The gap between these mistakes causing harm and not causing harm is basically just luck.
The less careful we are even when the mistake doesn't cause harm, the more frequently we'll make the mistake. Some feedback that made people be more careful, and pay more attention, would be good.
And at a larger level: if we can't be bothered to be that careful (or simply can't at all), and want to be allowed to not be that careful, then maybe we should make more societal changes to stop depending on humans driving 3000+lb machines. All this is great data for less driving but because it's mostly invisible, it can't be used to rebut the "but I want my own car and I want to drive it myself" folks.
Obviously I agree that bad drivers deserve little sympathy. But not all human errors are down to bad drivers nor a lack of care.
> The less careful we are even when the mistake doesn't cause harm, the more frequently we'll make the mistake. Some feedback that made people be more careful, and pay more attention, would be good.
That only works if mistake are concious. My point is mistakes can be unintended like rowdy kids causing a distraction at the wrong time.
> The gap between these mistakes causing harm and not causing harm is basically just luck.
I agree. But also the gap between a good driver driving well and a good driver making an honest mistake because of a badly timed distraction is also just bad luck.
It's happened to me before -- I've ran a red light at temporary traffic lights after my 2nd child was born (so I was tired thus required sharper focus) and my 1st child was so excited about having a baby sister that he kept making a scene. For a fraction of a second I lost focus and that fraction of a second happened to be when I was approaching road works. I was lucky that it was a Sunday evening and driving along a quiet village road so there wasn't any other vehicles. But I still had ran a red light despite my best efforts of driving safely.
> And at a larger level: if we can't be bothered to be that careful...
It's not about people not making the effort to drive safely; it's about human error. If it were that easy to drive then we'd already have infallible autonomous cars but we don't because driving isn't actually all that easy. This is also why I'm fully in favour of all these new smart safety features that autonomy has introduced; they help reduce the impact of the worst instances of human error.
Just to recap: I have little sympathy for bad or negligent drivers. I just want to remind people that it's easy to demonise others but sometimes actions are genuine flukes of bad luck.
Okay, so you make an error, you get a fine for it.
It's not as though I'm arguing anyone who runs a red light should go to jail. Heck, maybe our fines are too high, or should take income into account—I think all of those things would be healthy conversations.
But cars are deadly vehicles, and mistakes—regardless of the circumstance—should have consequences before someone gets killed. As frequently as possible.
Just commenting to reinforce the degree of my agreement here. Basically the attitude from law enforcement and the legal system comes down to:
- Oh, no one was hurt? Just a close call? Everyone go home and try to be more careful out there next time.
- Oh, you killed someone? I mean, it's a fluke— could have happened to anyone. Honestly, you've suffered enough emotional trauma already, here's a slap on the wrist to make the victim's family feel a bit better.
This is not hypothetical; it happens all the time. Here's an example from my city:
The library charges you a fee for returning a book late— it's a small penalty and a reminder to be more attentive in the future. Fines on the road should be treated the same way, as an additional cost you pay for the privilege of using the road, in proportion to the number of "mistakes" and "brain farts" you have.
And who knows, maybe that additional cost might motivate a few more people to choose transit or a cab instead of driving while fatigued, or pull over and wait for the kids to stop fighting in the back seat.
As long as you are okay with fining cyclists for riding on sidewalks, failing to come to a complete stop at stop signs, failing to signal turn direction, failing to yield, etc as well. Same with pedestrians for jaywalking. You can’t be intolerant of vehicle mistakes and allow for others if you actually care about safety.
Actually when you drive a car, you have a lot more responsibility. It is easier to cause serious harm to someone while driving a multi-ton vehicle, than when riding a bike.
I'd say both points are complimentary rather than contradictory. Yes, cars do require more responsibility, however they are not exclusively responsible for road safety.
For example cyclists have caused serious harm and even kills pedestrians before. Also pedestrians and cyclists have caused serious accidents to motorists when causing car drivers to react suddenly, to swerve or break harshly which has resulted in those drivers colliding with other motorists.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying the level of responsibility between pedestrians, cyclists and motorists are equal; clearly they're not. But there is still some shared responsibility when talking about road safety.
There's definitely some, but discussing this requires tact or you quickly find yourself making "all lives matter"-type arguments that can look like they're trying set the two sides up as equally dangerous or equally responsible. Or worse, an argument that ends up boiling down to "as a motorist, I will only ever drive more slowly and carefully once I no longer see any cyclist or pedestrian break another law, ever."
It's particularly a challenge because of confirmation bias on the motorist's side. Every driver can remember times that they were frustrated or had to swerve to avoid an irresponsible person on a bicycle, but it's likely that those cases where a cyclist or pedestrian had to jump out of their way have passed from memory, if they were even noticed at all in the first place. I'm not immune to this— I have a recollection from a few years ago of driving out to a pumpkin patch with my family and passing a cyclist on the shoulder of the country highway without slowing down or given them a proper side buffer. I wouldn't have thought anything of it at the time except that my partner called me out on it, but it's perfectly possible that rider felt threatened by what happened. I suspect that most of the drivers who blow through crosswalks in front of me have no idea I was in them— in their mind, nothing registered as "wow, I almost hit someone because I didn't see them, I should down!"
