*crashes while reading Waze prompt about crashes
Exactly. Driving… Driving…BEEP BOOP!..What was that?CRASH!!
It works that well.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Not sure an alert to a history of crashes is great. Now people will take their eyes off the road to read a notification instead of watching the road
In my country there’s sometimes signs that say something like “caution: accident prone area”. I never thought it distracting when driving.
I’m amused at the notion of engineers putting up signs warning everybody that they’re shit at their jobs.
Edit: I’m a former traffic engineer myself, so I’m entitled to say things like that. Frankly, our entire profession is doing it wrong and needs to be reformed.
Shit, it really feels like his point is spot on. If engineers are trying to design for safety, they’re doing a horrible job at it.
I can’t think of a single road I’ve driven down in the US that felt safe for anyone. Too much traffic weaving in and out and through merges and intersections, basically no safe bike lanes, and foot paths so close to fast-moving traffic that you feel like you’re in a wind tunnel.
How does something so endemic like this get fixed?
How does something so endemic like this get fixed?
That’s a very good question. Ultimately, the standards of practice in traffic engineering need to change. Speaking of which: to put a finer point on just how much of an uphill battle that is, consider the fact that even the name itself1 – “traffic engineering” – is biased towards narrow concern for the routing of cars at the expense of holistic consideration of the street as a place. (See also: confessions #2, #20, and #28) There’s a huge amount of institutional inertia supporting the bad status quo, including everything from university curriculum, to standards documents like the AASHTO Green Book and the MUTCD, to the fact that young Engineers-In-Training (EITs) are required to work under existing licensed Professional Engineers (PEs) for about half a decade (it varies depending on circumstances) before being allowed by law to strike out on their own – which on balance is almost certainly a good thing because we definitely don’t want unqualified people stamping plans, but also could lead to being inculcated into old ways of thinking and having latent new urbanist inclinations beaten out of them.
Fun fact: the biggest US traffic engineering research group, one which has an outsize influence in writing those standards documents, is none other than the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI). In Texas. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but yea.
Anyway, one way for non-engineers to try to help that happen faster – other than removed about it on social media like I’m doing right now – would be to educate yourself on New Urbanist/Strong Towns/Fuck Cars/etc. ideas, then get involved with your local politics and lobby for said ideas to be implemented. More concretely, read Jane Jacobs and Shoup and watch a bunch of Not Just Bikes videos, then call up your city councilperson, county commissioner and state rep, join whatever citizen planning groups happen to be around (e.g. my city has “NPUs”), and start removed at those people about it. You can also go to public hearings for road projects and removed at the engineers directly (they love that sort of thing, LOL).
1 It’s a totally different subject – albeit one I’m also passionate about – but I like to cite this article as a good demonstration of how framing matters. It really can’t just be dismissed as “mere semantics.”
Oh you’d love our “warning: road in poor condition” signs then. Those always tick me off.
I present for your consideration the case of September 3rd, 1967: the day Sweden switched from driving on the left side of the road to the right side. One would expect that the incredibly distracting process of overcoming a lifetime of learned habit would be a recipe for chaos, but in fact there were significantly fewer accidents than average on the day of the change [1].
As it turns out, the danger of complacency outweighs the danger of distraction. It does not particularly matter where one directs their focus if they are not driving mindfully. In a more natural environment, we’re good enough at identifying dangerous situations to pay attention when it matters, but roads are not a natural environment. For every alert person briefly annoyed by an audio notification there will be at least as many pedal-pushers too relaxed to even form coherent memories, let alone engage in defensive driving.[2]
The effect was not permanent, so I will be ignoring the alternative explanation that the new side was somehow massively superior to the extent required to explain the discrepancy. Ditto to the idea that fewer people were driving that one particular day, because the effect did last longer than a single day. ↩︎
Of course, just because someone’s driving absent-mindedly doesn’t mean that they’re stupid. They’ll catch on if you just buzz their phone randomly because you think it’ll prevent crashes. The driver needs to believe that the danger is real which is something that the app has to earn by not being manipulative. ↩︎
I had to turn off the distracting lane assist/warning feature because of so many false positives from inconsistent lane markings, especially in construction zones.
A few warnings is great, too many are so distracting.
That’s a Waze feature??
Just a general comment about excessive false positive warnings.
I wonder if just having a color coded indicator bar, or a unique icon that pops up would work better than a text-based alert.
Or coloring the section of the road accordingly just like it does with slowdowns or traffic jams coloring yellow and red for the stretch ahead.
Is there any waze alternative based on openstreetmap?
Magic earth is the best, not open source though
Now if only every state did vehicle inspections and enforced the laws…
Or better yet, if only engineers did their fucking jobs and fixed negligently-designed areas to be less dangerous.
Edit: I say that as an engineer criticizing my own profession from the inside, by the way.
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Sure, but a lot more crashes are caused by poor design (including design that facilititates law-breaking) than mechanical failures or lack of enforcement.
In particular, I want to address the latter: trying to stop people from speeding by having more police patrols simply doesn’t work. The only thing that does work is physically changing the design of the street (narrowing lanes, etc.) to make it scarier and less comfortable for drivers to go too fast. That’s the engineers’ responsibility, not law enforcement’s.
Seriously - the most dangerous roads I’ve ever been on were in Texas where there were 12 lane highways, and crazy people who wanted to drive 100MPH past you in the right-hand lane, all while people are merging on and off the highway.
Doing the speed limit meant that EVERYONE was driving faster than you, which meant that you were a lot more likely to get rear-ended from someone who didn’t see you in time. You have to speed to stay safe, and then you add in construction zones and it’s just a death trap.
Where is our public transportation option?
the most dangerous roads I’ve ever been on were in Texas where there were 12 lane highways
I understand why you feel like those were the most dangerous, but statistically, freeways are the safest kind of road. It’s places like stroads that you should really be scared of.
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Not on freeways, no. The design principles appropriate for freeways are entirely different than the ones appropriate for city streets. It’s the latter where I suspect most of these Waze “dangerous hotspots” will be, and so it’s the latter that I had in mind when writing my previous comment.
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Could you point out an example on Google Maps? Maybe there’s something else wrong with it.
Also, instead of focusing on there still being some speeding despite the street being narrow, consider how much worse the speeding might be if it weren’t.
This will be amazing. Even if it saves one life (and it will likely save many), it’s a very welcome change
I’m here for the angry advocacy of better road design you’re bringing to this post.
Keep it going!
Israëli company
Isn’t it a little late to alert someone of a crash after it’s already a historical fact?
