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URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Why Are So Many Pedestrians Killed by Cars in the US?
rafaeltorres wrote 1 min ago:
Wonder if it may have something to do with longer commute times, which
is not discussed in the article, i.e. a trip that used to take n
minutes a few years ago may now take double due to congestion, leading
to more impatient drivers. At least in my city (Miami) all people talk
about is how untenable the commute times have become.
dukoid wrote 1 min ago:
They are killed by drivers.
herval wrote 3 min ago:
ever-bigger cars, tiny sidewalks, wide roads that take a minute to
cross, the legality of turning left/right on a red light, few bike
paths, mostly merged with fast highway lanes?
I don't know, feels like a recipe for roadkill
CalRobert wrote 3 min ago:
What's even sadder is seeing how many pedestrians are killed _even as
far fewer people_, especially kids, are actually walking. It's like
watching drownings increase even as fewer people take up swimming.
I walked to school in the 90's and even then the curtain-twitchers
scolded my mom for letting me. It has only worsened since, as every
destination is ages away and involves crossing multiple 45MPH stroads
with monster trucks with 5 foot high hoods roaring down them.
petermcneeley wrote 7 min ago:
Does this count suicides? Does this count fault?
joduplessis wrote 9 min ago:
From the many years of running in a very poorly traffic-controlled
country, you learn to look at cars and also to look if drivers notice
you.
It was actually uncomfortable watching people not look, but cars always
stopping when I lived in Germany.
physicsguy wrote 13 min ago:
I was amazed when I travelled to the US at just how pedestrian hostile
it is. I was travelling to a conference in San Diego and it was just
impossible to walk safely between where I was staying and where I was
going to because this was the road:
URI [1]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/G2PeVbEzQyqbgDTN9
softwaredoug wrote 4 min ago:
It has a lot to do with many Americans relationships to cities, and
dare I say, wanting to be away from "those people" in the cities.
Some Americans can be hostile to increasing city density, arguing it
will increase car traffic. Yet the whole point of dense cities is to
help people avoid driving as you live next to everything.
Meanwhile development out in the hinterlands continues unabated, and
the only way to get to the city if you live there is with a car.
When you ask the same Americans why they like visiting a resort or
European city, they will talk about being able to walk around without
a car to get everything they need.
quantumwannabe wrote 6 min ago:
Only because you chose to walk through the port instead of through
town. Google Maps' walking route is shorter than the route that goes
through that road, entirely on sidewalks, and only requires crossing
one road wider than one car lane per direction (and said road has a
signalized crosswalk). There is also a pedestrian bridge across that
road that could be used instead, but Google didn't pick it, likely
because it connects with "private" property (the convention center's
path).
URI [1]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/asfGrRLkLmtpqnps5
throw-qqqqq wrote 8 min ago:
Hahah I got stopped by cops twice for walking to a food court in San
José ten years ago :D
They thought I was crazy for walking basically. After reassuring them
I knew who and where I was, they let me walk off.
Much of America seems very car-centric (to a European like myself).
globular-toast wrote 14 min ago:
I wish they wouldn't just focus on deaths. The difference between being
killed and having your body wrecked is pretty small. I'm curious to
know what the numbers look like if we considered some less extreme
interpretation of taking someone's life.
braza wrote 15 min ago:
As an enthusiast of traffic engineering, the most surprising thing in
US is how hard is for the engineers to handle so distinct zoning laws
according to it's county/city/state, and urbanistic planning in several
big/medium cities is more centered on _giving preference to the cars_
instead of _keep the cadency and flow of the cars_.
Not saying it's good or bad, but for instance, in some counties it's
way simpler to have a parking lot without any traffic buffer area at
the entrance than to get an approval for a roundabout to reduce
electronic traffic coordination in feeder roads.
Even simple things like pedestrian passages that do not have any
contact with the road (elevated passages or underground passages) are
very hard to find in the US.
