Posted by sien 6 days ago
In shared spaces, the more alternatives you have the more the car has to adjust to that reality and that tends to slow down cars.
And even more importantly, politically measures like 'slowing down cars' is much easier to pass if people have alternatives.
Here in Switzerland we are just fighting against the Right Wing Transport Minister who wants to make 50km mandatory in every city (but they are anti-regulation of course).
Secondly, I think these numbers only really look good, in light of them having been so horrible bad before. So much more could be done. There are 100s of streets that should simply be pedestrianized, both for economic reason and for safety reasons.
There is lots of good research going on in Netherlands, Finland, Norway and so on. In Oslo for example, they have reduced the cars in the city to a point where I was often simply walking on the street (sadly partly by moving cars underground). Sweden in Stockholm implemented congestion pricing.
Another thing not addressed here, is to keep cars light. The chance of death is much less with a smaller lower profile car. Charge higher registration and road fees to larger cars. Create maximum sizes for all public parking spots and harsh fines is somebody parks their dumb F-150 there. More can be done along those lines as well.
Narrow roads and use safer configuration. For example, never have a 4-lane road. A 3 lane where the middle is a turning lane, has the same threw-put and is safer. In general, preventing any kind of overtaking improves flow and safety.
There are so many more things that can be done. The goal has to be not just less people killed, but also less property damage and other kinds of negative effect. Zero is the acceptable number.
Now, cyclists in London are a driver’s nightmare. I’ve seen people barrel down a junction at full speed and jump a red light. This lack of desire for self-preservation is startingly common.
Between the hostile vans and the daredevil red-light-jumping cyclists, I am baffled at this report. Perhaps mortality rates are low, but injury rates are much higher than say, Germany?
It's worth looking at the road deaths data in wikipedia at :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
The road toll of 1266 in 2023 and 4.8 fatalities per 100K residents is and comparing it to 1970 where it was 3,798 and 30.4 per 100K residents.
Even the trend on deaths per 100K residents is down from 8.15 per 100K residents in 2003 and has declined to 4.4 in 2023.
In terms of road fatalities per billion kilometres driven it's down from 44 per billion kilometres traveled in 1971 to 4.4 in 2020.
It's really interesting to see how many single vehicle accidents there were and the breakdown of who was killed.
From : https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/australias-catastrophi... "48 per cent of deaths recorded were drivers, while 20 per cent were motorcyclists, 16 per cent were passengers and 12.5 per cent were pedestrians.
304 women were killed over the 12 months, while the report recorded 956 male deaths. 792 deaths occurred during weekdays and 474 victims were killed over a weekend."
The breakdown on where the crashes happened is interesting
"A total of 326 people died in major cities across Australia, with 581 deaths in regional Australia and 63 in remote or very remote parts of the country."
Given that the vast majority of Australians live in major cities it's surprising.
It's really surprising how many accidents are single vehicle :
"Out of 1266 deaths, 490 victims were involved in multiple-vehicle road incidents, whereas 776 people who died were involved in single-vehicle crashes."
On top of this it should be added that in a review of fatalities in Victoria ~52% of the crashes involved a driver who tested positive for alcohol or drugs or both.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014...
41% of fatalities are estimated to involve speeding.
https://www.transport.nsw.gov.au/roadsafety/topics-tips/spee...
This is not only road users: roadworks have restrictive speed limits, which are not taken down when there is no workforce out, to minimise risk to workers setting and unsetting limits, traffic cones etc. Things that in other countries would close a lane often close the whole road, again because of risks to road users and maintenance people.
This is of course great, but also very expensive - and I cannot shake the feeling that the UK loses so much money on this risk aversion that is actually causes more hazard due to underinvestment elsewhere. NHS is crumbling, the very safe roads take forever to navigate, introducing inefficiencies and starving the central budget of cash. GDP per capita has barely grown since 2008. Even a small annual boost would unlock a lot of cash for investment, in particular into NHS and saving lives.
It's like putting all your pension investments into bonds, because they are safer. But you swap market risk for the risk of not having enough cash when you retire.
But maybe it's easy to have this perspective because I have a desk job and commute by public transport.
One of the issues is we’re trapped with a media ecosystem that won’t even allow progressive parties to say “we’ll take a bit more in tax and in return you’ll get a functioning health service”, instead they feel they have to promise to run the economy like the Tories (which is mind numbing).
It’s not just the recent Labour election I’m referring to. The first time Blair got in it was the same.
We get the services we deserve.
And then it's not just the NHS. My point is, rather, that extreme risk aversion in the short term can actually increase the medium-term risk. If the UK could generate a few extra 0.1% of GDP growth per year in exchange for some risk, that would seem an overall better world to be in.
Imagine how much further forward we could have been if we started at this simple point of truth.
This is largely untrue today since the Conservatives have significantly increased taxes over the last decade. As it stands I think Germany only taxes around 1-2% more of GDP than us.
The primary difference between Germany and the UK in terms of public service funding is that the UK funds most of it's healthcare via taxation where as Germany operates a duel model which means healthcare isn't funded so much from taxation, meaning they have more money for other things.
Additionally, Germany has a much higher per-capita GDP which means they can afford significantly better public services even if they tax an equivalent share of GDP.
Finally what Germany funds with additional taxation the UK more than makes up for by running much larger deficits. The issue isn't that the UK government isn't spending enough as a share of GDP.
"UK tax revenue was 33.5% of gross domestic product (GDP ) in 2021 – the most recent year for which there are internationally comparable data. This is slightly below the average for both the G7 (36.3%) and the OECD (34.1%). While UK taxes are higher than in most other English-speaking developed economies (such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland and the United States), they are considerably lower than in most other western European countries (average tax revenue amongst the EU14 was 39.9% of GDP ).
Under current government plans, UK tax revenue is forecast to increase to 37.7% of GDP by 2027–28. This would take the UK above both the current OECD and G7 averages. It should be noted, however, that other governments may also increase their levels of taxation by then."
If it's just Germany we're comparing to, then there are still multiple percentage differences. Germany is close to the average of 39.5% of GDP and the UK is 33.5% raising to 37.7%. Nearly 2% difference, which is a lot. It doesn't matter how the tax is raised, it's the total investment that matters. We have been a low tax economy for a long time (compared to similar European nations), that was my entire point: if we want better services then we are unlikely to get them in a low tax economy. Recent changes to the tax levels doesn't change how we got to this position in the first place.
[1] https://ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxlab-key-questions/how-do-uk-tax...
Equally, nobody in the construction trade gets into it to get killed in an accident, especially ones avoided by just having traffic move at slightly lower speeds.