Road design, safety and Vision Zero

[neonjoe]

I think the number of expected injuries is plainly due to the fact that the squishy things between the wheel and the seat bring upon too much uncertainty to allow for a zero rate. Those squishy things often operate the vehicle outside of the norms for the designed conditions, speed, acceleration, deceleration, attention. Self driving cars will make the roads safer but there’s always the human element involved. A bridge isn’t designed to fail but if human hijacks a tank and runs into it it may, if the engineer had this case as part of the variables included in the tolerances we would either have designs that are much much heavier or there would be a tolerance for failure based on the fact that tank collisions are now part of the design variables.