I really would like to know one day what kind of design philosophy the
traffic engineering field follows with so much compromises.
astonex wrote 16 min ago:
Anecdotally, on my few visits to the US (NY and Colorado), the driving
I saw was absolutely atrocious compared to Europe. People were swerving
and failing to stay in their lanes on Interstates, everyone was
speeding well above the limit (everyone speeds on Motorways, but it
seems it's taken to another level in the US). Then you have turn right
on red meaning drivers just don't care and turn regardless. Then you
have everyone driving massive fucking trucks where you can't see
anything from inside.
It seemed every morning I got up and turned on the hotel TV, there was
another news about some crash on the Interstate that morning
tomasphan wrote 3 min ago:
Totally agree. When someone in my family got their license in the US
they had to drive around a parking lot, parallel park and pull into a
normal parking lot. Thatâs it. This was during COVID so the tester
wasnât allowed inside the car.
It absolutely reflects in the quality of drivers today.
I often drive in Europe for business and cry a little on the inside
when Iâm back on New York streets.
fennecfoxy wrote 17 min ago:
Culture.
Frieren wrote 18 min ago:
Road and street design is the main difference with Europe. A lot of
work has been put to make streets safer for everybody.
That fact alone acts as a multiplier for everything else. The cars are
bigger in the USA? The bad streets make it way worse. People are
distracted at the phone? The bad street design makes it more deathly.
Fix USA's streets and towns and all kinds of deaths will be decreased.
It is the most important factor.
pluc wrote 16 min ago:
This blows my mind considering most North American streets were
designed for cars, whereas the same cannot be said for Europe. Maybe
it's the reason: streets can be so narrow and winding in Europe that
you have to pay attention?
lksaar wrote 2 min ago:
Yea, I read an article on here a few years ago (which I can't seem
to find anymore), that a lot more cars in the US crash into
buildings compared to the EU and the main takeaway point was that
it is probably because of the long and straight roads in the US,
since you go faster and aren't as focused.
micromacrofoot wrote 18 min ago:
in other countries at an intersection with a stoplight... is it normal
for the light to turn green (allowing for a right turn) while a
crosswalk also simultaneously activates to cross that path?
this always feels strange to me in some US cities... why would you give
a car a green light to turn into an active crosswalk? I've been honked
at by drivers like I'm doing something wrong while having a cross
signal
heresie-dabord wrote 19 min ago:
Since 1930, 30K or more people have been killed every year in car
accidents in the US.
That's over 3_000_000 people in the past 100 years. [1] (corrected,
thanks!)
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U...
ReptileMan wrote 16 min ago:
30000*100 != 30 000 000
are you sure you haven't thrown a zero somewhere when multiplying.
al_borland wrote 22 min ago:
I donât buy the distraction numbers. I see people on their phones
constantly while driving, despite laws against it. Itâs also
impossible to really prove anything after the fact, as the article
touches on. The graph shows a massive increase in âdistraction not
reported,â which to me just sounds like the driver didnât choose to
incriminate themself.
The spike started in 2010, which is when 4G was rolling out, Instagram
launched, Facebook was already big, and social media in your pocket was
becoming an addictive reality. Before this, there wasnât a lot to do
on a smartphone while driving.
ceejayoz wrote 21 min ago:
Any attempt to blame it primarily on phones has to wrangle with the
fact that those phones are available and in use everywhere on the
planet, not just the USA.
mrweasel wrote 1 min ago:
[delayed]
shusaku wrote 13 min ago:
My only critique of this is that maybe the countries they compared
started to invested in safer urban driving infrastructure during
the Lehman shock, and its counteracting the universal growth in
distractedness
alterom wrote 23 min ago:
One obvious direction not explored in the article: looking not just at
the type on the vehicle involved in the deadly collision, but also the
actual model and its geometry.
It's not just that SUVs are deadlier than sedans.
It's also that the sedans are becoming taller, wider, heavier â and
deadlier.
The article says that blunt fronts are what makes a collision more
likely to result in a death. Well compare a 2000 Camry to a 2025 one
then on that metric.
