Showing posts with label pedestrian killings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pedestrian killings. Show all posts

Monday, October 12, 2020

Statistics confirm that American drivers continue to massacre walkers and cyclists.


Just the facts, folks. Sorry if it hurts your car to hear them.

Exactly How Far U.S. Street Safety Has Fallen Behind Europe, in Three Bombshell Charts, by Kea Wilson (Streets Blog)

We knew it was bad, but not THIS bad.

The United States has failed to reduce pedestrian and cyclist fatalities as fast as comparably affluent European nations, a new study finds — and the authors think we must employ the same simple, effective policies that they did to catch up in the fight the bloodshed.

Researchers from Virginia Tech and Rutgers University compared the last 28 years of available transportation fatality data from the United States with data from the four countries with the most closely comparable national travel surveys and levels of affluence: Denmark, Germany, Netherlands and the United Kingdom. All four peer nations had reduced per capita pedestrian fatalities by at least 61 percent over the course of the study period — and standout Denmark did so by a whopping 69 percent — but the U.S. reduced ours by just 36 percent.

In other words, our worst peer country’s Vision Zero progress was nearly twice as fast as ours in the last three decades. And of course, U.S. pedestrian fatalities actually increased dramatically between 2010 and 2018. Only the U.K. experienced even a moderate increase over the same period — and some U.K. safety experts blame the rise on American-made SUVs.

Wednesday, May 20, 2020

A book to look for this summer: "Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America."


If anyone cocooned within the bunker-bound Team Gahan inner ruling circle would like to read this book, I'll buy it for them.

It limits my potential monetary exposure to what, three or four people? I'll even buy a copy for the hall of fame automobile supremacist Jim Rice of HWC Campaign Engineering.

But no matter.

New Albany's power brokers in municipal government don't read books, do they? Least of all the monetizer at the top.

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America, by Angie Schmitt (Kirkus)

A surprising study of anti-pedestrian urban planning in America.

Most readers will be unaware that pedestrian deaths have skyrocketed since the 1970s; in 2018 alone, 6,283 pedestrians were killed trying to cross the street. Former Streetsblog editor Schmitt takes us for an uncomfortable ride into the hard realities of why pedestrians are more unsafe now than they've been in decades.

In a book that will sit comfortably on the shelf next to Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, Schmitt provides an exhaustively researched study of the intersection of automobiles and pedestrians. The author uncovers a car-obsessed America whose civic planning is designed to discriminate against walkers while accommodating motorists. Unlike, for example, many European countries, the motorist has more rights than the pedestrian in the U.S.

Even worse, as Schmitt explains, thinly veiled racism and classism are at the heart of many of the traffic laws that essentially treat pedestrians as second-class citizens. Pedestrians hurt or killed by cars are often blamed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet the problem, Schmitt shows convincingly, is often the flawed road systems themselves. And it’s not just the engineers who design these systems, but also the politicians who allow poor urban planning to go unchecked.

The narrative is a deft balance of anecdotal and informational content, emphasizing the real-life human tragedies caused by anti-pedestrian bias but also backing it up with statistical research. Most importantly, Schmitt debunks common assumptions that pedestrian deaths are either blameless random accidents or, more often, the result of laziness or inattentiveness on the part of the walker.

In reality, the culprit is a sometimes-lethal combination of badly designed streets, increasingly larger vehicles on the road, poorly estimated speed limits, and a lack of crosswalks, among other infrastructural failures.

Bravely exposes the human cost of public and political indifference toward pedestrian safety.

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

In America, automobile supremacy means we walk less, but we die more. Evidently we want it that way.


Having been to Europe numerous times, and at the risk of generalizing, the basic difference is that most European countries put the brake on automobile supremacy. Driving remains more of a privilege, less of a right, and while there surely are tracts of the continent where cars are necessary, subsidized public transit in urban areas lessens the need to drive.

It's that simple -- and my guess would be that in Europe, every now and again a driver actually is prosecuted for killing a non-driver. Recall that when Matt Brewer was killed, the driver who hit him was exonerated by police within minutes, and later the prosecutor yawningly followed suit.

