Statistics help tell story and a story is often touted by technologist and engineers and police officers and even the federal government told a story. Statistics: 94% of traffic accidents in the United States are caused by human error. Numbers feel right. It also appeals to a very American idea: that individuals are responsible for their own destiny. Instead of placing the burden of road safety on systems — how roads are built, how cars are designed, how streets are managed — it places it on drivers, pedestrians or cyclists.
Statistics based on misunderstanding about a Report 2015 from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the United States Department of Transportation, the agency in charge of road safety in the United States. The report studied crashes between 2005 and 2007 and determined that drivers were the “important reason” behind the majority of crashes. But the driver’s action is often the last in a long sequence of events. In other words, the driver’s careless movement is what ultimately goes wrong — a process that begins, perhaps, a highway survey, or road design is placed on an engineer’s desk, or a policy crafted by lobbyists decades ago that makes it impossible for anyone to cross town without a car.
Earlier this month, after pleas from researchers, advocates and another Biden administration official, US DOT omitted that 94% statistic from its website. And on Thursday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg began telling a very different story about US road deaths. “Cannot lead to human death,” he told a news conference in Washington, DC. His goal, he said, is to have no road deaths.
Buttigieg was there to introduce what the DOT calls “National Road Safety Strategy. “It’s a set of actions and recommendations that can affect everything from speed limits and street design to essential technology in cars. If all goes to plan (and that’s a big “if”), the strategy could eliminate assumptions in the country’s approach to traffic safety — and lead to fewer deaths on roads. the way of the United States.
“It’s a big paradigm shift, to realize people will make mistakes and we’re not going to scold and enforce,” said Ken McLeod, policy director for the League of American Bicyclists, an advocacy group. your way to perfect behavior.”
Content
This content can also be viewed on the website derived are from.
Deaths on US roads have been declining since the 1970s, thanks to advances in vehicle technology and road design. But the trend has reversed during the pandemic. Americans drive fewer miles in 2020, but deaths per mile increased 23% and 38,680 deaths overall, the most since 2007. In the first half of 2021, DOT estimate the death toll rose again to 20,160, from 17,020 in the first half of 2020. Black, Indian, and rural Americans died disproportionately. So do pedestrians and cyclists. Compared to the rest of the world, the picture is even more bleak: After accounting for population size, more people die on America’s roads than any comparable high-income country.
Now, the US DOT is proposing to get rid of this ugly exceptionalism by adopting a “safe system” approach to roads: a Born in Sweden principle that roads should be designed and managed to allow people to cross the street without killing or killing anyone. “We are catching up with the rest of the world,” said David Harkey, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and a traffic safety researcher.
Proposed strategy to spend billions of words recently passed infrastructure bill about road safety programs, including those dedicated to reducing cyclist and pedestrian deaths as well as programs that research how to make trucks safer. It shows NHTSA requires automakers to add systems to all of their vehicles to automatically brake before a collision with a pedestrian. System, already on some cars, may require automakers to add more cameras, radar systems, or other sensors to their vehicles. The strategy also considers requiring automakers to add technology to prevent drunk drivers. Nearly a third of crashes involve a drunk person. Updating Committed Strategy important road design handbook generally, control how local governments arrange their streets, though it doesn’t stop at tearing up the guidebook and writing a new safety-focused document, which advocates searched.
