How to Make Driving Safer

On Twitter, in response to yet another comment on an egregious auto "accident", I posted: "Try to say crashes, not accidents. It’s a poorly designed system with predictable failures. We deliberately choose to not fix it. It’s no accident."

A commenter responded: "How could we improve the design?"

This is a very good question, and I was tempted to just say, "really, you can't", but that's not very instructive.  Anyway, there is a lot to this. First, let's go up a level. One of my favorite quotes: "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." - Peter Drucker

So, doing nothing is an option, and so is working to make cars safer, and so is undoing cars as transportation. This is a critical point. Before improving/optimizing/efficiently doing/etc. anything, we should decide WHY we want to do it. We've spent 100 years making the world better for autos. Was this wise? 

Why did we want cars at all? They were a faster way of getting around using existing infrastructure. First a parasitic advantage for those who could afford cars (and already had plenty of advantage) at the expense of all & now a symbiotic auto-centric transportation system.  But before we answer "why optimize cars?" we need to first answer "why optimize transportation?". This is not hard, actually, except it's not quite the right question. What we clearly need is interaction between people -- human networks are the key creator of value in our world.

There are sociological aspects to this, and certainly economic, but for me the key value for this is growth of information -- knowledge and know-how -- through the overlapping networks of people and their tools. I won't go further into this -- Cesar Hidalgo already did.

What I will say is the resulting situation is a networking problem -- one of interconnecting people with each other, and sometimes with things as well. Network value is a function of the number of interconnected nodes and to a lesser extent the quality of the connections.  Fundamentally, the value to a given person is a function of the other "nodes" they can reach via their network position. Traveling about to touch other nodes is the whole point -- interacting meaningfully with other people. What this means is that focusing on mobility ---- automotive mobility -- is great for cars and their related interests, but is only one aspect of value to humans (their drivers, & supposed "owners"). The more appropriate view is to focus on "accessibility" - the ability to get to other nodes. Access to lots of nodes is a function of proximity (how close you are to nodes of interest) & of mobility (ability to move around). Cars are just one mode of mobility, but (and it's a BIG but), it's also one that has a structural flaw. We'll get to that in a minute. First, let's look at others.

The default mode of human transportation is walking. We do it wherever we are, & we've done it forever, & we've built cities for millenia based on it. It works. And the reason it works is the human-scaled DENSITY. When we build human-scaled cities, we end up with a LOT of human nodes in close proximity. This brings us to another aspect of networking -- frequency of access. Some nodes we want to connect more often, & some less often. Some are critical, and some just niceties. Quality of life improves with ready, effective access works very well. We've lost site of this in recent decades, and for many it's been long enough we don't even realize what we've lost. But walking only gets us to part of the network, and value grows with the square of nodes (Metcalfe's Law). We need more.

Aside: we're only talking about people access, and there are other discussion about trade and freight that overlap. I'm ignoring such aspects. Over thousands of years, we've added mobility modes. Horses for speed and distance. Sailboats. Then railroads. Bicycles.  

We also separated communications from personal mobility -- we can send our thoughts while we stay at home. Mail, telegrams, phone calls, e-mails, and now Twitter and video conferences. These all provide human network value while reducing trips. 

But still, there is value....in being there in person. Mobility IS important. But thinking of "cars = mobility" is a deliberated marketed solution -- we've already seen there are LOTS of other options, and we haven't even dug into subways, motorcycles, gondolas, scooters, and dirigibles. Why cars?

On the surface, cars have some really desirable qualities: - any origin to any destination, individually - high speed, long range - self-contained - you just go. This is why at the outset cars really caught on. But there are dirty undersides, too. These "externalities"were ignored at the outset (when cars were few), and then deliberated covered up during growth, and now are taken for granted, yet they are fundamental. Cars are BIG, and hazardous, and they do not operate on human scales. Worse, in a world of cars, bigness wins.

By choosing autos for mobility as a solution for access, while ignoring the real goal of accessibility, we broke the fine-grained density of human-scale cities. We pretended we wanted accessibility, but we really wanted separation, too. That's the dirty secret of cars. 

Again, I won't harp on this -- go read "Color of Law". For that scheme to work, and it did, you had to have "car haves" & "car have nots", geographically separated. Back to network theory: if some nodes are trapped in a limited sub-network of poor connectivity, they will not have the same economic opportunity and quality-of-life that better-connected nodes will.  The quality of our network connectivity determines the quality of our lives.

Not only do cars drive out all fine-grained transportation modes -- walking, cycling, scooters, horses -- through physical hazard, they take up so much space that density MUST decrease. We see this not just in suburbs -- co-evolved with cars -- but in older cities, too.

Buildings fall to make room for parking lots. Trees fall to add a lane. Sidewalks narrow. Setbacks increase for easy parking. Curb-cuts make walking hazardous, even when just for a few feet from car to store. Lower density means that infrastructure per node increases.

Taxes per sq mile drop, straining city coffers. Miles of piping, wires, and roads increase. Cash once available for interesting buildings goes to pavement, and speeding cars don't see beauty -- and it goes away. Everything is big and flat, and ugly.

So, how do we design for safer cars? That OP question? Short answer: you can't. We need to go back & do over. Choose differently; choose better. Choose fine-grained, not car-grained. Choose human-scale, & human networks. Anything else we do is Drucker-esque error.

Empirically, we KNOW this can be done. The Dutch changed their view 50 years ago. Denmark did so more recently. Paris a year or two ago. In the meantime, in our car-centric country? First, stop digging the hole deeper.

 - Build car-lite areas - 15 min neighborhoods. Walking speeds and no through traffic for cars. 

- Build "Curbing Cars" - Bruntlet's -- neighborhoods 

- Follow Jeff Speck - "Walkable Cities" rules - Do what Brent Toderian says

 - Limit speeds -- this includes GPS governors, and speed camera ticketing 

- Require automated detection and braking for cars to protect peds/cyclists. 

- Add external air bags 

- Make cars smaller and far more expensive to operate (this makes sense for climate, too!) 

 - Recognize that humans CANNOT safely operate cars -- it's not in human nature, with our propensity for distraction, complacency, and poor reactions, coupled with the speed and mass of vehicles. 

- Where cars remain, separate them from humans with concrete, steel, and trees.

- Promote mixed-use density and infill development (especially of parking lots) 

- Add land-value taxation (which penalizes wasted space like parking lots and vacant investment land)  

 

Overall, focus on, and invest in, accessibility. Deliberately prejudice against auto mobility, especialy where it promotes elistism and class separation. Don't lose sight of the economic value of networking. This is what public transit is for. 

Simply, choose better!