June 19, 2019 photo.

And those Williams Plumbing sight line impediments are right back where they were, on the street, blocking fields of vision for all users even as ordinance enforcement personnel pluck the low-hanging fruit by ticketing street sweeping violations.

Why is the city obligated to provide commercial parking for four, five and maybe six vehicles?

Didn't rogue elements in the Street Department only recently ask Williams not to continue parking these vehicles on Spring Street?

Did someone over-turn the surprising edict?

(When parked in a line on 9th Street, they also block handicap accessibility on the sidewalk, but first things first).

Why are drivers killing so many pedestrians?

Because, like Williams Plumbing's fleet of vision blockers, drivers are coddled, everywhere and always. BOW should be embarrassed; unfortunately too few of the city's Democratic "leaders" are capable of feeling shame.

Why Are U.S. Drivers Killing So Many Pedestrians? by Joe Cortright (Strong Towns)

If anything else—a disease, terrorists, gun-wielding crazies—killed as many Americans as cars do, we’d regard it as a national emergency. Especially if the death rate had grown by 50 percent in less than a decade. But as new data from the Governor’s Highway Safety Association (via Streetsblog) show, that’s exactly what’s happened with the pedestrian death toll in the U.S. In the nine years from 2009 to 2018, pedestrian deaths increased 51 percent from 4,109 to 6,227.

There are lots of reasons given for the increase: distracted driving due to smart phone use, a decline in gas prices that has prompted even more driving, poor road design, a culture that privileges car travel and denigrates walking, and the increasing prevalence of more lethal sport utility vehicles. Undoubtedly, all of these factors contribute.

While some may regard a pedestrian death toll as somehow unavoidable, the recent experience of European countries as a group suggests that there’s nothing about modern life (Europeans have high rates of car ownership and as many smart phones as Americans) that means the pedestrian death toll must be high and rising. In fact, at the same time pedestrian deaths have been soaring in the U.S., they’ve been dropping steadily in Europe. In the latest nine year period for which European data are available, pedestrian deaths decreased from 8,342 to 5,320, a decline of 36 percent ...

Sunday, June 23, 2019

The narcissism of car-centrism, part 2: "Why U.S. pedestrian deaths are at their highest level in almost 30 years."


It's actually possible to reduce the narcissism of car-centrism: "Unlike the U.S., the E.U. has found ways to redesign vehicles and roads to reduce pedestrian deaths."

Just not in America, evidently.

Why U.S. pedestrian deaths are at their highest level in almost 30 years (PBS)

U.S. pedestrian deaths are at their highest level since 1990. Possible explanations include wider roads, sprawling cities, heavier traffic in residential areas due to navigation apps and increasing distractions from digital devices. And according to victims’ families and safety advocates, the problem is a crisis state and local governments have been slow to address. Arren Kimbel-Sannit reports.

snip

The Hubanks apartment complex is half-a-mile away from the signal crosswalks on Central and Seventh avenues. That's a long way to walk for people who need to catch a bus to school or work.

snip

National advocacy groups say deaths like Keshawn's are more common in low-income areas. It's evident in Southern California, where residents in underserved neighborhoods are waiting for safer streets.

snip

The couple wants safer roads and safer drivers. They know changing laws and minds is a challenge. But it's not impossible. The European Union has seen a 36 percent decline in pedestrian deaths between 2007 and 2016. Experts say it's because, unlike the U.S., the E.U. has found ways to redesign vehicles and roads to reduce pedestrian deaths.

Sunday, March 10, 2019

"Right now pedestrians are being killed and injured by motorists at the highest rate in decades."


Just think about all those times when the bored of works enumerated the many splendid reasons why they couldn't (read: wouldn't) help make our streets safe.

Just think about city engineer Larry Summers' passive-aggressive protests -- but traffic flow, but INDOT, but whatever else springs to an obstructionist's mind.

Just think about how different it would be if their first response wasn't "here's why we can't and won't help" but "we'll find a way to help."

Just think if the latter resolve constituted Jeff Gahan's instructions to pliant super-sized campaign donors like HWC Engineering, rather than using HWC as a shield to defend the veneer salesman's preference for our car-centric status quo.

