Road design, safety and Vision Zero

[danbrotherston]

I'm not going to bother touching the "expected number of fatalities" thing above.   It's been covered.  There are many human activities/products where absolute safety is so impossible that there is a background expected probability of failure/injury.  So, once again, this isn't special for road design.

Tou think that all engineering disciplines are the same, that isn't true, no bridge designer has an acceptable number of collapses greater than zero.  Yes, sometimes bridge do collapse, due to mistakes, or lack of repair, or misunderstanding the design, but those are considered failures.  Yes, sometimes there are suicides, and as plam points out, those too are worked to prevent, by installing guard rails, nets, phones, etc.  On our roads, it isn't, it's an accepted part of the design.

Um... the "acceptable" number of suicides isn't zero.  And if you think every suicide is investigated and acted on, you're just wrong.  It's exactly the same as road deaths, some number of deaths is treated as expected.  It's only when rates rise above the background rate that action is even considered.  

If we accept death, then we will have deaths, if we choose not to, we can work to eliminate them.  The Swedish have done it, they have done it without banning cars everywhere (although some places, where it makes sense), they have done it in a sparse country with a lot of rural roads and driving.  To pretend that we cannot is a lie, and it is only to justify killing people out of fear of being inconvenienced.

We can work to eliminate deaths even as we accept the reality that there will always be deaths.  I don't need to pretend that moving massive number of humans, large distances, at crazy high speeds (relative to what our bodies are designed for) is something that we can ever accomplish without accidents.  I can still say that we should work to improve safety.

Not to mention, that that kind of delusion, could easily be BAD for overall safety.  Ranking intersections by injuries over expected injuries seems like a good way to find problematic places to focus on new safety initiatives.

Why would this be better than ranking them by absolute number of deaths and injuries?  What is the goal?  Achieve no deaths or injuries, as Sweden aims to do?  Because if that's the goal then that is not a good way to rank intersections.  In fact, that ranking seeks to achieve the goal of kill or injure this number of people.

Please, answer for me, why are people in Sweden not willing to kill people, but we are?

Maybe I should move there...