To test this hypothesis, we need to look at all accidents where a
pedestrian was hit â and see a breakdown on whether it resulted in a
fatality, by vehicle and road type.
Another thing the article doesn't consider is that the speed limits
have increased across the US, and where they haven't, the enforcement
is not necessarily there (cough Bay Area cough).
Solutions like lane diet (or engineering cities for anything other than
automobiles) never became popular.
The outcome is inevitable.
_____
TL;DR: bigger, fatter cars going faster kill more people.
throwaway173738 wrote 15 min ago:
This is another important point. A pillars are two or three times the
size. Thatâs twice the amount of metal in your field of view where
you would be looking for a pedestrian.
banga wrote 23 min ago:
This morning while jogging in the US I came to an intersection. Green
lights and walk on in my direction. A car approaching from my left had
a red light, the driver glanced to his left and without stopping or
looking in my direction, turned right across my path. I expected this
of course, so avoided being run over. If I wasn't watching for this, it
likely would be a different outcome.
So why do so many pedestrians get killed in the US? The two main
reasons to me are: 1. Drivers don't look for pedestrians, and 2.
pedestrians expect drivers to follow rules.
Another contributing factor is of course the huge vehicles that crush
people with drivers barely noticing...
542354234235 wrote 1 min ago:
The reason drivers are able to drive like that is the design of the
streets themselves. Things like raised crosswalks[1] and corner
extensions[2] slow cars down and force them to pay attention. A lot
of intersections in my area are the opposite, where they lower the
whole curb to road level so cars can cut onto the curb to make the
turn faster. There are lots of ways that the US builds infrastructure
in ways that make it much more dangerous for pedestrians and bikers.
[0] [1] 3.14 Raised Crosswalk section of [0]
[2] 3.16 Corner Extension/Bulbout section of [0]
URI [1]: https://highways.dot.gov/safety/speed-management/traffic-cal...
Zambyte wrote 6 min ago:
This comment makes it seem like people are built differently in the
US than they are in the rest of the world, but that obviously isn't
true. The roads (particularly intersections, where crashes tend to
happen) are in fact built differently though. Urbanist resources like
NotJustBikes and Oh The Urbanity! YouTube channels do a great job of
highlighting the differences, and how they force drivers to pay
attention through the laws of physics rather than the laws of
signage.
Waterluvian wrote 7 min ago:
The more I look, the more I see a cultural mindset of âsomeone
elseâs problem; someone elseâs fault.â
I see that in both 1, and 2, and the lawyer ads everywhere necessary
to make the consequences also someone elseâs problem and fault.
Zigurd wrote 9 min ago:
Pedestrians pay with their lives so that we can have butch looking
trucks in the US. Seriously. It's for the vanity of pavement queens.
And it's measurable. Quantifiable. Regulators are unwilling to take
on this problem because they'd be called woke.
Zambyte wrote 3 min ago:
The "pavement queens" have been convinced they need larger by
companies that sell trucks, because larger trucks have lower legal
requirements for fuel efficiency.
_fat_santa wrote 9 min ago:
One thing I always do is say a car is stopped at an intersection and
is making a right turn while I'm in the crosswalk, I always look at
the driver and where they are looking. Often times what I see is the
driver will just look to see that the road is clear and never looks
to see that the sidewalk is clear and just goes. I can count maybe
2-3 occasions where had I not done this I would have been run over.
This was one thing not talked about in the article: drivers in the US
are not used to pedestrians outside of major cities like Boston, NYC,
etc. I've seen drivers blow past me while I was in the crosswalk to
rush and make a right turn and were bewildered that someone was
actually using the crosswalk.
softwaredoug wrote 21 min ago:
Right turns are really dangerous for pedestrians. A lot of localities
started banning right-on-red because cars look left only.
tbrownaw wrote 4 min ago:
There's an intersection here where the crosswalk button lights up a
"no right turn" light hanging next to the usual stoplights.
potato3732842 wrote 8 min ago:
The problem is that even if they look back and fourth and know
you're there the "go" condition (no incoming cross traffic) is the
same for both parties so it's a ready made "two idiots trying to
pass each other in the hallway" situation.