Just think if Greg Phipps had the chutzpah to disagree with his cash-stuffed overlord and insisted on trying to make the situation better, rather than meekly accepting the status quoin the name of non-democratic Democrats.

We'll stop there. After all, "just thinking" is precisely what they're not doing.

#FireGahan2019
#FlushTheClique
#DrainTheSwamp

The Stark Traffic Safety Divide, by Sarah Holder (CityLab)

Pedestrians fatalities are rising sharply as Americans spend more time behind the wheel. And self-driving technology isn’t likely to be the fix we need.

In some ways, the crash that killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona, last year, was a typical distracted-driving incident, with a cruel high-tech twist: As Herzberg walked her bike across the road in the dark of night, the driver of the Volvo SUV hurtling toward her was streaming an episode of The Voice on her cell phone.

But the driver wasn’t the only operator that was distracted: The car was part of Uber’s fleet of self-driving test vehicles, racking up miles in computer control mode. Its many sensors should have recognized the pedestrian obstacle in its path and avoided the collision. Instead, the SUV’s operating system kept right on driving; and the human driver failed to intervene. Herzberg was fatally injured, and died in the hospital.

This week, at least one chapter of the long legal battle that ensued against Uber—which made the self-driving technology that powered the car—closed, when an Arizona prosecutor ruled that the company was not criminally liable for Herzberg’s death. The driver may still face manslaughter charges.

The Tempe case was so high-profile in part because it was historic—the first recorded case of a pedestrian killed by an autonomous vehicle, a long-dreaded industry milestone that threatened to confirm the public’s worst fears about self-driving technology.

But the coverage of the incident may have obscured a larger tragedy: That every day in the U.S., pedestrians like Herzberg are being killed by regular drivers at a staggering rate. And though autonomous vehicles promise to eventually replace humans at the wheel—and eventually, promoters of this technology insist, make the streets safer—right now pedestrians are being killed and injured by motorists at the highest rate in decades.

Saturday, August 25, 2018

Here, there and everywhere, "In crashes that kill pedestrians, the majority of drivers don't face charges."


Drivers surely comprise the most privileged class of Americans in history. Who else is able to wreak this much havoc with so little fear of punishment? Apart from the Pentagon, I can't think of any.

In crashes that kill pedestrians, the majority of drivers don't face charges. Between 2010 and 2014, there were 3,069 crashes with pedestrians in the Twin Cities and its suburbs. 95 were killed. 28 drivers were charged. But many of the deaths weren't even judged worth a traffic ticket.

I googled "how often are drivers prosecuted for killing pedestrians?" The top result says it all.

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Most drivers in crashes that kill pedestrians don't face charges ...

www.startribune.com/in-crashes-that-kill-pedestrians-the...drivers...t.../380345481/


May 22, 2016 - The majority of drivers who killed pedestrians between 2010 and 2014 were not ... Those who were charged often faced misdemeanors — from ...

Carol Wiggins crossed Territorial Road every day at the crosswalk on her way home from work in Watertown. But the driver of the car that hit her one evening said he didn’t see her until it was too late.

Wiggins never recovered from the traumatic brain injury from the 2011 crash, dying weeks later in a Minneapolis hospital. The driver never faced any charges — not even a traffic citation.

“It doesn’t help with trying to get any kind of closure,” her daughter, Monica Fortwengler, said. “You always have that little bit of, ‘Why was my mom’s life not deemed worthy of even a flippin’ traffic ticket?’ ”

The decision not to cite the driver who struck Wiggins isn’t unusual. The majority of drivers who killed pedestrians between 2010 and 2014 were not charged, according to Star Tribune analysis of metro area crash data. Those who were charged often faced misdemeanors — from speeding to careless driving — with minimal penalties, unless the driver knowingly fled or was intoxicated at the time of the crash.
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There are plenty more where that came from.

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Drivers in pedestrian fatalities rarely charged, prosecutors say | The ...

https://www.macon.com/news/local/article31898907.html
Aug 22, 2015 - Drivers who hit and kill pedestrians are rarely charged in those incidents, according to prosecutors and law enforcement officials.When drivers ...

