this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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Two way roads.
If they didn't exist today and someone came up with the brilliant idea of having people in control of machines (cars or bikes) moving in opposite directions at 50mph, separated by a few feet and a painted line, it would be dismissed immediately.
I drive on a lot of rural roads in the UK, mainly Wales, most of the time I'm just happy when the road has space for two cars to squeeze through and some visibility for what's coming around the corner of that rural lane. Actual physical lines separating the lanes? Oh boy it's my birthday. Yet with all that, we have a death rate per 100 million miles of just over a third of somewhere like the US, so I'd imagine the size of cars and inadequate licence requirements are probably bigger issues for road safety
I can't remember which episode it was but in the Cautionary Tales podcast by Tim Harford a guest once explained that cars are too safe. Through the years we blamed cars for not being safe when people get hurt but few alterations were made to our behaviour if you campagne it to the advances they've made in car safety. If imminent death would follow everytime we made a mistake people would be more careful. That's how I feel about the roads in Wales. The lack of oversight made me be more cautious. That and the fact that I normally drive at the other side of the road.
The general concept you're describing is called Risk Compensation. It feels intuitively correct, but in whatever context it's been studied in almost all cases it turns out that the safety feature is actually better overall. Some people might be a bit riskier knowing about the safety net, but not enough to counteract the safety improvement.
Also - in the UK - road deaths go down over time, while miles driven goes up. Driving is getting safer. Cars are part of that, but so is road nd signal design and driver training.
It's so much safer to have an accident in a modern car than one from even just a few decades ago. There's no amount of better-than-what-we-have levels of driver awareness that can make up that gap.
Actually a positive correlation has been found between the amount of roadway lighting and car accidents. More streetlights cause more crashes.