alt Hacker NewsNormalizing by miles driven will take you to the wrong conclusions. It underestimates the extra deaths directly caused by the fact that we’ve built exurbs farther and farther away from where people work over the last 20-30 years.
So maybe deaths per mile would be similar, but we’ve pushed people further and further so they have to drive more miles, increasing the deaths due to poor design.
Building society in a way that we increase deaths due to poor planning, like making driving the only option for the majority of people, gets hidden by statistics like “per mile” or even speed limit changes, which are also more necessary as people need to go further to get to their daily activities, rather than everything being within a short walk or safe bike ride
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Not at all. Demonstrating that miles driven increases pedestrian deaths would be tremendously useful.
> Building society in a way that we increase deaths due to poor planning, like making driving the only option for the majority of people
It's not poor planning, it's what Americans want. Americans, by and large, do not want to live in dense neighborhoods or tiny homes like in many parts of Europe. You get that in places like NYC and quality of life in those places is atrocious.
It is not clear to me that exurbs would increase deaths, at least if we are still talking about pedestrians, because isn't most driving between the city and homes in the exurbs on freeways which generally do not have pedestrians?