I think it speaks volumes that the discussion is anchored around
whether cars look or not despite the fact that the underlying
algorithm will produce conflicts even if they do.
karma_fountain wrote 10 min ago:
Cars don't look at all.
softwaredoug wrote 2 min ago:
I've done my fair share of screaming "HEY!!!" as they pull out
strickjb9 wrote 24 min ago:
Great analysis - though I can't help but notice that 2009 is right when
smartphones really took off (iPhone in 2007, Android in 2008, then mass
adoption). The data showing accidents getting more deadly rather than
more frequent actually makes sense if you combine two factors: phones
causing more distracted driving incidents, plus our bigger American
vehicles turning what would be injuries elsewhere into deaths. That
could explain why it's US-specific - other countries probably have the
same phone distraction problem, but their smaller cars mean less fatal
outcomes. The distraction data might be weak simply because people
don't admit they were on their phone after killing someone, but
sometimes the obvious answer deserves more weight than we give it.
throwaway173738 wrote 17 min ago:
You do see the ânot reported â category trend up significantly on
the graph which suggests you may be right. I might report that I
wasnât distracted, but I would not report if I was distracted
because I might end up in jail.
33a wrote 26 min ago:
Pedestrians on phones, not drivers on phones.
softwaredoug wrote 26 min ago:
Where I live they will randomly build a bike path for a mile on the
side of the road. But then it just ends. There's not a sense of how it
could be built to connect people to the places they need to go. It's
random and ad-hoc. Then people say "its pointless to build bike / ped
infrastructure, nobody uses it!"
globular-toast wrote 1 min ago:
This is a huge problem where I live too. The thing is, technically,
everyone is equally connected, because people have a legal right of
way on all roads using any means of transport (apart from motorways,
but these are always redundant links). But practically, most routes
are unsafe and just downright unpleasant to use in anything but a
motorvehicle.
I don't know what metrics they are using to assess walking or cycling
infrastructure, but it seems like it's just raw miles of
pavement/tarmac. This is a useless metric. You can have 10 miles of
pristine cycle path but if it goes nowhere it's useful and nobody
will use it.
The metrics need to be based on graph completeness. Important places
are the nodes. You get to draw an edge if there's a reasonable route
that is less than, say, 150% of the crow flies distance (or some more
clever formula taking into account gradients etc., ie. it's allowed
to be longer if it means not including a 25% gradient). Then your
score is simply number of edges divided by number of edges in the
complete graph (or 2E/(N^2*N) where E is number of edges and N number
of places).
danbolt wrote 4 min ago:
Iâve lived in places where theyâll add the bike path during
scheduled road work, as itâs cheaper to get it done while thereâs
a crew already onsite. It can be a bit stochastic at first like you
mention, but over a while Iâve seen the corridor eventually fill
out, making the most of a shoestring budget.
Perhaps something similar where you live?
alterom wrote 11 min ago:
My favorite feature of bicycle lanes in San Jose is that cars cross
them diagonally to get onto highway access ramps.
Nothing screams "safety" like an SUV coming at you from behind and
left while accelerating to highway speeds.
AaronAPU wrote 20 min ago:
Around here, there seems to be an unwritten rule that every place a
trail crosses the road there must be a row of 20â tall shrub
blocking the entire line of visibility in both directions.
shusaku wrote 27 min ago:
> We also canât rule out that increased recklessness or
distractedness on the part of pedestrians is playing a role.
