Yeah I’m pretty sure this is why https://vger.to/lemmy.today/post/55397665
Screenshot for compatibility reasons on fedi. So that it’s loud and fucking clear
Kind of?
It’s not just that the outside of the vehicles are big.
The inside is too, so a lot of people can barely see over the dash on the best of days, so glancing down at a phone means taking their eyes fully off the road. In a sedan they’d at least maintain a periphery view of the road, which allows for unconscious sight and reactions.
Like how “daredevil blindness” is real and some people are blind but will duck if you throw a wrench at their head.
The A pillars (the pillar between the windshield and driver/passenger door window) have gotten so massive due to airbag requirements that it blocks a significant view angle. It used to be that they were an inch wide.
I’d rather have the airbag and have to move my head a bit to see than not have the bags. Surely driving instructors teach students that it is a blindspot of a sort and that you should keep it in mind, no?
I’ll agree that its a good component to have. I couldn’t say about driving instructors, for me that was about 25 years ago when I was driving a car from the early 90s that had the thinner pillars. I keep my head on a swivel while driving, but just as easily I’ve had a car or pedestrian pop up that I don’t see right off the bat in that blind spot, especially turning at an intersection.
Yeah. Some intersections are hard. I go through one daily that has a bike lane with a green light to cross a street while my turn rightinto that street light is also green. That means bikers may be aproaching from behind me at a weird angle, i hate that one. It is a balancing act I guess, safety for the driver and passengers vs visibility. Though nowadays you have all the new tech with sensors and cameras and the car basically yells at you that you’re going to hit something so I guess that is not terrible.
IMO that is sheer incompetence on the part of the traffic engineer who designed it.
I agree, but remaking it is probably too expensive for the town sadly. It has been complained about
Surely driving instructors teach students that it is a blindspot of a sort and that you should keep it in mind, no?
Drivers Ed is a month for a teenager or a handful of lessons…
The only thing I remember from drivers Ed was when another student was told to turn right up ahead, replied “yep” and then just didn’t do it.
When the instructed asked why not, the kid accelerated and said he didn’t want to turn.
Scary as fuck. But everything else I was told decades ago I can’t remember.
And that’s not even getting into how much vehicles have changed in the last couple decades. Especially when the topic involves the continued increase in size in trucks…
You think a boomer remembers what they were told in the 1980s during drivers Ed and will be able to extrapolate the changes to modern vehicles on their own?
Quick edit:
Besides all that, you’re putting a distracted drivers “safety” after hitting a pedestrian in a giant truck over them being able to not hit a pedestrian.
You know what’s safer for a driver? An Abrams tank.
Your line of logic is literally why trucks keep getting bigger and why were in this fucking mess
Different countries i guess. Driving lessons last a while over here, and there is an actual test at the end of it that is very easy to fail. But I understand your point and agree with what you’re saying about the drivers not appreciating the differences between then and now.
Woah, relax. I didn’t mention a thing about careless drivers hitting pedestrians, or trucks. I was just pointing out that airbags overall are good, even if you’re supposed to put a little extra effort while driving.
This is like if someone said smoking crack in an elementary school is bad…
And you said it’s important for people to relax sometimes.
What you said was fine in isolation, just not in the context of the discussion you wandered into and didn’t understand
Ok. I literally responded to the a-pillar comment, but it’s fine. I don’t wnt to engage further, thnks for your insights.
Read the room, son! Like, I’m a nonviolent old lady and even I felt a momentary impulse to throw wrenches at blind people. Lotta lemmings with even more impulsivity than me.
Sorry to be like this, but what is this link?
I get redircted outside of my Lemmy App (because it is a 3rd party URL) and then get advertised a Lemmy client, which I don’t even like, only for its page to only show a preview and in order to actually view the linked post I have to open the original WebUI of the Lemmy instance linked on the advertising page of voyager?
And it got the balls to tell me that its the best experience?
What the fuck Voyager??
seems to be an issue on your end:
also on voyager and it’s working as expected!
click link > opens post within voyager
maybe a settings issue or a bug?
Voyager made this website and probably added these URLs as supported links.
I am not on voyager, but on thunder and it does not work, since there links are not the standard share link. I tested using normal links in a comment and it works there.
So while in theory Thunder could add support for these Links, I really just whished that Voyager would stop advertising themselves whenever somebody shares a link with their client.
