"Society has accepted death as a cost of getting from A to B": Parents of young cyclist killed in collision call for change

chrisonatrike wrote:

several posters wrote wrote:

No mention of cycling in the quote

And no mention of helmets before your post either.

I'm a bit confused about what point you're making (unless you've just seen eburtthebike and are automatically assuming helmet row?).  I understood eburtthebike's point to relate to much of the danger when getting about without a motor vehicle to be due to the presence of motor vehicles - and that as the article says we might not accept the level of deaths in other sectors.

Statistically use of any transport mode in the UK is very safe (compared to rest of world).  Unfortunately this is partly due to "driving non-motorised / lower-energy modes off the roads".  FWIW according to analysis here in terms of numbers unsuprisingly cars are doing most of the killing and most of those dying are pedestrians - makes sense since pedestrians are the most numerous vulnerable road users.

I'm not really making a point. I just don't know whether cycling is so dangerous we should be demanding instant reform or so safe we don't need to wear helmets.

What level of safety is considered 'acceptable'?

~20 deaths per billion miles traveled (for cyclists) seems pretty low to me. In commercial air travel, 1 catastrophic failure (which could result in hundreds of deaths) per billion flying hours is considered the 'acceptable' level as set by EASA and FAA through CS 25.1309 and 14 CFR 25.1309.

So while I haven't done a conversion from time to distance (not sure how I would), it seems that numbers are comparable.

I'm not surprised that someone whose daughter has just died would be far less tolerant of death than the average person - I would be too, I just don't know where we should set the bar. Vision Zero is a fairy tale and it's treated as such.

ShutTheFrontDawes wrote:

...Vision Zero is a fairy tale and it's treated as such.

It should be treated as a target or aspiration. Whilst I agree that zero deaths may be unachievable, we can at least improve the current situation and it's as much a mindset to deal with road danger in a far more serious manner - hopefully taking in safety practices from other industries.

hawkinspeter wrote:

ShutTheFrontDawes wrote:

...Vision Zero is a fairy tale and it's treated as such.

It should be treated as a target or aspiration. Whilst I agree that zero deaths may be unachievable, we can at least improve the current situation and it's as much a mindset to deal with road danger in a far more serious manner - hopefully taking in safety practices from other industries.

In terms of deaths per distance, the UK has around 4 deaths per billion vehicle kilometres. It's pretty low compared to many other countries, including neighbours and other first world countries like France.

The picture seems far better than many seem to imply.

ShutTheFrontDawes wrote:

In terms of deaths per distance, the UK has around 4 deaths per billion vehicle kilometres. It's pretty low compared to many other countries, including neighbours and other first world countries like France. The picture seems far better than many seem to imply.

None of that is a good reason to not want to do better though.

Also, often forgotten are the deaths caused by air pollution from vehicles which is a big problem in high population areas (e.g. illegal levels in Bristol).

hawkinspeter wrote:

ShutTheFrontDawes wrote:

In terms of deaths per distance, the UK has around 4 deaths per billion vehicle kilometres. It's pretty low compared to many other countries, including neighbours and other first world countries like France. The picture seems far better than many seem to imply.

None of that is a good reason to not want to do better though.

Also, often forgotten are the deaths caused by air pollution from vehicles which is a big problem in high population areas (e.g. illegal levels in Bristol).

But it is a good reason to avoid hyperbolic and false (albeit emotive) statements like "if the death and injury toll from driving was from any other cause, it would be banned immediately until it had been made safe."

Something is done about road safety. We have (some) police enforcement. We have (reasonably good and widespread) road signage. We have (mostly approriate) speed limits throughout the country. We have (a degree of) driver competence testing. We have (a degree of) testing for vehicle roadworthiness.

To imply that nothing is done about road safety, or even that road safety is really low, is misleading. Often deliberately so.

