I don't understand. What control do I have over a tired/drunk/high truck driver running a red light into an intersection I'm passing in?
I can be actually assured that no drunk driver will smash into my seat in a subway (the chance might not be zero but it's astronomically low). You may say it's not "control" because I didn't personally force all those drunk drivers out of railroads, but then again, I can't force them out of public roads either.
For one, you can choose the routes you take. Accidents aren't evenly distributed across every mile of road. Some roads are are just statistically safer than others. Accidents also aren't evenly distributed across all times of day and weather conditions. By choosing not to drive at those times and in those conditions, you can lower your risk profile.
Moreover, the route you drive most is your commute to work, so you can choose where you live to minimize travel time and intersections. There's one intersection on my way to work, so I guess theoretically what you describe could happen. But the accident statistics for that particular intersection show that practically no accidents have occurred there. Therefore most of the time I spend driving is going to be quite safe compared to the aggregate stats, and that's by choice.
Delivery driver routes are usually optimized for right turns for this reason. My dad was a UPS driver for 30 years and went without an accident the entire time, not even one that wasn't his fault. You'd think statistically he would have gotten into one over the million miles or so he drove on and off the job, but I think that just goes to show that defensive driving and route planning actually works.
No form of travel is absolutely safe. The best you can do is control what you can and hope for the best.
You also can't be sure a random guy is not going to come from a side street on a red light at 90mph and T-bone you because he was answering a whatsapp and didn't notice the lights.
I ride a motorbike. As part of training I was repeatedly told to wear protection not because of my riding skills, but because of everyone else's lack of skills.
Part of riding a motorbike (cycle here) is also driving defensively is it not? I don't assume people are going to stop at a given intersection, I take a look at their current speed and project it forward before determining if it's safe for me to go. If someone is going at a high rate of speed towards a stop sign or red light, I don't pull out just because I have the "right of way" I assume they are going to do something stupid.
Another example: On the highway I get myself into a position where I have plenty of stopping distance for the car in front of me, but also behind me in case I need to stop rapidly myself.
> I don't assume people are going to stop at a given intersection, I take a look at their current speed and project it forward before determining if it's safe for me to go.
While I sympathize with your overall sentiment (and indeed, as a fellow motorcyclists, I know a lot about defensive driving/riding), I have never seen people consistently drive the way you describe, ever. For many intersections in the cities (probably most), you simply cannot see if someone is actually going from a side road until you're so deep in the intersection that you have no chance of stopping before it if you notice someone.
There's a side road on in front of you. Imagine there is a car going same speed as you, on a crash trajectory (i.e. it is exactly as far from the intersection as you are). Where's the first moment you see it?
where you're around 20 feet from the intersection of your routes. If you begin braking immediately as you notice the other car, you need to be going slower 15 mph if you want to avoid a crash. If you add any amount of time to actually judge the speed of the other car and its intention of stopping, you need to be going less than 10 mph. Needless to say, nobody actually does that, people don't slow down to 10 mph in locations like above.
First I must say, in the city I'll park my car at the outskirts and take public transit so I admit it's situational. I don't like driving with so many unpredictable pedestrians running around, you could end up in prison because someone had a few too many drinks and fell into the road.
But in your example I'd have a good chance to prevent a collision. I'd already have my foot on the brake due to the crosswalk there. I will have brought my speed down that I will be able to stop should someone suddenly appear within it. A kid could pop out from between those two cars on the right chasing a ball, so you need to have a stopping distance of perhaps 2 - 3 feet maximum, depending what vehicle of mine I am driving that's probably 20 - 25 mph maximum. 25 mph is the speed limit there so I probably wouldn't even get tailgaters at that speed, but I don't care if I do. That intersection is a good place for a rolling stop, where you bring the car down to perhaps 5mph before you proceed, mostly because of the sidewalks on both sides and the risk of kids running around or riding bikes. That's a residential street, there should be no need to move quickly down it.