The actions of Voyager seem malicious; no other Lemmy (or mastodon client) that I know of does not directly link to the post in question and rather just advertises itself like an adfly page.
oh, sry, i read that wrong!
yes, that’s a voyager link, although that should probably open in the browser version by default, since voyager, afaik, does have a web version…
fyi: it’s not malice, there’s actually a good reason for generating these links!
it’s so different instances can be shared through the same home instance, i.e.: so i can share a link from feddit.org with someone on lemmy.world, and they can still access it within the same client, through their own home instance without requiring a new login, etc.
it’s a limitation of lemmy and voyager offers a workaround ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That makes way more sense. I would question it, since my client (Thunder) manages the same without requiring to rewrite the URL.
no idea if there’s a better way, that’s just how i remember the reasoning…guess there’s probably ways!
Oversized designs is definitely a big one, but don’t forget subpar training and verification of said training (take a driving test once and your set for life) and of course just overall poor design.
I’ve got a Lincoln mkx and it can be almost impossible to even see out of the windshield on sunny days due to the angle of the windshield catching massive reflections of the dash (like how the hell did that make it past testing)
Vw tiguan rear view mirror goes lower than my shoulders, blockng half the front view.
Maybe, but it’s probably a lot more to do with infrastructure. European drivers are used to pedestrians being everywhere, North American’s aren’t.
It would be interesting to see a comparison between cities and rural locations.
We have pedestrian friendly infrastructure and we don’t drive penis size compensating trucks. Cars close to pedestrians are forced to go slow and if they would swivel off the road, the curbs and other stuff like trees are there to stop cars before they hit anyone, or force the wheels away from the sidewalks to steer the car back on the road. So even when people are dumb enough to be on their phone, the risk of a fatal accident with a pedestrian is limited. Giant trucks just ram over and through everything, splashing any pedestrian in their path. Especially if there aren’t any sidewalks and cars are allowed to drive really fast. Contrary to the US we actually value human lives so we built our cities to be safe for bikes and pedestrians.
and cars are allowed to drive really fast
That was stated very plainly here. Cars are getting bigger and heavier. And pedestrians being killed equals weight of car multiplied with speed. Weight up, so speed down. Small roads everywhere now 30kph/20mph.
Ok so the thing is, when you get hit by small car you usually tend to roll over the top w some injuries. You can’t really do that when its a giant truck/SUV the height of you and you end up rolling under their BIGASS SUSPENDED VEHICLE
fun fact there’s a standard bumper height that all cars have to respect exactly for this reason, AND such that cars always collide bumper to bumper, not bumper to hood, or bumper to windshield
GUESS WHAT FUCKING VEHICLE CLASS IS EXEMPT FROM THAT FUCKING GUESS
also guess what EVEN FUCKING SEMITRUCKS ARENT EXEMPT FROM THAT IN EUROPE. SEMI TRUCKS HAVE TO HAVE A CERTAIN HEIGHT ON THEIR BUMPER TO MATCH CARS, WHILE AMERICAN SUV’S DON’T
I’m sorry but this is fucking infuriating to me. I gotta log off now bye
Tl;dr
USA:
- Terrible drivers
- Big ass trucks
- Minor punishments
- No sidewalks
- Texting while driving
Europe:
- Reasonably decent drivers
- Moderately big vehicles
- More or less severe punishments (still too low)
- Sidewalks everywhere
- Texting while driving
○ Mossad v. Hezbollah.
Doesn’t mention anything about infrastructure and I’d guess that has a lot to do with it in the US. Very, very few cities are setup with any type of pedestrian traffic or public transport in mind.
True. I remember visiting El Paso a decade ago.
There was a starbucks in viewing distance from the hotel but the only way to get there was by car. The fact that taking a short walk to get my morning coffee was not possible seemed absurd.
And this kept happening. Walking anywhere was just not a thing there.
Big Trucks and SUVs are much deadlier than proper cars in case of accidents. Pedestrian infrastructure does not exist in most parts of the US or is very dangerous to use and those parts of the US that do are often unaffordable for regular people to live in. People also do not expect pedestrians even if there is infrastructure of that kind. Roads in the US are designed to maximise the danger to pedestrians even if there is pedestrian infrastructure because of car first regulations …
Since the article clearly states that even Canada—where we drive the same vehicles and have some similar infrastructure issues—isn’t showing the same uptick, the most likely reasons are legal/regulatory or cultural rather than physical. In other words, there’s more going on here than just oversized SUVs with bad collision outcomes for pedestrians (although they certainly don’t help).
