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How To Build Roads To Control How Fast You Drive
An anonymous reader writes "They're the holy grail of transportation engineering: streets and highways specifically designed to encourage automobilists to drive less quickly, reducing the rates of passenger fatalities and generally encouraging a safer urban environment. And now new research shows that, if built right, they just might work. A new study out of the University of Connecticut suggests that minor reductions in vehicle speed are possible through changes in the street environment. Through the use of roadside parking, tighter building setbacks, and more commercial land uses, road designers can make drivers subconsciously drive more slowly." All of that is gonna work a lot better than my strategy of placing car-sized holes covered with twigs and branches randomly every half mile or so down the interstates.
The Germans and Dutch have been removing road signs and lights from roads for a few years now in experiments based on the theory that making roads more "dangerous" forces drivers to be more careful.
e.g. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html
From http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,2143663,00.html, "When you don't exactly know who has right of way, you tend to seek eye contact with other road users,'' he said. ''You automatically reduce your speed, you have contact with other people and you take greater care."
http://www.car-accidents.com/pages/stats.html
There were nearly 6,420,000 auto accidents in the United States in 2005. The financial cost of these crashes is more than 230 Billion dollars. 2.9 million people were injured and 42,636 people killed. About 115 people die every day in vehicle crashes in the United States -- one death every 13 minutes.
http://www.theclaimsconnection.co.uk/road-accident-claims1.html
The number of people killed in road accidents was down from 2,946 in 2007 to 2,538. In accidents reported to the police the number of people either killed or seriously injured stood at 28,572, a fall of 7%.
So roughly 42,000 deaths versus 2,500 deaths. 307m people in the US version 61m in the UK. Therefore the death rate per 1m people is 137 in the US versus 41 in the UK.
So, no, there aren't more here (where I assume you mean the UK).
It's gone further than that. I'm taking a motorcycle safety course with my wife. I have ridden for over 30 years, she is starting this year. They now teach you to assume that every car driver is intentionally going to kill you. we were told to assume that every car near you is being operated by a complete idiot that wants you dead.
And I agree with him, it's how I made it 30 years without an accident.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Ahem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
I think what you meant to ask for was "how many deaths per unit of vehicle distance travelled" since this controls not for how many drivers there are but for how much driving is actually going on. If you compare these numbers, you see that the US sees about 9 deaths per billion kilometers, and the UK sees 6.3 deaths. It's slightly more genuine and not nearly as 'shocking' (1.4x more vs 3.3x more fatalities) than the blanket deaths per person metric mentioned earlier. The UK sees fewer deaths overall in just about every measurable metric, however speculating on the actual causation is an exercise in futility left to the reader.
If you're not passing, you shouldn't be in the left lane, period. I don't care if you're doing 50 or 80 MPH, the left lane is for passing! It's people like you that fuck up good traffic flow.