Road safety

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Boustrophedon
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Re: Road safety

Post by Boustrophedon » Sun Mar 07, 2021 10:53 am

shpalman wrote:
Thu Mar 04, 2021 10:19 am
If you hit something unmovable in your car, like a wall or a tree, then the car stops but the whole point is that you have to stop too.

Cars have crumple zones, airbags, and pre-tensioning seatbelts (whose mountings are designed to peel away from the bit of the car they're attached to) in order to make this deceleration controlled and survivable. It's your mass which is the issue, not the mass of the car.

Otherwise what other kind of accident are you talking about. Please provide stats to show which kinds of RTA lead to significant numbers of injuries and deaths.
I was thinking about inelastic collisions with other cars: The lighter car will always come of worst.
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Re: Road safety

Post by shpalman » Sun Mar 07, 2021 11:20 am

The unstoppable force stops, the immovable object moves.

Blame those reckless idiots at Volvo who brought side-impact bars to the mainstream so that everyone now just blows through red lights without looking, unafraid of being t-boned.
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Re: Road safety

Post by bjn » Sun Mar 07, 2021 12:24 pm

shpalman wrote:
Sun Mar 07, 2021 11:20 am
The unstoppable force stops, the immovable object moves.

Blame those reckless idiots at Volvo who brought side-impact bars to the mainstream so that everyone now just blows through red lights without looking, unafraid of being t-boned.
Blame the Australians as it was a standard they introduced that crept backwards up the supply chain.

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Re: Road safety

Post by Grumble » Sun Mar 07, 2021 2:18 pm

shpalman wrote:
Sun Mar 07, 2021 11:20 am
The unstoppable force stops, the immovable object moves.

Blame those reckless idiots at Volvo who brought side-impact bars to the mainstream so that everyone now just blows through red lights without looking, unafraid of being t-boned.
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Re: Road safety

Post by shpalman » Sun Mar 07, 2021 2:45 pm

Reported road casualties in Great Britain: 2019 annual report
uk-fatalities-rta-1979-2019.png
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Car occupants are killed at a rate of about 2 a day in the UK; serious injuries are more like 30 a day.

(Motorcyclists are killed at about half that rate, but with two orders of magnitude less vehicle-miles travelled.)

I'm not interested in "ah but it's not the speed/momentum/energy which kills you but the momentum/energy/[impulse from going from that momentum to zero]" - it's like that "it's not the fall that kills you but the hitting the ground at the bottom" yeah we get it.

Just about all modern cars can decelerate the same assuming you aren't driving like a dickhead for the conditions, since a heavier car pushes down harder on its tyres so there's more friction force available and ABS is mandatory (the flipside of this is that 4-wheel drive doesn't give you better cornering or braking since all cars already corner and brake like that, but higher cars definitely reduce the sensation of speed). Anecdotally the accidents I tend to see on the local news are of the "how the hell did you manage that?" variety with cars upside-down facing the wrong way on roads with low speed limits. Otherwise it might be that one or both morons managed to encroach into the incoming traffic's lane, especially if god forbid you might be trying to not exceed the speed limit by too much and the moron behind you decides it's still too slow.

Meanwhile I think we know that by far the main kind of motorcycle accident is where a car "just didn't see him" and fails to give way, and then the second most common kind is failing to be able to go round a corner.

Cars have been getting heavier, there are fewer RTA casualities.
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Re: Road safety

Post by lpm » Sun Mar 07, 2021 4:13 pm

shpalman wrote:
Sun Mar 07, 2021 11:20 am
The unstoppable force stops, the immovable object moves.

Blame those reckless idiots at Volvo who brought side-impact bars to the mainstream so that everyone now just blows through red lights without looking, unafraid of being t-boned.
But if I start chucking stuff at you, you'd rather be hit by a heavy sponge than a light marble.

Isn't a Volvo a heavy sponge? When it crashes into a Aygo it will crumple into a write off while the Aygo will have a small dent in the bumper.
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Re: Road safety

Post by lpm » Sun Mar 07, 2021 4:27 pm

shpalman wrote:
Sun Mar 07, 2021 2:45 pm
Cars have been getting heavier, there are fewer RTA casualities.
A large part of that is because the UK has redesigned roads to remove blackspots. Bad junctions are rare, because if they've caused an accident they get changed.

Drive abroad and you immediately notice really bad road design. Junction layouts aren't up to UK standards. When Tiger Woods crashed the other day, coming off a curving road and somersaulting down a slope into some trees, the police guy said Oh yes, there's loads of accidents at that spot.

