Enlarge / The intersection of Interstates 10 and 610 in Houston, Texas, throughout night rush hour. (credit score: Getty Pictures)
Statistics assist inform tales, and one typically touted by technologists and engineers and cops and even the federal authorities informed a story. The statistic: 94 p.c of US visitors crashes are the results of human error. The quantity felt proper. It additionally appealed to a really American thought: that people are in control of their very own destinies. Quite than place the burden of street security on techniques—the best way roads are constructed, the best way vehicles are designed, the best way streets are ruled—it positioned it on the driving force, or the walker, or the bicycle owner.
The statistic was primarily based on a misunderstanding of a 2015 report from the US Division of Transportation’s Nationwide Freeway Site visitors Security Administration, which is in control of US street security. The report studied crashes between 2005 and 2007 and decided that the driving force was the “vital cause” behind the overwhelming majority of crashes. However a driver’s actions had been usually the final in an extended chain of occasions. The motive force’s fiddly motion of the wheel, in different phrases, was the ultimate factor to go incorrect—a course of that began with, maybe, the surveying of the freeway, or the street design laid out on the desk of an engineer, or the coverage crafted by lobbyists many years in the past that made it unattainable for anybody to get throughout city and not using a automotive.
Earlier this month, after pleas from researchers, advocates, and one other Biden administration official, the US DOT nixed that 94 p.c statistic from its web site. And on Thursday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg started to inform a really totally different story about US street deaths. “Human fallibility shouldn’t result in human fatalities,” he stated throughout a press convention in Washington, DC. His objective, he stated, is zero street deaths.
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