ShutTheFrontDawes wrote:

But it is a good reason to avoid hyperbolic and false (albeit emotive) statements like "if the death and injury toll from driving was from any other cause, it would be banned immediately until it had been made safe." Something is done about road safety. We have (some) police enforcement. We have (reasonably good and widespread) road signage. We have (mostly approriate) speed limits throughout the country. We have (a degree of) driver competence testing. We have (a degree of) testing for vehicle roadworthiness. To imply that nothing is done about road safety, or even that road safety is really low, is misleading. Often deliberately so.

However, there is a clear difference between how traffic deaths are treated and reported and other causes of death.

The motor industry has previously colluded to change how collisions are reported and pushed for the use of language such as "accident" to reduce the agency of the driver. Luckily, we didn't go all-in on the victim blaming laws on "jay-walking" that they managed to get introduced in the U.S. and other countries.

ShutTheFrontDawes wrote:

To imply that nothing is done about road safety, or even that road safety is really low, is misleading. Often deliberately so.

Indeed.  And to imply that "nothing more can be done" would also be a bit misleading - there is likely some "low hanging fruit" in terms of just enforcing the existing laws a bit more vigourously (with side benefits of picking up unrelated criminality / detecting drivers who are not physically fit to drive).

Again looking more broadly (e.g. in terms of "population health") I think the idea that because we are indeed (IIRC) one of the safest places overall (see e.g. WHO report)* for "road safety" we can put this issue to bed now can also be questioned.  I would agree than by doing "the same, but more so" we may not get much further.  Unless we can get rid of the remaining cyclists and discourage more people from walking anywhere (or standing on the footway).

* Apparently behind Swizerland, Sweden, and Norway in terms of medium to large populations - 2018 report.  Some very small places or with very few / no motor vehicles, few roads do better.

Just to drive into one particular part of that "just enforcing the existing laws a bit more vigourously". Do you know how much that would cost and what the benefit would be? Let's say for example that we increased the funding for road policing by a factor of ten. How much would that cost and how many deaths would be prevented?

Would it be an effective use of funds, compared to, for example mental health spending (to pick an example from thin air).

I don't know. Do you?

"Effective" for what?  If we're talking about mental health or policing then of course more than just "death and injury" start to enter in.  Expectations about quality of life, feeling of security etc.

Anyway, since we both have no idea (and don't know what we don't know) it's good that neither of us are making a point.

Any change has costs and benefits.  Continuing to do the same thing is also a choice and should be evaluated also.  As a heutistic - pending detailed evaluation - it seems sensible to me to look at changes which might have benefits beyond just the bottom line of "KSIs reduced per time per pound spent".  Otherwise just arresting smokers / forcing the sedentary to run laps might win on numbers.  (That kind of intervention might lead to some feeling that the country had become less of a pleasant place to live in also).

For example on the policing side I mentioned - because the police themselves do - that when engaging in road policing (say a close pass operation) they commonly find a collection of other offenses.

Is getting them to do more this kind of thing more cost-effective than no change?  In terms of "KSIs" maybe not, in terms of preventing crime this might look good.  Or if it's the Met police - it might just lead to more accusations of police targetting women or minorities...

Indeed! It's certainly not a simple as 'anything this dangerous would be banned if it were anything else'.

It may well be that AI is the answer to a lot of the cost issues though. It can sift through far more data than a human ever can. If you put all the banned drivers and drivers with only provisionbal license into it's memory and then ran all the existing CCTV through it it could presumably identify many more offenders (of that and other offenses) than a traffic cop trawling the streets. 

The question is more about would there be a political will to do that or would it just be "a tax on drivers" or "killing the economy".  

The truth is that more can be done very easily. Take for example the idea, often floated on here, that drivers are required to do an online course every so many years. If you charged them for it then it might well be self funding and probably a drop in the ocean when compared to the cost of running a car. 

There's absolutely no practical reason why encouraging (make it easy for) road users to submit footage and no reason why that wouldn't be self funding again. I've had about 10 drivers doing courses based on my footage in the last 6 months. At nearly £100 a pop that's got to be more income than resources used. If it's not change it.

AI being the answer to such issues is like 'nuclear fusion' being the answer to global mass consumption. A great idea in theory.