Drivers who hit pedestrians often get little or no jail time - Orlando ...

www.orlandosentinel.com/.../pedestrian.../os-pedestrian-enforcement-20130709-story....


Jul 9, 2013 - Drivers who strike pedestrians usually receive little or no jail time, found a ... "When you killed our Bobby, you took an innocent," sister Penny Stout, 49, ... The Sentinel identified 54 drivers charged with criminaldriving offenses ...

Few consequences exist for drivers who kill pedestrians - SFGate

https://www.sfgate.com/.../Few-consequences-exist-for-drivers-who-kill-4473786.php


Apr 29, 2013 - When drivers did face criminal charges, less than 60 percent had their driving ... Few consequences exist for drivers who kill pedestrians .... Forty percent of those convicted served no more than a day in jail; 13 drivers were ...

Sober drivers rarely prosecuted in fatal pedestrian crashes in Oregon ...

https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/.../sober_drivers_rarely_prosecute.htm...


Nov 15, 2011 - But details are often sketchy because most pedestriandeaths ... Tito Jose Feliciano, the driver who killed Lindsay Leonard and Jessica Finlay.

Drivers who kill people on bikes often don't get prosecuted – Greater ...

https://ggwash.org/view/.../drivers-who-kill-people-on-bikes-often-dont-get-prosecute...


Mar 17, 2015 - Authorities rarely prosecute the drivers, and when they do, punishments aren't very harsh. During ... Drivers who kill people on bikesoften don't get prosecuted .... I can say that when cyclists are behaving aspedestrians (on ...

The Outrageous, Unjust Rule That Lets New York Drivers Who Hit ...

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/10/the...drivers...pedestrians.../380980/


Oct 1, 2014 - Local officials have tried to turn the terrible incident into social progress by ... from properly investigating, charging, and prosecuting drivers who kill. ... On the flip side, drivers who merely hit a pedestrian or cyclist—even hopping ... of a car sometimes, the list of problems with the "rule of two" is a long one.

Driver charged with slamming car into pedestrian, killing him

https://nypost.com/.../driver-charged-with-slamming-car-into-pedestrian-killing-him/


Jul 1, 2018 - An unlicensed driver was arrested on Sunday after he hit andkilled a ... p.m. when he lost control and drove onto the sidewalk, authorities said.

Friday, May 11, 2018

Pedestrian murders are "increasingly likely to involve SUVs and high-horsepower vehicles, which tend to be driven faster and above the speed limit."

Insurance Institute for Highway Safety

We've been lucky so far, but outside those daily morning and afternoon drive times filled with pass-through commuters, when congestion slows speeds downtown, it's obvious that "friction" on reverted two-way streets hasn't been sufficient to appreciably slow traffic.

Suggesting otherwise? That's just delusional.

Moreover, the "enhanced" pedestrian crossings with tiny credit-card-sized yellow lights? They're the single biggest bait 'n' switch joke Gahan, Rosenbarger, Summers and company has ever foisted on us -- and that's saying something.

Just remember: HWC Engineering's contract to achieve this lack of success was alchemized into a $5,000 campaign contribution to Jeff Gahan from the firm's president.

But of course none of them ever actually walk, do they?

How the hell would they know?

Nearly 6,000 pedestrians were killed in 2016, reaching the highest level of fatal crashes since 1990, the Washington Post reports. After hitting a low in 2009, pedestrian deaths have jumped up 46 percent, outpacing the overall increase in traffic fatalities, which are up just 11 percent.

The chart above, from the study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit funded by auto insurers, pinpoints where these fatal crashes increased the most—in urban-suburban areas, on arterial roads, as well as at night and away from intersections. Another key factor not shown: vehicle type. The report says that crashes were increasingly likely to involve SUVs and high-horsepower vehicles, which tend to be driven faster and above the speed limit. CityLab context: Pedestrian deaths climb, while safety laws lag.

Sunday, April 22, 2018

If the pickup truck killed the boy, then charge it. Charge SOMETHING or SOMEONE.


