adamzerner's Shortform

Biff Wiff

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Something kinda scary happened a few days ago. I was walking my dog and was trying to cross at an intersection. There's a stoplight which was red, and a cross walk which was on "walk". But this car was approaching the crosswalk really quickly. You could hear the motor rev and the driver was accelerating.

I didn't enter the crosswalk. I put my hand up to catch his attention. He came to a quick stop. I gave a shrug like "what are you doing". He gave a similar shrug back. Then after I crossed, he floored it right through the stop light that was still red, only to come to a stop light one block away that was also red.

It wasn't actually a close call. I looked before entering the crosswalk and wasn't at risk of getting hit. But I feel like it was a close call in a different sense.

I'm a very careful street crosser, but even I fail to look both ways sometimes when the crosswalk signal is on "walk", especially when visibility is poor. If there's a parked car or something that is blocking my view of oncoming traffic, sometimes I just go. What if this were one of those situations?

And furthermore, I've had a ton of similar encounters where a car seemingly would have hit and killed me if I weren't paying attention. I think it was a few weeks ago when I was walking on the sidewalk and a car jolted out of a parking garage without looking for pedestrians. If I had continued into the car's path -- an easy mistake to make -- I seemingly would have been ran over and killed.

But I don't think this logic actually adds up normality. The logic implies that vastly more people will get run over and killed than we actually observe. Given the number of close calls I've had in my life, it implies that I should probably be dead. And given how much safer and more cautious I am than other people, it implies that many of them would also be dead.

So then, I don't think these "close calls" are actually all that close. I'm just not sure why.

The stats I could find were for reported injuries, so maybe a decent proportion of "actually hit by a car" doesn't cause serious enough injuries to report?

Also the stats were for everyone in US. You might also be overestimating how often normal people walk places. I'd guess we're both outliers in how much we walk places. And some of the people included in the stats are extremely old people and babies.

5JBlack1y

I haven't experienced anything like 5-10 close calls per year. I've experienced about 3-5 in my life so far. I'd expect about 1 in 100 or so of incidents as close or closer to be actual hits, and that may be overestimating. In every case that I can remember, there were at least two factors that (narrowly, but quite definitely) prevented being hit. Even if they had, none of the incidents were likely to have been fatal and probably not even very injurious. The only pedestrian-car collision I've ever personally seen was a child running directly across a road in front of a speeding car from between parked cars on their side of the road. If the child wasn't running, the driver would likely have had time to swerve. If there were no parked cars, they would likely have seen the child approaching the road. If the car was being driven at a normal speed for the road, the driver may have had more time to stop or evade. Fortunately the child suffered no injuries beyond abrasions and bruises.

6JBlack1y

I'd expect the baseline denominator to be "number of times a pedestrian crosses a roadway". Drivers blast through red lights more frequently than you might expect. However, they almost all do it when there aren't any pedestrians crossing or any other cars on their road, because the presence of stopped vehicles or crossing pedestrians in the road ahead is a much stronger visual prompt than a more abstract light that isn't even in their path. The most dangerous case is where the road ahead of the car is currently completely clear, but someone is about to step into the road (or a car is about to enter the intersection from a side road). Likewise pedestrians almost always notice cars not slowing down to stop, even when they have a walk signal and are about to cross. Cars in high speed motion are somewhat noisy even without combustion engine noise, even when the pedestrian can't see the road. So a pedestrian collision usually needs all five of: inattentive driver, a road with no obvious visible obstacles, a pedestrian that doesn't notice the car either, entering the road on the same side, within a narrow time window around when the car passes through. Even then, most impacts are not fatal (~10% from the linked site). A car coming out of a parking garage almost certainly won't kill if it hits, because most impacts that kill pedestrians are at substantially greater speeds. Also almost all are "glancing" hits that throw the pedestrian aside due to the pedestrian only being partly in the path of the car at the time of impact. I too have experienced a number of "near misses" without actual collision, and that's exactly what I would expect given the statistics.

adamzerner's Shortform

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adamzerner's Shortform

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