In Canada our distracted driving laws are pretty harsh and they do actually enforce them. Insurance is also mandatory and a distracted driving ticket is very expensive for a couple of years.
Where in Canada are police doing their jobs? Not in Ontario.
Insurance is mandatory…but many are driving without it as some idiot in Ontario got rid of visible licence validation in 2018.
BC. Sometimes the police wait at the stop light about 50 feet up, and walk down the side of the cars to check if you are on your phone while light is red.
I have seen it in Ontario and Quebec. They do it with seatbelt check campaigns. I have never seen it in Toronto though but in Toronto I don’t think you can even get pulled over for a moving violation anyways, unless you are speeding exceptionally fast.
I thought big trucks and SUVs were doing it - at least that’s what a different headline said.
SUVs don’t kill people, but phones apparently do
deleted by creator
Since it’s a US-only phenomenon, looking at vehicle types popular in the US seems like a good starting place, but that assumes phone use affects people’s awareness of their surroundings uniformly - I would want to confirm that by ruling out cultural differences between countries.
People DO get killed because of phone usage in other countries. It is a huge issue. There’s now even special cameras here for fining people that call. Unfortunately many people text and drive. I constantly see people look down their laps while driving.
Lots of good reasons here on laws and larger vehicles in the US. One thing that seems to be missing:
Wider streets & roads, prevalence of stroads => faster driving speeds => more pedestrian deaths.
A lot of cities in Europe are much safer by design because of narrow streets that force drivers to slow down. Europe also has more real roads as opposed to stroads which are pervasive in the U.S.
Well european roads are mostly narrower because they were build 600 years ago
My hypothesis is that the rise in distracted driving was just as bad in European countries but they have safer infrastructure that limits cars’ speed and otherwise protects pedestrians, and I think that could be tested by looking at the rates of car crashes overall in Europe (if those went up at the same time as the US without a corresponding rise in dead pedestrians I think that’d suggest their infrastructure is the difference)
Probably because those massive gender affirming trucks are death machines for pedestrians
No way to prevent this says only place where it regularly happens
It feels like people have gotten much worse at driving in general over the last four years. Distracted driving is a big portion of that, but I think everyone is getting dumber, less empathetic towards others and they are incapable of feeling shame now.
Every time I drive to work on the highway there’s a ton of traffic in the left lane and then there’s always some clueless idiot driving slower than the people in the middle lane holding up all the people behind them. This happens at least three times in each direction of my 30 mile commute.
People sit at the stoplights on their phones and when you honk at them a few seconds after the light turns green, they get mad at you.
From personal experience, I have had to dodge people outright walking into traffic to cross a road, ignoring all the cars and staring at their phones. This has s happened serval times in the last year for me. The worst offender was someone walking across a 10-lane highway (5 lanes each side with a grass divider) during rush hour traffic.
Same. Daily. WTAF is so important you have to stare at your phone in a crosswalk?
don’t pedestrians have right of way on crosswalks??
Cemeteries are full of people who had the right of way. You still have to pay some basic attention to your surroundings.
Yes, but I guess your family can argue that you had the right of way when a giant truck turns you into a hood ornament because you were watching Facebook shorts instead of looking both ways before crossing a street
I guess it’s a different situation in Germany compares to the US
How? Please elaborate
Here you can pretty much cross the street on a crosswalk without looking because people are more careful.
According to the laws of man, yes.
According to the laws of physics? Nope.
Phones are an addiction. Every moment of your attention is demanded by social media.
In my cases, there was no crosswalk. Straight up reckless jaywalking.
You should be higher on the list. It’s a complex problem with a lot of moving parts - while the emotional support truck designs certainly have a fault in accidents due to physics and blind spots, people not paying attention and crossing the road with the assumption traffic will stop for them, or the lack of awareness of traffic when crossing, has taken many lives as well.
We should control what we can - limit crossings to safer zones (crosswalks, dedicated traffic light crosswalks, crossing bridges, tunnels or underpass), require visibility rules for vehicle safety (reverse cameras, blind spot detectors, automatic emergency braking is what we have, we need driver visibility requirements better defined), separate vehicle and pedestrian traffic physically (barriers, natural and/or artificial), and teach driving and walking lessons to kids in school so they learn how to do these things, instead of letting the school of hard knocks teach them.