With the advent of ChatGPT there have been some interesting recent advances (to use the term fairly loosely) in AI. Like fusion, the solution remains ineffective.

ShutTheFrontDawes wrote:

AI being the answer to such issues is like 'nuclear fusion' being the answer to global mass consumption. A great idea in theory. With the advent of ChatGPT there have been some interesting recent advances (to use the term fairly loosely) in AI. Like fusion, the solution remains ineffective.

I agree. ChatGPT is very good at certain tasks, but as it's been trained on lots of stuff that humans have written, it shares a lot of our prejudices and currently it suffers from "hallucinations" where it makes stuff up. It can certainly be used as an assistive tool though to speed up tasks that people currently do.

The biggest problem with trying to use AI for any kind of law enforcement is that it'll likely be quite racist, so will need checks in place to prevent it being abusive.

I think this is the point. AI, unlike fusion, is being used by the police already. The issue is how far and how we check it.
https://pwc.blogs.com/publicsectormatters/2019/10/making-the-most-of-ai-...

hawkinspeter wrote:

I agree. ChatGPT is very good at certain tasks, ...

Schumacher family planning legal action over AI ‘interview’ with F1 great

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/apr/20/schumacher-family-planning...

The Grauniad wrote:

Michael Schumacher’s family are planning legal action against a German weekly magazine over an “interview” with the seven times Formula One champion that was generated by artificial intelligence.

brooksby wrote:

Schumacher family planning legal action over AI ‘interview’ with F1 great

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/apr/20/schumacher-family-planning...

The Grauniad wrote:

Michael Schumacher’s family are planning legal action against a German weekly magazine over an “interview” with the seven times Formula One champion that was generated by artificial intelligence.

I think that's more a problem with bad journalism. The journalists could easily have just made up the interview themselves and published it with only a brief mention at the bottom that it was fabricated, but they just happened to use AI to make up the interview.

ShutTheFrontDawes wrote:

 In terms of deaths per distance, the UK has around 4 deaths per billion vehicle kilometres. It's pretty low compared to many other countries, including neighbours and other first world countries like France. The picture seems far better than many seem to imply.

this is true, and we are only at a quarter of the road deaths per capita of the USA  (1/20th the deaths, 1/5 the population). But I'm not sure that other countries are worse makes those lives any more expendible.

ShutTheFrontDawes wrote:

Something is done about road safety. We have (some) police enforcement. We have (reasonably good and widespread) road signage. We have (mostly approriate) speed limits throughout the country. We have (a degree of) driver competence testing. We have (a degree of) testing for vehicle roadworthiness.

I think the driver training and testing standards in this country are higher than many places and this is mainly what we lean on for road safety, because the level of police enforcement is frankly laughable.

All the measures you describe are what result in 1800 deaths a year, to reduce that figure we need further measures, but that level of deaths is tolerated, there is no discussion on what further measures we need to drive that number down.

Vision zero is common in most workplaces, if there were 1800 deaths a year in industrial accidents in factories or on farms severe sanctions would be imposed by the HSE. But being able to drive cars around at any speed is almost a sacrosanct right.

(Construction 30, agriculture 22, manufacturing 22 deaths/year) 

New cars are allowed to be sold with top speeds far in excess of the national speed limit, the technology exists to speed limit vehicles but there is no appetite to even discuss mandating this. Drivers will allegedly need to have the option to go faster to "get out of trouble" but this evasive action requirement is not present for vulnerable road users on e-scooters.

wycombewheeler wrote:

New cars are allowed to be sold with top speeds far in excess of the national speed limit, the technology exists to speed limit vehicles but there is no appetite to even discuss mandating this. Drivers will allegedly need to have the option to go faster to "get out of trouble" but this evasive action requirement is not present for vulnerable road users on e-scooters.

