Reply to Did anyone here about the 11 people injured, 2 killed eating outside of the Parthenon today?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Older driver does not mean age caused this awful accident.  And even if it somehow contributed, so many accidents are caused by young or professional drivers or inattentive drivers or fatigued drivers or drivers going out in bad weather.  By your reasoning, no one should have a driver’s license.

“from 2014-2015. Drivers ages 16-17 continue to have the highest rates of crash involvement, injuries to themselves and others and deaths of others in crashes in which they are involved. Drivers age 80 and older have the highest rates of driver deaths. Drivers ages 60-69 were the safest drivers by most measures examined.”  https://aaafoundation.org/rates-motor-vehicle-crashes-injuries-deaths-relation-driver-age-united-states-2014-2015/[/quote]

Which is why concluding that we could prevent these accidents by taking away drivers licenses of drivers over a certain age is incorrect. Not only could they choose to drive anyway (many people choose to drive without a license or on expired or suspended licenses), but it doesn't stop this from happening with a younger driver. Do you really think you can identify a magical age after which drivers are no longer competent? It doesn't exist. Some people are never competent, some people stay excellent drivers into their 90s.

What would help:

- Increasing availability of alternative forms of transportation to lower the number of drivers on the road
- Require vehicles to pass a "pedestrian safety" standard that would minimize risk to pedestrians when tragedies like this do occur (SUVs are very dangerous to pedestrians because of the way they suck bodies down and under)
- Design roads near pedestrian areas so that drivers are forced to slow down (one way roads, narrow streets, high curbs) and so there are more barriers between cars and bodies on sidewalks (curbs, trees, and other obstacles)

Steps like this will make people safer from ANY kind of user or technical error from drivers, no matter the cause. Imagine if we could protect people from young and inexperienced drivers, drivers with poor eyesight, drivers using expired licenses, drivers who don't understand traffic rules, drunk and impaired drivers... all at once. Well we can! We just have to scale the city to pedestrians instead of cars.[/quote]

Agree with this sentiment. Decades of bad societal choices have led us to a world where seniors feel they must drive. But honestly, we must do better is so many regards, from car design, to bollards, to the fundamental issue that the average SUV is now a 4,000 lbs death machine than can run over most seniors and children. I think cars have a place, especially on actual highways where pedestrians aren't allowed, but we need to rethink them everywhere else.

I mean Mary Cheh got scooters speed limited in DC, why can we do that to cars when then leave the road?[/quote]

Highways are actually the safest roads despite the higher rates of speed, because there are no pedestrians or cyclists. But we have applied the principles of highways (especially the focus on efficiency for drivers) to streets that are shared by all kinds of users.

And SUVs as a class of car are such a race to the bottom. People buy SUVs because driving scares them (as it should) so they buy larger and larger vehicles to feel safe. And in so doing, everyone outside a vehicle gets less and less safe. Look, the safest vehicle in the world is a tank. If you could just drive a tank around, you'd never have to worry about being injured in a car accident. And you'd also totally destroy everyone you came into contact with. Is that the end goal here?

Seriously, if this guy had been driving a Nissan Sentra, there probably wouldn't have been any fatalities at all. Injuries, yes, but two people DIED. Is that really worth the comfort and perceived safety of driving an SUV?[/quote]

It was a 2008 Subaru Forester. That’s a Compact SUV. Not a super large vehicle. Not tiny but not huge. I wouldn’t want to be run over by a Sentra either. Even a SmartCar can kill you. And I’m not a fan of large SUVs but this wasn’t a Tahoe. It just looked large on a sidewalk.[/quote]

Well a Forester weighs 500 more pounds than a Sentra, but that’s not even the big issue. It’s profile and ground clearance. A Forester is taller with a higher ground clearance, like most SUVs. This means that if it hits a person, the person is likely to be pushed to the ground by the taller vehicle, and then rolled over. That doesn’t happen with a sedan unless the person hit is a child. Of an adult gets hit by a sedan, they will be thrown up, often up and over. Still awful, but it turns out humans do better if they are tossed up into the air than if they are rolled over. Fewer deaths, fewer catastrophic injuries.

So yes, even a “small SUV” like a Forester is more deadly than a sedan. And the Forester now is bigger than it used to be. So even deadlier.

SUVs cause more deaths, period. Sorry if this is an inconvenient fact to you.[/quote]

I don’t disagree about SUVs. But these people were sitting. You seem to be discussing the physics of people who are standing. [/quote]

Yup, any car that drives into a group of sitting people is going to kill them whether it is a SUV like a Honda CRV (similar size and class as the Suburu) or a Toyota Corolla.[/quote]

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