Or a raw increase in pedestrians on urban roads? Maybe people are more
willing to go on a walk at night in the city these days?
everdrive wrote 26 min ago:
Anecdotal, but I've been in some cities where pedestrians don't even
look, they just walk right into the road. Yes, I would be at fault if
I hit them (in many cases) but I'm also not perfect, and also don't
expect them to charge right in front of me.)
piva00 wrote 14 min ago:
One of the reasons to force slower speeds in city streets, more
time for reacting to adverse events, less damage in case you hit a
pedestrian at 30km/h than 60km/h.
pretzellogician wrote 20 min ago:
Living in Boston 30-something years ago, I found this was required
as a pedestrian, because drivers would try to intimidate you from
entering a crosswalk by accelerating at you. So... you had to
explicitly look away and still be aware of their presence.
(Not just Boston, I've seen this in some other cities since.)
throwaway173738 wrote 16 min ago:
This is how it works everywhere Iâve been.
barrenko wrote 27 min ago:
Pedestrians are quite squishy.
furyg3 wrote 28 min ago:
At first I thought maybe the number of pedestrian journeys have gone
up, but that appears to be declining (leading to even more concern as
to why deaths have gone up).
codeduck wrote 22 min ago:
Because (darkly) there's one fewer pedestrians time one of them gets
killed?
Sorry, I'll show myself out.
alterom wrote 8 min ago:
There's many more pedestrians who start to think twice about
walking anywhere after someone they know is hit by a vehicle.
paulcole wrote 28 min ago:
The answer is so simple.
We really really really really like our cars/trucks/SUVs in the US and
have agreed that about 30,000 to 40,000 people a year will die so that
we can keep driving the way we do.
Itâs the price we pay for the way we choose to live.
alterom wrote 5 min ago:
I like how your comment is downvoted even though this hypothesis is
directly supported by the data from the article.
Fat cars getting fatter, pedestrian-hostile streets becoming faster,
city infrastructure requiring people to drive everywhere.
Hmmmm, what could be the reason.
octo888 wrote 22 min ago:
I'd love more of this kind of frank discourse because I'm tired of
decades of political pearl clutching "even just one death is a
tragedy"
everdrive wrote 28 min ago:
There are a multitude of issues:
- poor visibility in modern cars due to rollover protection
- touch screens and touch controls in cars
- general proliferation of controls in cars
- smart phones & smart phone addictions
- higher vehicle belt lines are better for vehicle --> vehicle
impacts but worse for vehicle --> pedestrian impacts
- poor pedestrian infrastructure, sidewalks, crosswalks, etc.
pmontra wrote 3 min ago:
But why only in the USA? Cars and phones are the same in all the
countries listed in the OP and it's not SUVs vs sedans. So are we
left with your last point, different infrastructure?
strickjb9 wrote 20 min ago:
I hung onto a Blackberry way longer than I should have simply because
I wanted physical keys. I'm trying to hang onto cars with physical
controls as well. It seems like automakers are finally get the hint
that people want physical controls again.
octo888 wrote 25 min ago:
How have touchscreens had such a free pass compared to mobile
phones?!
Just kidding I know the answer is lobbying
36Ndm wrote 29 min ago:
Also if you look at they way the cars are designed in the US compared
to Europe, the hoods of the cars are much higher, and not designed to
prevent injury in the event of a car -> pedestraion incident
sethammons wrote 4 min ago:
In the article, it talks about the big suv hypothesis and also points
out that pedestrian deaths are up for sedans too.
Are US sedans hood designs different than in Europe?
contrarian1234 wrote 29 min ago:
They forgot to check if it correlates with shark attacks
They checked so many things I'm surprised it didn't match something
just by accident (it's still a fun exercise :)) mostly just teasing)
uniqueuid wrote 30 min ago:
An interesting read.
This kind of problem is exactly what statistics is designed to do, and
it makes me a bit sad that we are left with a bit of a shoulder shrug.
It's absolutely possible to do a much better job at disentangling
possible causes here with something as simple as a multilevel
regression. (Although ok, proper causal inference would be more work).
hackingonempty wrote 31 min ago:
It is literally 20 times as many people killed every year as are killed
in mass shootings but you can't get anyone to care at all about it.
