Motor Vehicle Deaths Topped 40,000 Again in 2017

General Discussion
22

I’d say that depends on the culture in which the trains exist as well as the crossings. The Japanese have Bullet Trains that run at 200 mph and have for years as have the French, South Koreans and China. We have the Acela that runs in the northeast at 150 mph.

Given that the Brightline’s point to point destinations are a bit of “nowhere” to “nowhere,” I doubt they will reduce the distracted driver load much at all let alone carry enough passengers to support it.

That’s a problem with most public transport in the US. Our cities and suburbs don’t work well with it. NYC and Chicago are the exceptions but they developed much earlier than most cities and retain the center city work-and-live in the suburbs commuter model that works with public transport. Most other cities don’t work that way anymore. Europe forces that model to continue so their train systems will work.

23

Is it any safer to cross a track on which trains travel at 30mph?

As to the 40K fatalities: We’re #1! USA! USA! USA! *&%# the Olympics.

I’m with Ebenezer Scrooge: be quick about it and decrease the surplus population.

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24

Of course it is. Very simple math. Faster means less time to react and move out of the way. Human reaction time is, at best, about 3/4 of a second or 33 feet of train movement - within your peripheral vision. At 150 mph, that is increased to 165 feet so you become a stain on the train.

No, we aren’t #1 China has that distinction at 261,000 a year, or 19 per 100K people. India rings in at #2 at 239K deaths or 16.6 per 100K people. The USA is way down the list at 40K and 12 deaths per 100K.

Not bad considering we have more cars than people. Neither China nor India can claim that.

25

4,000 or 40,000 or 400,000 deaths, the number of people killed isn’t really relevant to anything. The statistic that means anything is the one that calculates fatalities per miles driven. As Mustangman pointed out above, that number has been on a general downward trend for, well, a long time.

Another relevant point is that I don’t think you will find any meaningful difference in the statistic of deaths per million miles driven between states that have safety inspections and states that don’t.

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26

I don’t know about the old people crack and whether years of experience and observation count for anything, but at least we agree that inanimate objects do not cause behavior in people-all inanimate objects. I’d throw in more laws don’t necessarily change behavior either. Attitudes change behavior.

27

And how do you plan to get people off the roads and on a train? At gunpoint?
Look beyond our borders to countries with successful high speed train systems. Then look within our borders. Our environment is totally and entirely different from theirs. Our population densities, our population distributions, our road infrastructures, our culture, everything. There used to be trains that ran north/south between NH and Boston. I took one when I was a kid. They went out of service for lack of ridership. Look at Amtrak. They’re bankrupt. We spend tons of our tax dollars trying to keep them rolling… and with zero benefit. It is a much, much larger environmental assault to run a train to carry a few dozen passengers than to shut the train down and let them drive… or to run a bus line.

New rail systems are not to our benefit. They divert billions of our tax dollars that could and should be used for highway expansion and maintenance into a system that simply doesn’t work in our environment.

Where trains work for passenger transportation, and there are some areas where they do, I think they’re great. But most of them are long-since shut down because they simply don’t. Not enough people ride them to keep them solvent.

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28

By presenting a favorable alternative to driving in traffic among idiots who distract themselves with cell phones.

When I lived where there was a mass transit option for commuting, it was a great alternative to driving in rush hour traffic. Wouldn’t you like to have the option of riding to your vacation destination without dealing with the hassle and stress of driving? Wouldn’t you rather get on a high speed train from the airport to Disney World than have to rent a car?

Why does everything always come back to guns with you people?

I merely suggested we look at their railroad crossings to see how they manage to not kill idiots with high speed trains, not adopt their entire way of life.

You seem to be obsessed with straw men.

Unless I’m mistaken, the current high speed rail initiative in Florida is privately funded. The only thing controversial about it is that they want to run it near people’s homes.

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29

The rate went down for a long time since the mid 50s, and dipped to just over 30,000 about 3 or 4 years ago… That coincided with Canada’s (with 1/10 the population) at 3200. Miles driven since the mid 50s is about 16 times.

That rate is now on the UPSWING in both countries, in spite of cars being ever safer. Every law enforcement officer will tell you that careless driving and the use of car phones for texting is a major force behind this increase. And those areas with legal pot have shown an even more rapid RATE of increase.

30

Gee, it’s called the “Magic Express”. You take a high speed jet from Minneapolis to Orlando,
then you can take the Magic Express bus from Orlando to Disney World. Doesn’t take very long at all, or you can rent a car. A train is really not necessary with the toll roads. We are grasping at straws. We used to have passenger train service too in the 60’s. About 50 cents for a ride to the next town, or a couple bucks to Minneapolis, but just not enough demand to support it.

31

If the expressways are allowed to deteriorate and no new lanes added as traffic increases the public will find high speed rails as a convenient alternative. But then allowing the roads to become congested would also increase the gentrification of ghettos which would greatly decrease commuting miles.

The “Life of Riley” was a post war image of an ideal life in the suburbs that can’t survive.