In addition to all that my car has a top of line collision avoidance system, side curtain airbags, a high crash rating, etc. I always wear my seatbelt and keep my kid strapped in with a age appropriate booster seat.
I'm not saying I'm perfect but being careful can reduce your personal risk considerably.
> That intersection is a good place for a rolling stop, where you bring the car down to perhaps 5mph before you proceed, mostly because of the sidewalks on both sides and the risk of kids running around or riding bikes.
On the arterial street that I linked, intersections like this one are placed every 150 feet. I literally never seen anyone drive the way you describe, ever. Nobody does a rolling stop every 150 feet. Very few drivers even go speed limit there, maybe 1 in 20: most people do around 30 mph, a good fraction does 35 mph. In fact, if you drive the way you describe (which I doubt, because, again, I literally never, ever seen anyone drive like that), you're more likely to get into an accident (most likely getting rear ended), due to being extremely unpredictable.
> I'm not saying I'm perfect but being careful can reduce your personal risk considerably.
This is, of course, right, but my point was not to demand perfection, I just want to point out that what you describe is extremely unrealistic, and virtually never observed in real life driving.
Not only is what he described simply not realistic, it's likely far more unsafe than "driving normally" because the behavior violates the expectations of many/most other drivers and when people are thrown into situations that violate their expectations things get weird.
"But he should have been using a reasonable following distance" makes for easy low effort internet points but internet points won't get you out of a hospital bed.
You will never be able to look into every intersection, even very open ones. You will never be able to look out for cars traveling 50kph/30mph unless you literally stop before entering every intersection.
You also don't have any control over how far behind other cars are. The only thing you can do is to drive faster or to let them by by stopping or changing lanes. The latter is highly dangerous in fast flowing traffic on single lane roads while the first will almost never help as the other car actively wants to go faster.
Being in absolute control is you can drive as defensively as you want, in the end a distracted idiot can take you out and the only thing you can do is minimize the risk.
Yes, but let's be honest: none of us has 360º eyes, and very few have split-millisecond reflexes. You control for the front, meanwhile somebody hits you from the rear; you look to the sides, and someone brakechecks you; and so on and so forth. You can reduce chances, but not eliminate them. Statistically, by the simple fact that you are sharing the road with hundreds of other (often terrible) drivers, the chance that one of them will fuck you up is incredibly higher than the chance of that happening on a public-transport vehicle in dedicated lanes (or even rails) driven by someone whose job is to safely move such vehicle from A to B every day.
You can't assure it, but again, you can control your own actions to help mitigate the danger of others being reckless. For example by driving defensively, scanning to the left and right when passing through an intersection, etc.
This goes straight to the article’s point that we tend to care about things that don’t actually matter as much when they seem worse. The hypothetical bus driver suicide seems bad if he takes out other people with him, it’s easy to imagine being a passenger with no control and meeting a terrifying doom. Let’s just nevermind that it almost never happens, and forget that suicide car drivers is a much, much more likely occurrence in the real world. And bad drivers accidentally taking out people near them happens way more often than anything to do with suicides. You’re far less likely to be killed on a bus than in a car, hands down. Wanting to drive a car instead simply highlights our flawed emotional thinking.
Even if that happened, how many people can seriously be injured in a bus accident in a city? Not talking of bus going through mountains and losing breaks
I just searched for “bus driver suicide” and it was a pretty even split between stories about drivers saving people who were trying to kill themselves, and drivers killing themselves. The latter was very much largely happening in solitary ways, except for one dude in China who drove his bus into a lake.
You assure your bus driver doesn't have a habit of popping pills by making them go through rigorous certification, give them decent wages, and punishing them harshly when they do pop pills.
You may object it's not perfect, but nothing is, and it does work. In fact, it works exactly the same way you can assure that your brake pad won't suddenly give way in front of a bus coming from your left.
I can be actually assured that no drunk driver will smash into my seat in a subway (the chance might not be zero but it's astronomically low). You may say it's not "control" because I didn't personally force all those drunk drivers out of railroads, but then again, I can't force them out of public roads either.