Blame the victim, did you see what they were wearing?
tomasphan wrote 12 min ago:
We care about control. Mass shootings are random and scary and
totally out of victimâs control. People say âthat car crash
wouldnât have happened to me Iâm a better driver and I pay
attentionâ. Which is true to some degree.
Same reason why flying is scary because you canât even see whatâs
coming.
jonathanknight wrote 24 min ago:
Wow - I think the problem there is that it is ONLY 20 times the
number killed in mass shootings.
snapcaster wrote 25 min ago:
My theory is its because what we respond to is _not_ number of deaths
but instead "number of deaths in excess of what we've priced in". In
the standard american mental model we assume there are going to be
lots of road deaths so nobody really responds to it
rjbwork wrote 28 min ago:
Even moreso than guns, the automobile industry has been waging an
incredibly successful propaganda campaign for over a century now
equating the ownership and use of a personal automobile with freedom.
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote 20 min ago:
Have you tried to move around US w/o it? As propaganda goes, it is
pretty spot on.
baggachipz wrote 6 min ago:
Only because the car companies made it that way through lobbying
and stifling mass transit efforts.
rglullis wrote 14 min ago:
What is cause and what is effect, and which of those do people
can control?
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote 10 min ago:
Eh, I guess I am talking to militant anti-SUV people.
Allow me to rephrase:
- Your environment imposes restrictions upon you
- Even if you can control your actions, optimal choice is to
move within those restrictions
- Doing things that attempt to move outside those restrictions
are not optimal
- Some people choose the optimal path
- Some people are upset that the optimal path is chosen
Good grief, why am I bothering with nonsense so early?
throw_m239339 wrote 21 min ago:
The Jaywalking conspiracy!
URI [1]: https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history
snapcaster wrote 25 min ago:
This is true, people having a complete meltdown to the idea of
walkable cities was very telling
bradfa wrote 33 min ago:
Pedestrians are hit by cars in the USA because the roads are not
designed for non-car users. This is exacerbated by distracted driving,
drunk driving, and recent car design changes like higher hood heights
but the root of it is poorly designed roads which donât consider
pedestriansâ needs.
twelvechairs wrote 19 min ago:
A huge part of poorly designed roads is wider lanes (and parking
spaces) that allow/encourage huge cars. Its been proven that narrower
lanes correlate strongly with lower crash and fatality rates (e.g.
[0] below) yet lane widths are under pressure to increase with larger
vehicles, and every time this happens the vehicles get larger again.
[0]
URI [1]: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2023/narrower-lanes-safer-stree...
FridayoLeary wrote 8 min ago:
I heard the fire department wants wide lanes so they can drive
around in those huge behemoths they love.
ajuc wrote 3 min ago:
[delayed]
CalRobert wrote 9 min ago:
Higher speeds, too.
willis936 wrote 26 min ago:
As compared to the European roads that are half the width of US
roads?
trollbridge wrote 8 min ago:
There are lots of narrow roads in America, like the one I currently
live on, which is about 1.75 lanes wide. If I come up against a
large truck, one of us has to pull to the side.
Most people prefer not to drive on roads like that.
ajuc wrote 9 min ago:
Yes. Wider roads are worse for safety.
throwaway173738 wrote 22 min ago:
Yeah. Halving the width halves the time to cross and also causes
drivers to slow down in proportion even if the speed limit is
significantly higher. Narrowing and placing âobstaclesâ is the
only effective way of showing traffic permanently.
micromacrofoot wrote 23 min ago:
people drive slower on narrower roads â some traffic calming
efforts in the US include making right turns at lights narrower so
people slow down while potentially turning into a crosswalk
denismenace wrote 23 min ago:
Yes, european roads are not as wide, since they make place for
proper sidewalks and bike lanes. Another advantage is that narrower
roads make drivers drive more carefully and slowly, reducing
accidents even further.
IanCal wrote 7 min ago:
I wish people would stop assuming that an area with 500M people,
more than 20 countries and far more cultures are one addressable
block.
