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The problem is, at this point, mostly unsolvable in the "it's trivial for a state to co-ordinate this, but it makes life a lot worse if they do" sense.
Sure, you can legislate away the dashboard screens (and every control moved there is a strict malus to safety, but the manufacturers like them because it's cheap for them to install, expensive for you to replace, and bakes in obsolescence thanks to how tech companies work). But if you do that, drivers just fall back on their phones like they were before they bought a car with the screens and that's even worse.
And all the other solutions don't work. You could make phones read GPS constantly and just refuse to work above a certain speed, but that means you can't use your phone on the bus, train, or as a passenger and it also kills the battery. Explicit go/no-go zones don't work because they still don't help passengers and are abusable by governments.
I think the best solution at this point is an extension of industry trend: mandate (directly or indirectly) that new phones must function as physical keys for cars. You surrender your phone to the ignition switch (which captures it until you turn the car off), which has a bit of extra hardware that still functions in this way if its battery has died. There are a bunch of complications that you could use to get around this (mostly to do with the requirement for an extra physical key) but it mostly boils down to the car being completely dependent on the phone being in the ignition to play music, display a map, and the other conveniences (maybe calls and text-by-voice-only; while I get that these also increase reaction time substantially you at least have your head up) because it will only pair with other phones if the driver surrendered theirs to start the car.
All of the EVs worth buying out-accelerate even the higher end of gas-powered sports cars. It's not the "
gun nutsgearheads" you need to worry about havingspecial guns that hold more than 10 rounds in a magazineamazing acceleration because a significant number of normal people who bought new cars over the last few years have them for reasons mostly unrelated to those performance numbers.Of course, they're also probably the worst cars to have that power because they're way harder to stop- a Tesla weighs an extra ton over a comparable gas car- and because of that mass, they "win" when colliding with a normal car (something that isn't obvious like it is for SUVs).
Sure, you could go tiered licensing to drive them (and most EVs and especially Teslas are built in such a way that crippling their acceleration would be trivial with an OTA update), but now you're directly fighting the EVs-at-any-cost political faction, you damaged the ability of existing owners to quietly enjoy their property, and most people aren't going to bother (the people that would already drive fast gas-powered cars, because they value the ability to turn corners more than raw acceleration).
SUVs aren't going to ever go away mainly because the population is aging and those people find climbing up easier than climbing down (and they're generally above most of the LED high-beams that might as well be military dazzlers, and give the illusion of better visibility because collision standards have made it so you can't see much of anything out of modern cars), so you'll probably have to take that class of vehicle from their cold dead hands.
I think you're making this problem a lot more complicated than it actually is. A lot of deaths could be prevented with a few classes of changes: separate cars from pedestrians and cyclists, and use road design to encourage safety. People gravitate to driving at the speed which feels safe; narrower lanes and roads naturally encourage slower driving, because you're closer to other vehicles, roadside barriers, etc. There's a huge number of other things you could implement as well. And if you assume that people will screw up, it becomes clear that you should design infrastructure to be safe even when someone does make an error.
Over-indexing on phones specifically doesn't do anything about speeding, other forms of distraction, drunk driving, or just regular old human error.
Not just bikes has some videos on traffic calming and related topics:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bAxRYrpbnuA&ab_channel=NotJustBikes
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bglWCuCMSWc&ab_channel=NotJustBikes
https://youtube.com/watch?v=_ByEBjf9ktY
Car size is also an issue, but this paragraph is pretty baffling to me. Given how high some SUVs and trucks are, I don't believe for a moment that they're easier for anyone with limited mobility than a sedan or smaller SUV or crossover--you have to climb up and down in any case anyway, to get both in and out. Safetywise, SUVs are a defection that only become "necessary" if others already have them; ditto for the issue with elevated lights. If you limit the number of high and heavy vehicles on most roads, and how bright their lights are, then much of the motivation to buy them goes away.
Thinking about this harder, maybe it's all nothingburger.
After all, compared to 10 and 20 years ago, distracted driving rates are way up, vehicle performance is way up (cars have turbochargers they didn't have before, and cars with 400+ horsepower doing 0-60 in 4 seconds didn't exist below 50,000 USD until just a few years ago), blind spots are way bigger, night driving is even more difficult, and the average vehicle is both heavier and taller.
Because of those things we should expect harder and more deadlier crashes.
But that's not what the data shows. Compared to 10 years ago, the rate of traffic fatalities in the US dropped by a quarter (per mile travelled). So if all of those things actually did increase fatalities significantly, and it seems like a reasonable thing to assume would increase, our safety standards are clearly outpacing any and all of the negative effects they have (and to think that the average car on the road today, being made in 2010, doesn't even have the infotainment systems that allow you to send a text without looking down).
So maybe the best solution really is "nothing, just have more and more technology to make distracted and high-speed driving safer and safer available at lower and lower pricepoints". I'm not that happy with that because those safety standards make me feel I'm more likely to cause an accident because of reduced visibility inherent to those safety standards (extra-thick A pillers, huge blindspots) and all that tech getting damaged makes collision repair far more expensive, but clearly they're having a positive effect in aggregate so maybe I'm complaining too much about it.
The US saw over 40,000 traffic fatalities in 2021 and car crashes are one of the leading causes of death for young people. This hardly seems like a nothingburger (do you think crime is a nothingburger? Homicides are something like half that or less).
What data? The table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year seems to show either flat or slightly increasing deaths per million VMT, depending on whether you're looking before or after the pandemic as your end point. It's even worse if you look at pedestrian deaths, which are way up. And heavy SUVs are contributing to this trend.
Certain technological innovations have improved the ability of vehicles to either alert the driver or protect them in case of a crash. Also, as 2020 showed, congestion can reduce automobile fatalities. These developments are offsetting the effects you mention, but that doesn't mean that distracted driving and heavier vehicles aren't a problem.
Based on the data I've seen, the aggregate effect is negative, but also there's no need to couple these things. Repeal CAFE, make narrower lanes and smaller parking spots, add traffic calming, harsher penalties for distracted or reckless driving leading to injury, maybe even tax heavier vehicles.
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