

speed limits in general have pretty much no effect on driver behavior.

…unless they’re enforced.

Kind of like every other law out there: if it’s not enforced, people will do whatever they feel like doing.

We don’t need to wait for legislation for an Idaho stop. Right now, DOT could install bike signals which flash red or yellow when motorists get a red light. They can justify this by saying they deem it safe for cyclists to treat reds as yields or stop-and-proceeds, depending upon the visibility. We’re already heading in that direction with LPIs which give cyclists and pedestrians a head start on motor traffic.

Automated enforcement is the only practical means of catching speeders in an urban environment. I definitely don’t want cops chasing down speeders. That would be a repeat of what was tried during the 55 mph era. More people died in these chases than were ostensibly saved by the lower speed limit. And speeding, unless it’s the relatively rare grossly excessive kind, has a second order effect of safety compared to other infractions like failure to yield, distracted driving, or aggressive driving.

The position and velocity of every single vehicle can be known with great accuracy, and the lawbreakers targeted. Even better, every vehicle could be fitted with a speed governor that simply does not permit it to go faster then the speed limit on the road it is on (with an emergency kill switch so that a rush to a hospital would be possible, so long as the police could meet the vehicle at the hospital in order to verify the legitimacy of the emergency).

The problem with that is the same as with saturation enforcement via speed cameras. The political will isn’t there. Governors are a far better solution than anything else as motorists can’t say they’re a money grab by the government. However, it’s a political hard sell. I would personally try to sell it by doing two things. One, the governors would only be in effect on local urban streets, not limited access highways. Two, speed limits would be raised to at least 85th percentile values on all limited access highways, which effectively means legislated state speed limits would have to be repealed. Motorists might buy into it knowing they won’t be governed on highways AND they could drive a lot faster than now without risking a speeding ticket.

A secondary benefit of much higher highway speed limits might be a switch to more efficient vehicles. SUVs get horrible fuel efficiency at very high speeds but for now that doesn’t matter as highway speed limits are mostly very low. In an era of higher legal speeds, as is the case in Europe, people will want to stop driving vehicles which are cost-prohibitive to drive at very high speeds.

The problem is that getting enough enforcement to catch speeders often enough for them to stop speeding is either logistically or politically impractical.

Automated enforcement is trivially simple. It works extremely well where and when it exists, given the absurd limitations on how it is used in New York. Lift those restrictions and we can start to enforce the speed limit (not 10 mph above the speed limit, but the actual speed limit) everywhere, at all times of day, on all days of the week.

Also, I’d much rather have limited enforcement directed at things more likely to kill people, like failure to yield and parking in bike lanes.

Reducing speeds reduces both the likelihood and the severity of crashes. Even a reduction from 35 mph (the fake speed limit that the cameras enforce) to 25 mph (the actual speed limit) would be a major life-saver.

I’m certainly not suggesting that other driving violations not be enforced! But more drivers will yield to pedestrians if they’re driving more slowly in the first place. And are you seriously claiming that parking in bike lanes kills more people than speeding?

Keep in mind even without laws people aren’t going to do whatever they feel like doing.

Of course it does. Would you continue to pay taxes if the law didn’t require you to pay taxes? In the unlikely event that you would, you’d be paying them because you feel like paying them.

Laws are actually a sort of 85th percentile, or maybe even 99th percentile, of human behavior.

Really? The federal government sets tax rates by determining what 85% (or maybe 99%) of citizens would voluntarily pay if there were no obligation to pay taxes? Somehow I don’t think that would work very well.

The 85th percentile nonsense that you bring up has nothing to do with the legal system in general. It has to do with a deliberate misinterpretation of a 1964 study by NMA-types. The study concluded that, on rural highways (the study didn’t consider cities), motorists (the study didn’t consider pedestrians or cyclists) are most likely to be involved in crashes at high speed differentials, and the crash severity is greater at higher speeds. The NMA-types deliberately applied the study’s results to scenarios that its author warned not to apply them to, simply ignored the severity aspect, and continue to ignore or denigrate the modern day availability of automated enforcement to make speed limits meaningful.

Even without laws, empathy keeps most people from killing or raping. Just as an example, even before there were laws against animal abuse, it was relatively uncommon because most people empathized enough with animals to avoid abusing them. Or even better, back before we had formal laws, early tribes of humans didn’t kill each other off.

