Originally Posted by
base2
Iride01 Good point about MADD making inroads with holding bars and bar-tenders accountable for the actions of the patrons they excessively serve.
Bringing this back to safety, why not hold road engineers responsible for how people use the product they design? It seems to me a NTSB level investivation and list of recommended best practices to avoid systemic fatal flaws in design or processes is appropriate. How many aviation, rail, or maritime fatality accidents are there? Very few. Right now, any investigation is left up to well meaning law enforcement (who are not engineers) to find fault with the affected parties, not root cause analysis. Until we get this level of scrutiny and hold road engineers responsible for the use/misuse of their designs we're merely chasing our tails. The road design failed to protect vulnerable road users
and the road design failed to signify the risk excessive speed and inattention posed to others to the driver so that he could operate his vehicle in an appropriate manner with due care and caution of the consequences.
Adding on to the above, our system of urban planning guarantees that whatever it is that you need is a long way away from where you are. This necessarily means that community gathering spaces where you can meet and socialize with people of different socioeconomic strata requires driving. We wonder why there is a drinking and driving problem? The two go hand-in-hand by design.
Proper infrastructure design and urban planning would have eliminated the opportunity for this driver to become a murderous felon.
This comment is almost entirely wrong. It might be quicker to observe the statements that are not wholly incorrect and nonsensical, but I will try the reverse anyway.
The timeline of the reduction in drunk-driving does not support the claim that MADD was in any way responsible, as I noted a couple comments earlier. The NHTSA also identified the cause, and it wasn't MADD ( or SADD, or any other group ).
Road engineers are not held responsible for dangerous driving because the latter cannot be prevented by road design. And even if it could, it would be financially idiotic to do so, compared with the far lower cost of simply using infrastructure properly.
As noted already, this is not an urban planning issue, since the site is not urban. And your impression of urban planning leads the reader to wonder if you have ever been to an urban area. Suffice it to say, you are completely wrong about the respective locations of people and destinations.
Finally, it is absolutely ridiculous to claim that infrastructure design can prevent a person at the wheel of a pickup truck -- or just about any other motor vehicle -- from killing with it. You would need walls -- everywhere. Surrounding every home and business, every outdoor space -- literally everywhere. You would need to remove all intersections. Such a proposal is obviously not possible, nor would anyone want to see it happen if it were.