Safe Speed Forums

Now you are having us on BW, aren't you? The figures relate to pedestrian casualties. The number of people in the vehicle is irrelevant, unless perhaps if you are weighing up some other alleged, non-safety benefits against the safety issue??!!



How heartless!

Yes, SCE, that's the only way to look at it - it's a dead simple cost/benefit trade-off. A bus might have more risk but carries several people, so more people get where they want to be with less total risk than if they all drive cars. It’s a no brainer, except to the ABD, who are fools for trying to pass this stuff off as genuine!

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If you have a transport system, the number of people transported is rather important!

PS: The ABD should be ashamed to look at vehicle miles in isolation, rather than the big picture. What could be thier motivation? Oh, I know, perhaps they want to make cars look good. But surely they would never be so biased?

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Is there something wrong with your eyesight, BW.

I repeat - it is about the risk to PEDESTRIANS!!

If you're looking at risk to vehicle occupants, you look at bn passenger-km.

If you're looking at risk to non vehicle occupants, you look at bn vehicle-km.

It's no consolation if you're mown down by a bus to know that it was carrying 36 passengers

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

I feel very, very unhappy about saying this , but Basingwerk is right - 36 passengers in the bus is relevant. Were all 36 driving by car, then there would be 36 cars versus 1 bus on the road. This needs to be taken into account.

However, I think it is very unlikely that a stream of 36 cars is more than slightly more likely to hit a pedestrian in the first place that 1 car, as pedestrians are not in the habit of walking straight into fast moving queues of traffic.

Has anyone taken into consideration just how many of these pedestrian fatalities are bus passengers?

No Basingwerk isn't right. IF we were talking about 'modal shift' as a method for saving pedestrians, it WOULD be right to talk about risk posed to a pedestrian per passenger carried.

But we're not talking about modal shift. We're talking about road safety. We should be talking about ways of making buses safer for pedestrians not imagining pie-in-the-sky ways of forcing people out of their cars.

Even if we were talking about modal shift, the average number of bus passengers is 7.something and the average number of car occupants is 1.6. The buses are STILL considerably more dangerous to pedestrians per passenger mile. So modal shift to buses is likely to kill more pedestrians. That's one more good reason for not doing it.

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Paul Smith
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The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

You don’t have to wait til it happens to do something - if there are less vehicles carrying more passengers, it is a consolation to have less chance of being mown down!

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It would be nice for your argument if the bus passengers could drive their cars while they are on the bus, but, even in Topsey Turvey world, they can't.

Look at the big picture and you will see that busses use less bandwidth to carry more traffic, so even given greater risk, it is worthwhile - unless you want more gridlock and danger. People on busses are travelling and they are not in cars. Where in these ABD figures is this accounted for - that's right, it's not!

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It is about the cost of travel versus the the benefits. If we can scale up the number of people who travel without a linear increase in risk, that is a clear benefit to anybody! These figures don't show that, and so they are bogus and/or misleading. Aren't they?

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Good man. Let's give it to 'em, spanky!

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I think you're wriggling despite being well and truly on the skewer.

The ABD are rightly complaining about the poor performance of buses - not as a transport mode - but as an input to road safety.

No one (except perhaps you) is suggesting that the solution is to get people out of buses and into cars, although if we did the indications are that considerably fewer pedestrians would die.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

But if such a modal shift came about, then the figures quoted would change and the demographics of vehicles on the roads would change and hence the magnitude of associated risks would change. The end result may well be a safer road network.

Consider the ultimate extreme of the argument, if there were no vehicles on the road there would be no risk to pedestrians whatsoever. More vehicles means more chance of being in conflict with one. Buses with loads of people on = less cars with fewer people in, ergo a net gain in road safety.

Doesn't necessarily follow. Over the past 40 or so years there has been a correlation between increased car usage and reduced casualties. Obviously there are other factors at work, but there's an argument that there is a "critical mass" effect in operation.

Generally speaking, lightly used roads have more accidents per bn v/km than busy ones, so thinning out the traffic wouldn't reduce accidents in the same proportion.

And if you're a bus passenger, by definition you're also a pedestrian for part of your journey, which is, mile for mile, far more dangerous than travelling in a bus or a car.

If there were no private cars or motorcycles on the roads whatsoever, I wouldn't be surprised if total casualties were the same or higher than at present, but much more heavily weighted towards pedestrians and cyclists than motor vehicle occupants.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

I wonder if there's a country, comparable to the UK in terms of driver training and temperament of its people, where public transport use is significantly higher than ours whose accident data we could compare with our own.