Some places are, others are absolutely awful.
> Another advantage is that narrower roads make drivers drive
more carefully and slowly,
In some places, in others people go absolutely hell for leather
because the roads are pretty fun.
This varies city to city.
ceejayoz wrote 5 min ago:
I've no doubt it varies, but they're all doing something
differently that seems to work versus the US.
> Other countries havenât seen this increase in pedestrian
deaths: in every other high-income country, rates are flat or
declining. Whateverâs causing the problem seems to be limited
to the US.
ajuc wrote 16 min ago:
On small village roads with little traffic you don't even need
pavements (not to mention bike paths) as long as the road is
narrow and winding with good visibility. Cars drive slowly and
rarely, it's perfectly fine to walk there.
tdeck wrote 18 min ago:
In Japan many neighborhood roads (even in cities) are narrow and
have no sidewalk to speak of. But I feel safe walking down them
because drivers expect to go slow and look out for pedestrians
and cyclists.
If you want to blow through an area fast, there are other roads
for that with lighted crossings and sidewalks, and often slower
mixed-use parallel roads for pulling in and out of businesses.
gdulli wrote 27 min ago:
It's more the trend in cars than the roads because the roads didn't
change starting in 2009.
willis936 wrote 22 min ago:
And drivers. Readers should ask themselves when they first got a
smartphone and if it was around 2009.
ceejayoz wrote 16 min ago:
You should ask yourself whether smartphones are a US-only
phenomenon. From the article:
> Other countries havenât seen this increase in pedestrian
deaths: in every other high-income country, rates are flat or
declining. Whateverâs causing the problem seems to be limited
to the US.
willis936 wrote 3 min ago:
Smartphones + US culture is limited to the US.
ajuc wrote 8 min ago:
It reminds me of Americans blaming school shootings on video
games as if nobody else in the world had them :)
quantumwannabe wrote 29 min ago:
Someone didn't read the article.
potato3732842 wrote 27 min ago:
>Someone didn't read the article.
Someone doesn't understand that any article that's drawing
conclusions based on a workflow that involves putting a Chevy
Suburban (functionally a chevy pickup from the B pillar forward)
and a Honda HRV into the same category is sus at best and anyone
uncritically accepting said conclusions is also sus at best.
If one wanted to be honest they'd look at GVW or some other metric
that tracks size far more closely than a fairly arbitrary
categorization that is highly gamed for regulatory reasons.
We're all just so sick of these shallow analysis. Shitting numbers
and graphs onto them doesn't make them not shallow. Like what even
is the point of a raw "deaths by state" map?[1]?
URI [1]: https://xkcd.com/1138/
alterom wrote 3 min ago:
>Like what even is the point of a raw "deaths by state" map?
It does give slightly more insight than the map of US state
population per capita[1]
URI [1]: https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=71089629169883...
willis936 wrote 23 min ago:
Suburbans are on truck chassis and are SUVs. HRVs are on car
chassis and are crossovers. The bucket is called "trucks and
SUVs" to make this less ambiguous.
ToucanLoucan wrote 12 min ago:
As an adamant enthusiast of both cars and infrastructure
design, if someone puts a crossover in the trucks and SUVs
category, I am dubious of anything that follows. Crossovers are
basically just cars with higher rollover risk. They're lighter,
they have smaller engines, they can stop more quickly, and
overall have much, much better safety characteristics.
Like I'm sorry but if you put crossovers and SUVs in the same
bucket for a discussion anywhere, but especially in the realm
of safety, I'm not taking your opinions seriously.
potato3732842 wrote 15 min ago:
>Suburbans are on truck chassis and are SUVs. HRVs are on car
chassis and are crossovers. The bucket is called "trucks and
SUVs" to make this less ambiguous.
TFA does not use data broken down in that way.
TFA cites "sales by body type" which puts a 'Burb (functionally
a pickup for this discussion) into the same category as a 2002
Forester (which is an SUV on paper, but obviously a car).
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