Road design, safety and Vision Zero

[danbrotherston]

Your analogies are wrong.  I hate to break it to you but we do accept tainted water in the same way we accept car accidents.  And we accept people dying in fires and people dying from lack of healthcare intervention.  And we even accept bridges collapsing.  Of course all of this is if you use ‘accept’ to mean we know these things are going to happen because guaranteeing their prevention isn’t practical or possible.

 So we set rules for driving that are a trade off between safety and cost/convenience/etc.  And we set rules for inspecting water that is a trade off between safety and cost/convenience/etc.  And we set building codes that are a trade off between safety and cost/convenience/etc.  And we set rules around how healthcare is delivered and what procedures are covered for people that is a trade off between safety and cost/convenience/etc.

And in all cases we know the rules will fail us some percentage of the time.

Edit: I mean, I’d just love to hear how you think our transportation systems should work where don’t have to accept that people will die.  Hell, even the LRT is almost certainly going to kill someone at some point.  What rules do you think we should have for the 401?  Should it be closed and driving outlawed?  What speed limits will our trains have (since faster trains mean more people will die too)?  Like how do you think our society could even function without rules that are going to kill some people?

It sounds like you don't know how engineering works. When a bridge collapses, the cause is investigated, and policies implemented to ensure it does not occur again.  Just because engineers are human and not perfect, does not mean that we accept failure, it simply means that we learn from it.

We don't learn from failure in our traffic system, hell, we don't even consider it a failure, people dying is part of the expected outcome.  No modern bridge has ever been constructed with the expectation that it will collapse any percentage of the time, yet we construct intersections with the expectation that it will kill x people per year.

Airplanes are a more direct comparison.  Yes, airplanes crash.  When they do, we investigate why and how, and then eliminate the possibility, either through design changes, policy changes, any number of other changes.  We do not accept that any crash is inevitable or unavoidable.  And the "inconvenience" isn't a concern either. When the 787 MAX was determined to be defective, they were removed from service.  It was inconvenience, many people were temporarily stranded, large companies suffered substantial losses.  But we chose to do it because the idea of an airplane crashing is intolerable.  Yet on our roads, we have the equivalent of a fully loaded 747 crashing every single week, and we don't even care.

This absolutist belief that we must accept failure, because anything else is impossible is not shared by any engineering discipline except traffic engineering.