32

Florida is adding lanes to the expressways to ease traffic and our roads are in really good shape. No freeze-thaw helps that.

It started 114 years ago with the rail lines to allow commuters in NYC to live the suburban life in Brooklyn. It accelerated with the democratization of the car. The Model T to be exact. That would be post war, WWI not II. Low priced cars changed the landscape. The toothpaste is out of the tube and it isn’t going back in. You can’t use a 100 year old model to solve today’s problems.

33

You apparently didn’t bother to read my last statement.

And you apparently don’t own one of the homes that will be affected.

Get off your soapbox. If trains worked from an economic standpoint, we’d have them. For the overwhelming majority of the country, they don’t. They simply suck money from areas that need it. And make environmentalists think they’ve done something useful.

34

I read your statement and my point still stands.

By that reasoning, today’s entrepreneurs can stop looking for untapped markets, because if there was a demand, someone would already be filling it, at least according to your reasoning.

As to your assumption about my home’s proximity to the proposed high speed rail line in Florida, you’re wrong. How do you think I am so well informed on this issue? :thinking:

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35

That timeline may be true but I think the correlation to pot use may be misleading. In case anyone has been in a cave for the last few years, the opioid crisis is far more concerning and likely to be contributing to accidents than pot use. Not many pot heads passing out with joints in their hands but heroin addicts are passing out with needles still in their arms in parking lots with their kids in the car (also ODing in aisles of Walmart and while driving). There is a meteoric rise in people abusing these drugs and driving.

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36

Thanks for the reminder. I really meant that increased drug use has contributed to the rapid rise in car fatalities. Canada is about to legalize pot nation wide. Let’s see what happens to traffic fatalities in the coming years

It was argued that drugs do not have the effect alcohol does; but instead of dulling the senses, they just make drivers more careless.

37

I’ve looked very closely at the reports each year for the past seven years. The increases by accident type are in the data. Some things I pulled out: 1) Most importantly, the death rate per miles driven has barely moved in the past few years. The increases are mainly because as we drive more miles, there are more opportunities for bad things to happen. 2) Your chances of being killed while inside a mainstream car, crossover, or light truck have not changed in recent years. 3) There are more motorcycle deaths and pedestrian and bicyclist deaths have changed a lot. 4) Drunks still account for a third of deaths “speeding” for a third, and the rest are still scattered. 5) If you have NHTSA data that shows an increase due to distracted driving please share it. I can’t find any and I have spent hours looking. Since cell phones, then blackberries, then smartphones arrived the death rate per mile has dropped dramatically. There is a negative correlation between the increase in smartphone use and driver deaths. Yes - I see it all the time too and I hate seeing it. In my family, we use Cellcontrol to block cell phone use in our vehicles used by our children

deaths%20per%20mile%20driven
deaths per mile driven.png696×424 16.1 KB
. The arrows show the introduction of the devices I mention.

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38

I think it’s a miracle that the fatality deaths aren’t double. The population of the US has doubled in my lifetime, and the amount of miles driven by everyone, whatever the reason, has multiplied by much, much more. And the population of the US is not more literate, more responsible or more sober today than it was 60 years ago. So the question is not, “Why is it so high?”, the question is “Why is it so low?”.

I live in a place with full employment, a very large transitory population with people who speak so many languages no one has an accurate count, and an infrastructure that’s cramped by mountains, oceans, bays, earthquake faults, landslides and uncoordinated land use planning. Even so, people are driving around, mostly getting there, banging into each other some and getting hurt, too, but mostly actually getting to work and back, getting the kids to school in an place that eliminated school buses years ago to save money (!), and incidentally producing a new technology that has changed the world.

All drugs - opium, heroin, morphine, alcohol, methamphetamine, all the hallucinogenics, pot - were legal at the start of the 20th century. We tried to prohibit alcohol and that was a failure, we tried to prohibit marijuana, and that failure is changing right now, and we will continue to try and control each others behavior forever. As far as I can see, we’ve done an amazing job at making travel safer, and the addition of all the distractions involved in new technology has created the bump in motor vehicle deaths. Once we get to automated motor vehicles, and we will, that death rate with drop again.

End of rant. (I won’t comment about guns - this is Car Talk).

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39

Great graph, @GorehamJ - maybe we’ve gotten vehicle - caused deaths to about as low as they can go with current technology, so that 2/3 caused by the driver (speeding and drinking) are now the main issue.

That’s behind some efforts to reduce the max alcohol level to extremely low levels, from 0.08 down to 0.04 or less. I think that’s a mistake. I bet the vast majority of drunk driving deaths are not folks in the 0.04 to 0.08 range, but those in the 0.10 - 0.20 and above range. Tightening the limit further will make lots of folks criminals, but may have very little impact on the death rate.

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40

You make a good argument, sir, one that rightly shames my anecdotal conclusion that the use of smart phones is a contributor. Well done. :+1:

41

What a bunch of BS. The discussion is about trains and any relationship they might have to motor vehicle deaths. Your circular, totally unrelated, and totally meaningless statement intended to obfuscate the question is meaningless. Nice try, though.