It seems back-to-front to have speed restrictions on e-bikes and e-scooters that are relatively lightweight and yet no speed restricions on the 2 tonne cars etc.

as we all know on here, there are lots of things we could do to make cars a lot safer for people outside the car - halving the number of cars/ mîles would be a start, as would a black box in every car that prevents ANY abuse - but we don't do the black boxes because we have somehow decided that it is more important that drivers are allowed to have their fun and to take reckless chances with our lives and property. 

David9694 wrote:

as we all know on here, there are lots of things we could do to make cars a lot safer for people outside the car - halving the number of cars/ mîles would be a start, as would a black box in every car that prevents ANY abuse - but we don't do the black boxes because we have somehow decided that it is more important that drivers are allowed to have their fun and to take reckless chances with our lives and property. 

"We" have decided nothing about the conditions that have come about allowing motorised transport to go about murdering & maiming at high levels, world-wide.

For a start, there is no homogenised single "we" all having an aligned ability to adopt the same belief and associated actions at any particular moment. There are thousands of different and highly unaligned attitudes and behaviours about how cars et al can or should be driven. Many of these attitudes are now hard-wired into millions of drivers. (And other, opposing, attitudes hard-wired into cyclists).

Which highlights the second illustration of the fact that "we" have not decided anything: humans are controlled by ideas, not the other way about. We are infected ("possesed" may be a better term) by notions and attitudes that are installed by powerful outside agencies within the various cultural soups wherein we swim. Human agents may propagate these attitudes (via adverts and other mass media organs of persuasion) but it's the ideas themselves that are actually doing the controlling, including the puppeting of the humans broadcasting them as well as the humans performing them.

Ask yourself why the world is stuffed to the brim with zillions of humans performing all sorts of self and other-harming actions. Are we doing so out of sheer peversity, freely chosen?  Seems unlikely. We seem to be possesed by what that Dawkins called "memeplexes" - a seprate evolving set of metaphysical entities (religions, ideologies, beliefs, conspiracy theories etc.) that only need we physical containers (our big brains) as hosts. 

These memeplexes can be parasitic and don't care about the welfare of their hosts, only about their own survival. Off we go to war with some other humans infected with competing parasitic memeplexes. One such war is the current "motorist vs cyclists". Perhaps it's really "car designs vs bicycle designs"? 

There is no "us" - maybe. But then - is there even an I?

Ooh, memetics! Always interesting but I've not kept up. What if any *predictive* power does that have? Also - while employed in practice by those with something to sell I'm unclear what exactly this brings to the argument. Is it possible to practice memeplex hygiene, or cultivate certain ones over others? Or is this just a post-facto analysis for what happened, because there is no-one in control of anything?

I think in most other circumstances an unexpected death is taken more seriously than on the roads. Even in hospitals, where many deaths are to be expected, they are continuously looking at statistics and taking action to reduce risk and even take action against NHS trusts that underperform. This does not happen to any great degree on the roads, I think if it did we wouldn't be arguing about speed limits, we would be following the evidence that 20mph reduces critical injuries and fatalities. If that's wrong then you can always reverse it.

I too have some qualms about vision zero in that targets should be achievable and time limited*. So better target setting would help but you also have to apportion responsibility for those targets (it has to be multi-agency).

Incidentally, I am targeting a lot of my close pass submissions this year on two roads near my home that I ride regularly. My (forlorn) hope/thinking is that statistically these will look like hot spots and therefore warrant further attention. To my way of thinking that's how it should work. 

*surely the big problem with climate change targets.

IanMK wrote:

I think in most other circumstances an unexpected death is taken more seriously than on the roads.

Road and Covid deaths seem to be deemed an acceptable cost to society in the UK at the moment (and Rest of World tbf) 

Secret_squirrel wrote:

Road and Covid deaths seem to be deemed an acceptable cost to society in the UK at the moment (and Rest of World tbf) 

well considering the global economy (including the UK) was practically stopped for COVID while the economy has always taken precedence over the impending climate consequences of fossil fuels, I would disagree with part of that statement.

ShutTheFrontDawes wrote:

I'm not really making a point.

Fair enough, it's the internet...

