General Road and Highway Discussion

[danbrotherston]

Accidents and traffic deaths are investigated.  All the time. And studies are done (you linked one!).  And improvements to cars and roads and regulations are constantly made.  But it’s entirely obvious that the model for bridge investigations or plane crashes is prohibitively expensive for individual car accidents.

It’s the same thing with healthcare.  We don’t investigate every death or mistake made in healthcare.  That would be an insane waste of resources with very fast diminishing returns.

Tainted water isn’t always prevented or investigated either.  It’s not just about limits of contaminants but about things like how often water systems need to be inspected.  Rules around private wells.  When boil water advisories are needed. Etc.

Aircraft accidents are still the same.  It’s much easier to investigate individual commercial plane crashes because there are way fewer of them than car crashes and the cost per crash is significantly higher. But the recommendations that come out are just more trade offs.  Never does anyone think their report is the one that will stop people from dying ever again.

And you still seem to think that there’s way more certainty in these things than there actually is.  If you really believe that a bridge collapse results in that type of failure never happening again, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Traffic collisions (as they are collisions not accidents) are NOT investigated in this way.  The police investigate with only one purpose, to assign fault under the law for the purposes of adjusting insurance claims.  There is no investigation what factors led to a collision or how it may be prevented in the future.  There is ONLY what the law says about insurance fault and nothing more.  Don't for a second believe the police or anyone is concerned with anything more than that.

Now there are other agencies that occasionally investigate collisions in aggregate, safety agencies in the US have investigated unsafe cars, but they concern themselves exclusively with the car, and no other aspect of our roads.  Our region investigates collisions but only when those collisions (and resulting injuries) are in excess of the "expected" number of deaths for that intersection.

Suggesting that investigating every crash as we do for an airplane (not what I suggested) is prohibitively expensive is kind of proving my point. There used to be many more plane crashes too, are you saying that we should have given up then as too expensive and not tried to make flying safer?

You claim there are trade offs, no, there aren't, yes, when we investigate a crash, the investigators and engineers must decide what they feel will make it safe to fly and that answer isn't "never fly a plane again"...that doesn't mean it isn't a trade off.  This absolutist view that the only way to be safe is to never fly isn't true. Sure, it's the only way to be sure you will not crash in an unforeseeable crash, but it doesn't mean that's the only way to avoid foreseeable and seen crashes.

No investigator or engineer will fly a plane that they think "ahh, we know it will crash an average of once a year"...that. never. happens.  Except in traffic engineering--that is literally the actual excepted standards--x people will die in crashes per year....it's fine...we designed ti that way.  Would you get in a plane that is designed to crash x times per year.