My sense from having had these conversations over the years is that most drivers enjoy an enormous amount of privilege on the road and are very resistant to acknowledging the role it has in shaping their views and experiences.
"as a motorist, I will only ever drive more slowly and carefully once I no longer see any cyclist or pedestrian"
I feel like the internet is full of dispatches from a fantasy/science fiction alternate universe where people are divided into warring tribes of (SUV) drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians that are somehow mutually exclusive.
I vaguely remember a time or a place or a timeline when people would drive here and there, with a bike rack on their car, and then they would get out and walk or ride their bike somewhere. All in one day!
But I guess today everyone does only one thing their whole life. Or else they have lost the ability to imagine doing anything other than what they are currently doing, minute by minute.
Sure, there are lots of multi-modal travelers, and by and large those people are the most even-handed and reasonable in these discussions. :) Some people who cycle or take transit do so exclusively, but I suspect that many or even most have a car at home or occasionally rent one, or have at least been in a passenger in one in the recent past.
Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of motorists have never experienced the road from the perspective of a bicycle seat, or last rode a bike decades ago as a child or teenager. For those who live in a garage door community, it's possible that you could even go many years with your only vulnerable pedestrian experience being the weekly dash across the Wal-Mart parking lot.
So yes, there is some tribalism to this. The people who ride bikes (some of the time) are a minority group, but I don't think we're the ones driving that mentality.
I don't think that's true at all. Indeed, feedback and fear of consequences are two things that drive people to become conscious. Both of mistakes and of the potential for mistakes.
You've carefully cropped out the following sentence that explains why your point doesn't always ring too.
With the best will in the world, you cannot prevent 100% of distractions 100% of the time. Young kids, for example, will always find a way to circumvent your best efforts at least some of the time.
No, my point stands. The notion of 100% anything is a straw man; it's nothing I said. But we do aim to asymptotically approach it over time, and we do that through proportionate feedback.
I understand you somehow feel at the mercy of your kids, and think that should entirely excuse negligent driving. But please understand that plenty of parents feel and behave otherwise.
> The gap between these mistakes causing harm and not causing harm is basically just luck.
No. There are certain things in your example like rolling stops and lane changes in intersections that are completely safe when there are no other vehicles or pedestrians near the intersection. The existence of the yield sign and its use prove the former.
Executing a safe lane change requires doing a shoulder check, matching speed with another lane, etc— the reason it's prohibited in and near intersections is because those are exactly where you need to be paying the most attention to crosswalks, opposing traffic, conflict points, etc.
It may well be that it's fine if you're very, very confident there "are no other vehicles or pedestrians" nearby. But what is that literally every driver says who strikes a person walking? That they "came out of nowhere". It turns out enough drivers are bad at judging these things that it makes sense to just blanket ban them.
I’m not sure you’ve ever driven in rural areas or even the outer suburbs of US cities. Things are so spread out that you can easily have visibility of the entire 100 yard radius around a given intersection from more than 1000ft away.
Actually, the vast majority of traffic collisions require 2 parties to not be paying attention, but only one of whom has to actually make a mistake; I wouldn't consider the 2nd person failing to avoid the accident as a matter of luck.
This is part of why the "share the road" and "all have a role to play" narratives are so offensive to people who cycle and walk. The people choosing these active transportation options are already overwhelmingly the ones picking up the slack and preventing driver inattention and carelessness from becoming serious crashes.
We don't get a choice in this— we do it because the alternative is being killed in the street, and then when people actually are hit, we get to hear smarmy commentary about how it wouldn't have happened if they'd just looked both ways, or been wearing brighter clothing, or chosen a different time of day to go out for a walk:
But it's hard to even build a case out of this that will be accepted by people who don't have that first hand experience of being the vulnerable road user. Most places in North America, small driver errors are only barely punished if at all, and there's pretty much universally zero effort to track close calls involving people walking and cycling.
> We don't get a choice in this— we do it because the alternative is being killed in the street
Is this commonplace in the US? In the UK most streets are safe to walk down (even some country roads which don't have pavements/sidewalks). In the UK there isn't such thing as jaywalking (etc) so it is the drivers responsibility to give way to pedestrians even when those pedestrians aren't following the highway code themselves.
The less careful we are even when the mistake doesn't cause harm, the more frequently we'll make the mistake. Some feedback that made people be more careful, and pay more attention, would be good.
And at a larger level: if we can't be bothered to be that careful (or simply can't at all), and want to be allowed to not be that careful, then maybe we should make more societal changes to stop depending on humans driving 3000+lb machines. All this is great data for less driving but because it's mostly invisible, it can't be used to rebut the "but I want my own car and I want to drive it myself" folks.