You’ve cherry-picked a few laws that happen to correspond with what most people feel like doing. That applies to some laws, sure. But it certainly doesn’t apply to all or even most of them. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a law that requires people to do something that they don’t want to do, or forbids them from doing something that they want to do, nor is there anything wrong with enforcement of such a law.

If we want to curb speeding, the answer is to design streets where drivers don’t feel safe driving at excessive speeds.

That’s certainly one useful approach! But it can’t possibly be the only approach. It’s a very labor-intensive and costly approach, one that would take many decades to achieve city-wide if a steady funding stream were even available. It also can’t adequately adjust for wide variations in traffic volumes – a street that needs two or three lanes to carry heavy traffic volumes at busy times of day will encourage speeding when volumes are much lower. (That explains why late night crashes are more likely to be fatal than crashes during the day or evening.) That’s a huge gap in the engineering approach that needs to be filled by an enforcement approach.

Or better yet, just remove humans from the driving process altogether.

Perhaps in 50 years, that will be technically feasible on a wide scale. I’m not willing to wait that long to save lives. Are you?

I agree with everything you said, except that last bit about having to wait 50 years for automated cars to be technically feasible on a large scale. That day is just around the corner.

The obstacle to the widespread adoption of automated vehicles lies not in the technology, but in cultural issues: the inappropriate sense of entitlement that drivers have been allowed to develop, and an infantile and distorted (mis)conception of “privacy”.

Rather than addressing every point, let me just say the focus on speed is at best misguided. Sure, I’ll fully agree higher speeds make the consequences of any incident worse but just driving above an arbitrary speed limit seldom causes incidents in the first place. That’s why I want the focus to be mostly on what actually causes incidents in the first place. Failure to yield is certainly high on the list. So is distracted driving, aggressive driving, even driving while fatigued. This isn’t to say sometimes speed alone can cause an incident, but when it does, it’s usually a speed far too high to allow a driver to retain control of the vehicle, like 80 mph on an urban street.

The problem with using speed as the primary focus is twofold. One, if you have draconian speed enforcement you’re going to get drivers looking mostly at their speedometer instead of the road ahead as they should. They may be going slower, but they’ll get in more crashes as a result. This may actually increase overall deaths and injuries. Two, if you want to say 25 mph is safer than 35 mph, why stop there? Each increment you go down increases surviveability. Why not 5 mph while we’re at it? Why not 3 mph, which means the police will have to start going after fast walkers also? I’d much rather go after the things which cause collisions in the first place. Even better I’d like to do as many quick, low-cost engineering fixes as possible. Any system which relies mostly on enforcement is a failure right out of the gate. Eventually there will be public outcry over excessive enforcement, especially for groups which are politically connected, like motorists. When the enforcement ends, so do any increases in safety resulting from that enforcement. On the other hand, steel and concrete is a 24/7 traffic cop.

Really? The federal government sets tax rates by determining what 85% (or maybe 99%) of citizens would voluntarily pay if there were no obligation to pay taxes? Somehow I don’t think that would work very well.

Most citizens don’t voluntarily pay taxes. It’s taken out of your paycheck or added to the bill at the cash register. In cases where the taxes might not be directly taken out, the IRS usually gets a record of what you made to compare with what you report when you file. The people who matter, namely the wealthy, do in fact have a voluntary system where they just change the rules when they want to pay less. The rest of us don’t have that luxury.

As for other laws, they have to somewhat aligned with what people feel is reasonable or they won’t stand the test of time. Certainly there have been lots of unpopular laws which the elite passed just to throw their weight around. In the end many of those laws were either repealed, or just not enforced. Ironically, that’s exactly why it’s so hard to get laws passed which make the streets safer. A lot of the necessary laws would be quite unpopular with motorists. Those who passed them would be replaced with others who would repeal those laws. We’re really fighting 75 years of culture which equates driving a car with “freedom”. That’s changing, but not fast enough to save lives.

That said, I proposed one possible answer in my last response to Ferdinand, namely govern cars to the speed limit on urban streets only. If combined with higher highway speed limits, this would probably get buy-in from a majority of motorists. And incidentally I think it’ll take far less than 50 years to automate driving altogether. Those who view driving as anything but a chore are typically over 50. Within 20 years those who would rather play with phones than drive will constitute a majority.