The UK is basically world number 1 for road safety, so it should be possible to take the average EU improvement and attribute it to safer cars, leaving the UK extra as the road design effect.
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Re: Road safety

Post by shpalman » Sun Mar 07, 2021 4:32 pm

Italian road accident statistics pdf in English

Drive in Lincolnshire and you immediately notice really bad road design. Although they tend not to have curves. Or slopes.
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Martin Y
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Re: Road safety

Post by Martin Y » Sun Mar 07, 2021 9:56 pm

lpm wrote:
Sun Mar 07, 2021 4:13 pm
Isn't a Volvo a heavy sponge?
I believe the slogan they adopted* in-house is "Nobody dies in a Volvo". That's their target: to have an entire year where absolutely nobody dies in a Volvo. Whether it has a subtitle along the lines of "But if you're outside the Volvo, you're on your own" I am unsure.

*to replace the 1980s classic "they're boxy, but they're good".

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Re: Road safety

Post by TAFKAsoveda » Mon Mar 08, 2021 3:22 pm

Martin_B wrote:
Thu Mar 04, 2021 9:35 am
lpm wrote:
Thu Mar 04, 2021 9:09 am
Or people should stop rushing from A to B and from B to A, and just once and for all work out where they want to be.
Especially if you live at point C, being a point directly in between point A and point B, and are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there.
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Re: Road safety

Post by Gfamily » Mon Mar 08, 2021 4:01 pm

Martin Y wrote:
Sun Mar 07, 2021 9:56 pm
lpm wrote:
Sun Mar 07, 2021 4:13 pm
Isn't a Volvo a heavy sponge?
I believe the slogan they adopted* in-house is "Nobody dies in a Volvo". That's their target: to have an entire year where absolutely nobody dies in a Volvo. Whether it has a subtitle along the lines of "But if you're outside the Volvo, you're on your own" I am unsure.

*to replace the 1980s classic "they're boxy, but they're good".
Until a couple of years ago, at least, it was the case that nobody had died in a Volvo XC90 - which, considering it's been around since 2002 is not a bad record. Mind you, it's a bit of a tank, but that's part of the appeal.

ETA - Actually, that's in UK only as of 2018 - from sales of about 70,000 over 14 years, so not quite as impressive
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Re: Road safety

Post by plodder » Mon Mar 08, 2021 4:37 pm

"no one has ever died on one of our motorcycles" would probably reduce sales...

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Re: Road safety

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon Mar 08, 2021 5:40 pm

"nobody has ever died in these shoes" cackled the wizened old crone at the haunted shoe emporium

I left disappointed and bought a pair in the charity shop instead to make sure
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Re: Road safety

Post by Gfamily » Mon Mar 08, 2021 6:56 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Mon Mar 08, 2021 5:40 pm
"nobody has ever died in these shoes" cackled the wizened old crone at the haunted shoe emporium
Methuselace-ups ?
My avatar was a scientific result that was later found to be 'mistaken' - I rarely claim to be 100% correct
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Re: Road safety

Post by Trinucleus » Mon Mar 08, 2021 7:47 pm

plodder wrote:
Mon Mar 08, 2021 4:37 pm
"no one has ever died on one of our motorcycles" would probably reduce sales...
Presumably coming off them and hitting something hard is what does the damage

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Re: Road safety

Post by nekomatic » Mon Mar 08, 2021 10:13 pm

TAFKAsoveda wrote:
Mon Mar 08, 2021 3:22 pm
Martin_B wrote:
Thu Mar 04, 2021 9:35 am
lpm wrote:
Thu Mar 04, 2021 9:09 am
Or people should stop rushing from A to B and from B to A, and just once and for all work out where they want to be.
Especially if you live at point C, being a point directly in between point A and point B, and are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there.
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Re: Road safety

Post by plodder » Mon Mar 08, 2021 10:19 pm

Trinucleus wrote:
Mon Mar 08, 2021 7:47 pm
plodder wrote:
Mon Mar 08, 2021 4:37 pm
"no one has ever died on one of our motorcycles" would probably reduce sales...
Presumably coming off them and hitting something hard is what does the damage
we've done this already. risk = consequence x likelihood. By falling off the likelihood of a consequence becomes certain and therefore risk = consequence. In other words, it's the falling off that gets you and douglas adams was wrong. if it was douglas adams who came up with that one, obvs.

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