Every time I read this my heart breaks for the families. Of course the driver was in his seventies. Of course the police will never question if he took meds forbidding him to operate heavy machinery.
Edit: took it down. Did not see someone fast faster than I I
Bollards should be required anywhere people have to be around cars.
Honestly. Sidewalk curbs shouldnt be 6" high they should be 24" high and reinforced with rebar.
Or just ensure people actually know how to drive when they get their license and especially more frequently test older folks whose reaction times and vision may have deteriorated significantly. That’d be a lot cheaper and more feasible than redeveloping entire cities. Deal with the problem itself at its root.
@Pyr_Pressure @rocky1138 That would lead to a lot more broken ankles and other more serious injuries for people walking, not to mention making it a lot more challenging to make sidewalks ADA accessible.
???
I have a hard time imagining how it would lead to more broken ankles.
A 6" curb is easier to mistep on then a 24" high wall that someone has to climb over.
Not to mention, most areas that sidewalk curbs are located are in areas where pedestrians aren’t going to be crossing.
Obviously you would leave a 48"-60" gap in the tall curb in areas that you are actually meant to access / walk through like crosswalks.
@Pyr_Pressure Are you talking about a curb or a wall between the street & the sidewalk? Regardless, people don’t cross exclusively at crosswalks, people who park along the street need to get onto the sidewalk, etc. Turning sidewalks into fortresses would be highly inefficient and have a lot of unintended consequences. We need more limits on where and how fast cars can go and safety features like automatic braking to prevent crashes, not to rearrange the whole built environment for cars again.
Obviously it wouldn’t be a one size fits all locations situation
If there’s parking nearby use bollards.
If it’s a road way with vehicles driving parallel to a sidewalk instead of a 6" tall curb make it a concrete wall instead 24" high with gaps where crosswalks are located.
I hate how headlines like these are worded. The SUV didn’t smash into anything. The driver did.
And why is the car maker relevant? Are we supposed to deduct something from it?
Or maybe even deduce something? Yeah, very odd. The SUV part is relevant, but the make is irrelevant.
Well, the SUV made first contact before the driver did, surely. But the driver lost control and crashed into the school, agreed. They were the reason.
CBC phrased it properly.
So, nobody there noticed what a horribly bad place that is for a parking spot?! Incredible lunacy!
I mean… A daycare built so that cars are regularly parked 5 metres from where the smallest children are playing, hood towards the children. How blind can you be to the danger?!
Wait until you find out about sidewalks. Ridiculously dangerous.
(The problem is the car, not the building design.)
See these things that separate the cars from the people? That’s what could have prevented this.
The building design ignored the danger of the cars because cars are holy.
Sidewalks are a very different thing, because cars drive parallel to them, not perpendicular. In T-intersections they do drive perpendicularly to the sidewalk, but not that close. Of course accidents happen in them as well, but this one was so clearly preventable by not having parking places at such a spot. Or at least putting a little bit of concrete in between to stop any rampant cars.
Bollards would have prevented this…
But cars are so safe! /s
Not even an ugly cement block to stop anyone or anything
Under 20s kill way more people (~ 4.8 fatal crashes per 100 million miles) than 70-79 (~ 1.8 per 100 million miles). But you don’t see people going, “Of course it was a kid,” every time they take out a pedestrian in a hit and run. There’s a huge and relatively undeserved stigma against older drivers, but the fact is, no human driver is safe to be around.
I think the difference is that young people are inexperienced and reckless, not physically incapable of the task. Their shortfalls are also based on their age but it’s not something that we don’t have a system in place to handle.
Older drivers are more experienced, generally not in as much of a hurry, and less reckless but if they can’t see, hear, react as quickly, or be aware of their surroundings then the debate is legitimate.
Younger drivers need to be held accountable for reckless behavior and preventable accidents. There’s a system in place for this, it’s civil/criminal law. There’s no such system in place to control the effects of aging, which is a problem.
I’m not going to dive into the stats you posted so I’ll take it on faith that they’re correct and you’ve accurately represented their conclusion, that younger drivers as a general rule are more dangerous on the road. But I disagree that elderly get too much flak for driving poorly because that’s a real problem that hasn’t been solved (because it is really complicated and has lots of other negative externalities associated with revocation of driving privileges, continual testing past _____ age, etc)
Dead is dead is dead. We DON’T have a system in place to handle dangerous young drivers before they’ve actually killed someone except to make insurance prohibitively expensive for all of them. A young driver and an elderly driver who kill someone face exactly the same system that renders the same consequences, I don’t understand the distinction you are trying to draw.
The debate is not legitimate if the data does not support it. The data does not support it. The elderly get too much flak for driving poorly, because it’s not a real problem. The absolute number deaths the elderly are causing are absolutely dwarfed by those of young drivers. It’s a stigma, not a real problem (in comparison to other problems in the same scope).
We cannot stop youth, only put controls in place that dissuade young people from being reckless. Traffic enforcement is huge - pulling people over for moving violations is the greatest deterrent in society but no, it will never solve the problem fully. The only thing that can help is more traffic enforcement and raising driving ages, but the latter again has other negative externalities that I personally don’t think are worth it but I think it could be solidly argued for
People driving when they’re too old is also a safety issue, with no deterrents or controls at all. The rate compared to another demographic isn’t necessarily the point, it’s still a problem and one is being mitigated and the other is not. Your point is whataboutism.
I grew up in a tourist heavy area with tons of people driving motorhomes visiting, and it was primarily older men driving because they’re the ones with the time and wealth to do so. It’s fucking TERRIFYING to have stubborn old men driving fucking buildings on wheels when they are too old to drive and are unfamiliar with the roads. Yes, it’s a problem and it’s not being addressed, whereas young drivers ARE being addressed in the best ways we currently have.
They’re not the same.
Per capita? Can you show me the stats?
See also: https://newsroom.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/SmartFeatures-FactSheet.pdf#%3A~%3Atext=Despite+public+perception%2C+older+drivers%2CAAAFTS+2012 which makes even stronger claims about the relative safety of sub 20 and over 80 drivers.
stat turned out to be per mile when I looked it up, edited original comment
eg: https://www.nhtsa.gov/book/countermeasures-that-work/young-drivers
From your link “Except for drivers 80 years and older, per mile driven, young drivers are more involved in fatal crashes than older drivers.” and the stat “5.4 for drivers 80+”.
Those stats also was about drivers involved in a fatal crash. It doesn’t mention if the driver killed themselves or a pedestrian.
Yes, and the driver in question was 70. Meanwhile, drivers 16-20 make up only 5 annual cohorts compared to almost two decades of cohorts in 80+, and the population of 80+ drivers is very small. The absolute risk we face as a society from young drivers is astronomically larger than the 80+, even though they do get in more accidents per km, but older drivers get a disproportional amount of hate. There is confirmation bias and motivated reasoning happening.
If you are willing to assume that elderly drivers are more likely to die in a crash than young drivers, and you don’t care about consequences to the driver causing the crash, then that only makes the stats more damning against young drivers.
I think you got that backwards. My theory which I have no stats for is that young drivers are more likely to kill themselves and older drivers are more likely to kill pedestrians and crash into buildings.