Three times, the newspaper of record stated that a pickup truck struck a boy. Italics have been added.

Texas Boy Killed by Truck as His School Held a Walkout on Guns, by Christina Caron (New York Times)

Photo credit: An 11-year-old boy died after being struck by a pickup truck as he tried to cross a busy highway in El Paso on Friday, the same day that his school and others nationwide held walkouts to protest gun violence.

An 11-year-old boy in El Paso died on Friday after getting hit by a pickup truck while his school held a walkout to protest gun violence.

“Obviously everybody’s in a state of shock,” Xavier De La Torre, the superintendent of the Ysleta Independent School District, said at a news conference on Friday.

The boy, Jonathan Benko, and a group of about 12 to 15 other students from Parkland Middle School in El Paso decided not to participate in the walkout, and instead left the campus to visit a park on the other side of Loop 375, a busy highway that surrounds parts of the city, officials said.

Jonathan, a sixth grader and the last one to try to cross, was struck by a Ford F-150 pickup truck, Officer Darrel Petry, a spokesman for the El Paso Police Department, said on Saturday. He was transported to the University Medical Center of El Paso, where he died.

All that, and only then did the driver belatedly enter the story.

None of the other children were injured, Officer Petry said. The driver of the truck, who stayed on the scene, was uninjured. He was not charged, the police said.

Granted, it's important to know whether this was one of those newfangled driverless pickup trucks -- and it wasn't -- but moreover, given that the pickup truck hit the boy, why not charge the pickup truck, or not ... seeing as we seldom charge the driver?

Or do we always lede by blaming the vehicle so there's a reason not to think about the driver's role? Except, of course, the authorities would have gone after the driver full bore had he been drunk, as opposed to sober.

It's all very confusing.

Couldn't we just charge drivers who kill people?

Isn't that important?

Friday, March 30, 2018

Unfortunately, yes: "Driverless cars will be allowed to kill us, because capitalism is a death cult."

It's probably bad etiquette to reprint the whole post, and I do this very seldom, but just this once.

Speed kills, and the author leads off with an important point: while mainstream news coverage emphasized that the "driverless" Uber was traveling more slowly than the posted speed limit, it was moving plenty fast enough -- around 40 mph -- to kill a pedestrian 60% of the time.

Keep this number in mind.

Later this spring when the weather is warmer, I'll be taking the radar gun to NA's "improved" street grid, where two-way friction is being credited for slower speeds. My prediction: we'll see that average speeds still fall between 35 and 40 mph ... or, that very same hazardous 60-percentile.

Then we'll have further proof (as if it were needed) that it isn't Al Knable spinning the deceptive yarns.

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Driverless Cars Will Be Allowed to Kill Us, Because Capitalism Is A Death Cult (Rebel Metropolis)

As you likely already know, last week a ‘driverless’ Uber test vehicle made by Volvo struck and killed 49 year old Elaine Herzberg while she was walking her bike across a road in Tempe, Arizona.

The vehicle was traveling at a rate of speed that guarantees a 60+% fatality rate when striking pedestrians. The Uber’s autonomous vehicle (AV) didn’t swerve, it didn’t brake. The so-called “safety” driver on board wasn’t even watching the road.

The myth that driverless cars will solve the bad driving habits of humans also died last week. What we’ve learned since then has confirmed some of our worst fears about AV’s.

Some of the blame rests solely on Uber. The anti-union, anti-worker company wasn’t using trained test drivers who should be working in pairs, they were using a solo ‘safety’ driver with a proven record of driving unsafely. Some have also speculated the Volvo’s built-in sensor-based autonomous braking system might have spared the woman’s life…had Uber not disabled it.

More alarming is the frequency that ‘safety’ drivers have had to override when an AV glitches, gets confused, and almost has a collision while moving at speed: on average about every 15 minutes.

But maybe most terrifying is that driverless cars will almost never swerve to avoid an impact, instead relying on braking alone.



@EricPaulDennis: "A super-weird aspect of this crash site is that it occurred at a place where a beautiful brick-paved diagonal walking path was provided across the median, along with a sign instructing people not to use it. This is beyond pedestrian-hostile design; it's damn-near entrapment."