The Netherlands. Their accident rate is slightly worse than ours, IIRC. And they don't have "challenging" roads like the Cat & Fiddle.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

Are you seriously suggesting that more people on buses equates to less traffic?

Just indulge me for a moment while I tell you a little story.

Let's imagine that, from tomorrow onwards, 50% of people who commute by car decide to use the bus instead (that's assuming that there's anywhere near enough buses available to accommodate them all - but that's another story)
Up until today, the congestion has made your journey to work a half an hour longer than it should be, and you've been leaving home an hour earlier than necessary in order to make sure you're at work on time (rather arrive at work a half-hour earlier than be sacked for been late for the umpteenth time)
So you get up really early, and resign yourself to sitting in the traffic, all bleary eyed. And when you do get to work, through your office window you see that the traffic only starts dying down about two hours after you arrive. Things could be worse, you think.
But now tomorrow arrives, and you set out at your usual time. Immediately you notice that the roads seem a lot emptier, except for the two buses ahead of you spending several minutes trying to negotiate a corner in a narrow street. You get onto the through road and it's practically deserted. One thing you have noticed is that there are long queues of a few hundred people standing at the bus stops you pass. You turn into another road, and are almost immediately stopped behind a bus - the last of ten buses waiting their turn at a bus stop. You can't pass because of the islands in the road, so you just have to wait for about 10-15 miutes while the buses load up their passengers. You make a mental note to avoid that road in future.
But, for most of the way into work, it's plain sailing, and you get to work in very good time. The next day the same thing happens.
Now you start thinking that, as your journey time has reduced so much, you can leave the house later in the morning - you can sleep later and won't be so tired. Your journey time is also more consistent, so you don't have to arrive at work well before time. So you start leaving home about an hour later than you used to, and everything looks rosy.
This carries on for about a week or so, but now you notice that the roads are starting to look busy again, and after several weeks your journey time has crept up to almost what it was again. Now you're sitting in heavy traffic every morning again, compounded by the fact that you're now constantly stuck behind a bus, or queue of buses. And you're back to setting the alarm for the crack of dawn. And it's just as difficult to find parking - with all those extra buses, they decided to get rid of half the on-street parking places for bus lanes.
The only upside you've noticed is that the traffic starts dying down an hour after you arrive at work, instead of two. Doesn't worry you, though - you're comfy in your office.
What happened? Simple. Most other people started thinking like you, and started sleeping later and leaving home later - with the result that although there were less cars on the roads, it didn't make much difference to the number of cars on the road at any one time.

Another few points you may have missed:

1) as mentioned by others, buses spend a lot of their time carrying a lot less than their full passenger load.

2) buses tend to do most of their miles in built-up areas - in close proximity to pedestrians, whereas cars tend to do a greater mileage outside built-up areas.

3) buses create more pollution than the cars they replace, and are also a more expensive mode of travel than cars - it costs the economy more.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-bus, just anti the attitude that public transport is a panacea (buses=good, cars=bad)

A few years ago, they 'remodelled' the centre of Bristol - to improve pedestrian safety and bus travel. Since then, there have been several pedestrian fatalities - where there were hardly any before. And, guess what? Virtually all pedestrian fatalities have been down to buses.
My wife very nearly became a victim of a bus - on a contraflow bus lane in a one-way street. Not only does one not really expect to see a bus in a bus lane, with them spending so much time empty, but one certainly doesn't expect one to come from the wrong direction.

Cheers
Peter

If the figures are indeed 7 passengers per bus, and 1.6 passengers per car, then the way to improve pedestrian safety is get ereryone out of the buses, so they don't run anymore! From a wider point of view, the number of passengers is definitely relevant, as you have to weigh up the danger to pedestrians from the bus with the danger that would be there were people not on the bus, and vice versa.

However, is any of this research taking into account the areas where buses are driving, in comparison to the areas where cars drive?



Before any reasonable conclusions can be drawn, this has to be quanitified.

OK, but what proportion of those accidents are caused by buses etc, and which by cars?

Actually, I don't actually believe an answer to that question helps in any real way, don't know why I asked them original in the first place

With many interdependent factors, so many of which change over the decades that historical comparison loses it's weight, it's almost impossible to try and predict what would happen if bus transport re-asserted it's dominance.
The best we can do is design scenarios, which will always prove the point one way or the other depending upon who dreams them up in the first instance

The whole point of the probationary period IS to get licenses out of the hands of people too immature (or otherwise unable) to drive. I expect that they will use busses, trains and things more often.

r11co claims that it would cost more lives to scrap the probationary period because (he thinks) busses are dangerous!

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