ShutTheFrontDawes wrote:

... I just don't know where we should set the bar.

That's a good question - and not one that people like framing, never mind considering.  Bit like NICE etc. have to make funding choices.  Then someone with an emotional connection to the subject will frame this as "you're deciding how many people should die / should suffer when there is a possibility they could not!"

I think there's a bigger point is not just "are x deaths acceptable" (so let's argue about x).  After all as you say most people just aren't fussed - until it hits them (see RoadPeace's commendable efforts to try to challenge this).  And as things get safer this won't happen to most people.

More broadly I think we've not got the balance right - this activity needs "taming".  We're getting too many communal problems for the mostly private benefits.  Motoring costs everyone money (including non-drivers) and is a massive consumer of resources (including public space).  It has a slew of issues: suppression of other transport modes, its space-inefficiency leads to congestion / gridlock, it's noisy, by encouraging hypermobility it can "kill places" at least as much as it facilitates people getting to others.  And it literally kills people.

ShutTheFrontDawes wrote:

Vision Zero is a fairy tale and it's treated as such.

It's not as snappy - and is more complicated - but "sustainable safety" please. That goes way beyond what - to me - sometimes appears more of a slogan for protest.  It's about how to facilitate the safe and pleasant movement of people, not vehicles.  Paying due attention to human nature it takes a set of principles and then derives the more detailed plans and policies from them.  And it's been tested for some decades...

ShutTheFrontDawes][quote=chrisonatrike wrote:

I'm not really making a point.

And yet you spend so much time and effort endlessly not making it.

The way I look at it is if as many people who died on the roads each year in the UK died in UK airline crashes or died in UK rail crashes, the public & government wouldn't stand for it one bit there's quite rightly zero tolerance to any death using those forms of transport.

But on average 5 people will die today on our roads, as they do every day, they probably wont get mentioned on the news bulletins, so its absolutely become something alot of people, society as a whole, just accept as a cost to driving.

Awavey wrote:

The way I look at it is if as many people who died on the roads each year in the UK died in UK airline crashes or died in UK rail crashes, the public & government wouldn't stand for it one bit there's quite rightly zero tolerance to any death using those forms of transport.

But on average 5 people will die today on our roads, as they do every day, they probably wont get mentioned on the news bulletins, so its absolutely become something alot of people, society as a whole, just accept as a cost to driving.

I'm not going to presume what society would or wouldn't accept in practice regarding those other transport methods. What I do know is that 'good enough' in aviation is 1 catastrophic failure per billion flying hours. The actual achieved rate is far better. But when it appears that the target is not being met (e.g. Boeing 737 MAX-8), action is taken.

Available statistics suggest that there are ~4 deaths per billion km traveled in the UK. The question is that good enough? I think it seems reasonable personally, especially compared to some countries, who have far higher rates of death.

And it's unfair to say that society doesn't care about road deaths. They're reported in statistics and in the media when they are severe or unusual. And coroners can and do make rulings to reduce the chance of future deaths/injury.

ShutTheFrontDawes wrote:

 What I do know is that 'good enough' in aviation is 1 catastrophic failure per billion flying hours. The actual achieved rate is far better. But when it appears that the target is not being met (e.g. Boeing 737 MAX-8), action is taken. Available statistics suggest that there are ~4 deaths per billion km traveled in the UK. The question is that good enough? I think it seems reasonable personally, especially compared to some countries, who have far higher rates of death. And it's unfair to say that society doesn't care about road deaths. They're reported in statistics and in the media when they are severe or unusual. And coroners can and do make rulings to reduce the chance of future deaths/injury.

or about 1 incident per 900billion km, 

ShutTheFrontDawes wrote:

 Available statistics suggest that there are ~4 deaths per billion km traveled in the UK.

or 1 death per 250million km. That's quite a large factor less safe

but those are stats about whether a mode of transport is safe to use or not, and Im not really debating that aspect, trains and planes have those kinds of stats because we actually decided not to accept that using them just results in people becoming KSI stats.