Now I don’t know about you, but back in my driving days I almost never avoided a collision solely by braking, especially with the number of nocturnal whitetail deer over-populating the Mid West.

Armed with expensive sensory arrays alleged to see better than humans can, the Uber AV failed to see a woman crossing the street with a bike directly in front of it. A professional programmer I know familiar with Uber’s design said the current radar & lidar systems cannot see anything better at night than the human eye, and still rely on reflectivity of an object similar to our visual spectrum.

Even with an infrared FLIR system like what police and military use at night, a computer must process all its visual data in real time while moving at speed, calculate all the variables, then react accordingly – a feat now apparently nowhere close to being logistical reality.

And it’s not as though there was any demand from consumers for such a costly, dangerous street experiment in the first place.

So the question must be asked, why is the auto industry doing this?

Simple: pure lust for capital.

From the NYTimes: “Tech companies like Uber, Waymo and Lyft, as well as automakers like General Motors and Toyota, have spent billions developing self-driving cars in the belief that the market for them could one day be worth trillions of dollars.”

As many know who read this blog, the car industry has been bleeding young customers for over a decade. The kids want bikes, they want transit, they want social connection. They do not want to sit in congested freeways like their boomer parents before them.

So the auto industry has been desperately grasping at straws to reinvent the wheel to appeal to a market that simply doesn’t exist, and likely never will.



@RebelMetropolis: "This is the most horrifying vision of dystopian driverless cars I've read to date."

"Driverless cars are going to be one of the main pillars of the economy, it's very important that we do not allow one tragic accident to sway public opinion."

But capitalism has never been about responding to actual market demand. It has always been about extracting wealth from labor, creating monopolies, and lying to consumers about the things they supposedly cannot live without.

The irony, of course, is that the initial roll-out of the automobile a century ago was horrifically deadly. It’s been noted that so little attention is given to regular cases of homicide-by-automobile. To be sure, prior to Elaine Herzberg’s tragic death, 10 other pedestrians were killed by cars on the streets of Phoenix in just one week.

It’s good that we’re shocked by this now, we need to be. Because the scumbag industry lobbyists and the techie bros trying to convince us this new Titanic is unsinkable, they’re going to keep forcing driverless cars down our throats for the sake of profit.

Alex Roy wrote a lengthy class-concious indictment of Uber and driverless cars for TheDrive.com where he asked the most important question of all, “How many more people do self-driving cars have to kill before we have common sense regulation? A society that tolerates 40,000 deaths a year due to human driving will probably put up with a lot more collateral damage, as long as the dead are car-less, or better yet homeless. In this country, that’s practically the same thing.”

The capitalists are dumping billions into technology to do something totally unnecessary, that most can do with a vehicle that uses tech 200 years old. We need to stop these arrogant technocrats who’ve made clear their willingness to put profit over people.

See you in the streets.

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

In the wake of Sunday's pedestrian murder by autonomous Uber in Arizona, councilman McLaughlin renews his call for proper speedway markings.

They work where I work, he added.

Whether Gahan or street grid, if we'd all just stay inside the boundary stripes, it would be so much easier for the pillars of our community to think clearly.

Fatal Uber Crash Raises Red Flags About Self-Driving Safety, by Laura Bliss (CityLab)

After a woman in Tempe was killed by a self-driving Uber, local law enforcement was quick to absolve the company of blame. Transportation experts aren’t so sure.

Every day, as he goes to and from work, Arizona State University urban planning professor David King rides his bike* past the intersection where Elaine Herzberg was killed on Sunday night. The seven-lane road (counting turn lanes) in Tempe, Arizona is wide open, with no bushes or parked cars for a person to jump out from behind. In the immediate vicinity are a large park, an office building, and a nightclub that’s closed on Sundays—few potential distractions for a driver negotiating the area.

Herzberg, a 49-year-old woman who was homeless, was pushing a bicycle laden with her belongings along this road when she was struck by a self-driving Uber vehicle around 10 p.m. Sunday. She later died at a hospital, gaining the grisly distinction of being the first known pedestrian to be killed by a self-driving car ...