Road design, safety and Vision Zero

[jamincan]

To be honest I'm ticked off we are having an argument about this word instead of road safety.

And I do think that a pattern of death as we see from drunk driving should qualify.  A person chose to intentionally drive drunk knowing they could easily kill someone while doing so. There is no other form of negligent homicide which kills hundreds of people every year.

But if you guys don't want to call that murder, fine but honestly, why are we talking about it. Why was that your take away from this issue? Why was that your priority.

We can talk about road safety (and we do, all the time) and at the same time also talk about how we can best advocate for safer roads. I personally don't think that the moralizing approach is particularly persuasive to most people. As an example, I don't find "Texting and driving kills people." an effective message, because people have far too many examples of where that is not true, and likely no examples where it is true (at least for them personally). It is also something that a lot of people have done, and framing their behaviour in a moral sense is more likely to lead them to be defensive, which leads to them being less receptive to the message that distracted driving significantly increases the risk of accidents. I personally think education is more important, as I think most people are simply ignorant of the potential consequences of their behaviour.

For me personally, the thing that I found most persuasive about how important speed is for safety was the chart showing the likelihood a child dies if they are hit at a certain speed. It's easy enough to imagine a scenario where a child might unexpectedly run out from behind a parked car in a neighbourhood and get hit. Regardless of blame, I would be devastated if a was driving a car and hit and killed a child. Is the extra 45-60s it might take to get home from the highway exit worth risking the life of a child? Not for me.