A couple of researchers at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety have released a study of pedestrian crashes by type of vehicle. They've done this both nationally and for North Carolina. I don't know why North Carolina rates a separate study, and they didn't explain it, but let's take a look anyway:
Big vehicles are more dangerous than cars on left turns but about the same on right turns. When pedestrians dart into an intersection, minivans are more dangerous than cars but not pickups or SUVs.
This is peculiar. On a left turn you have plenty of visibility regardless of what you're driving. Conversely, on a right turn pedestrians can be close up and easy to miss if you're driving a pickup with a big hood. Ditto for darting pedestrians, but yet again pickups do fine even if they do have big hoods.
Now look at the two categories on the right. Once again, darting pedestrians don't cause many problems even though it seems like they should. But all big vehicles, and pickups in particular, seem to mow down lots of pedestrians who are just walking along. That's not a visibility thing.
With all that in mind, let's take a look at the national figures, which are quite different
The first thing you'll notice is that the numbers are way higher for left and right turns but about the same for everything else. Why?
I don't really understand any of this, and the paper doesn't address any of it. However, I have a guess that these results may be related less to the cars themselves than to the kind of people who buy them. Unfortunately, this theory fails since minivans, pickups, and SUVs attract very different kinds of buyers.
So I'm stumped.
Just a thought...
When you are a driver making a right hand turn you have to look left so you don't merge into a vehicle coming from the left and you look to the right because that's the direction you are turning. So you end up looking both ways (probably multiple times).
But when you are a driver making a left hand turn the traffic you need to worry about is incoming and you look left when you are about to make the turn.
My guess is that people making left hand turns forgot to check right for pedestrians and hit them when they attempt the turn. And vehicles with larger fronts would make it easier to miss pedestrians in your peripheral vision if you don't explicitly check for them before making a left turn.
Left hand turns are also more dangerous so people might be more focused on successfully negotiating the turn than looking for pedestrians. Even if they are trying to be safe, everyone has limited processing ability.
Yeah, I can't edit my post but I just read it and pedestrians shouldn't be on your right when you are making a left hand turn. Sorry about that.
They will be on your left crossing the lane where you want to go. So you will have the same problem. There's lots going on in a left hand turn and people miss the pedestrians. Maybe because they are farther away than they are when you are making right hand turns, or they are harder to see, or left hand turns demand more attention, or maybe for some other reason.
I can't remember if it's UPS or FedEx but I read one of them trains their AIs to minimize left hand turns in their drivers routes because they cause more accidents and burn more fuel. So the idea that left hand turns are more dangerous isn't new.
Blaine, I think you were right the first time for the case where there is no traffic light. Most intersections don't have traffic lights.
The closest I ever came to hitting a pedestrian was in exactly that situation.
Haven’t been to NYC in awhile but they had a big campaign about left hand turns being the most dangerous. This was part of there zero traffic fatalities initiative that lowered the NYC speed limit to 20 ( I think, it’s been awhile with the Covita). NYC pedestrians are a world unto their own..,,
Is it only that when turning right you're looking toward the right through the windshield, but when turning left you're looking left directly at the left frame of the windshield and also the side mirror attracting your attention?
It would be interesting to see the same study done for pedestrian crashes in the UK.
It's reversed. Right turns are more deadly.
Right turns might be more deadly for all cars. But we're studying the difference between smaller cars and the bigger vehicle types. Something seems to be leading to more danger, in the big vehicles relative to the smaller ones, on left turns.
I think you've got it. That big pillar to the left of the windshield is right in line with where a pedestrian crossing in the opposite direction will be. The driver almost has to be intentionally looking for them to see them. Of course, when we're driving, we should be intentionally looking every time, but some of us slip sometimes.
That's what gets in my way when I'm taking a left. I'm mainly watching the oncoming traffic and the pedestrian is blocked by the pillar.
Yes. That’s the problem with high traffic lefts. You are looking the cars. Since NYC started their zero initiative I have begun to make sure I double check for walkers or bikers when going left. Btw, when biking I trust no driver. Always avoid them and be cautious. When biking you realize most drivers are pathetic. Ok, not most but enough to kill you. You actually find out their are a lot of polite cautious drivers as well. Quite the dichotomy.
What about autonomous vehicles?
Have your buddies at Waymo felt right to divulge, or are the numbers that bad?
Hmmm.....
US numbers are for fatal crashes, so comparing ratio of total crashes by vehicle type to fatal crashes?
NC seems to be reporting change in total number of crashes, not fatal crashes, but there were more car involved crashes, so I'm not sure how the data is being normalized for miles driven by vehicle type. Maybe info in the appendix???
Most of the data is not significant, even a few cases with big differences, though the US "turning left" data is significant.
I agree with Blaine that when drivers are turning left there's a lot going on to distract them from watching out for pedestrians on top of everything else.
As for the differences between NC and entire US on right turns and walking along the roadway, my guess would be it's largely about suburban/rural vs urban differences, and specifically road patterns in the mid-South. Stats for the whole country should be heavily weighted toward urban incidents. But in the parts of NC that I've seen, suburban and rural roads often don't have sidewalks, they often meander, and there's a lot of tree cover so pedestrians are walking through alternating shadow and sun patches. And it can rain a lot too, which could have a big effect on visibility.
But as I think about it maybe sidewalks have as much as anything to do with it. Lack of sidewalks puts pedestrians in the streets at intersections, physically closer to the traffic, and not in a predictable spot where drivers would know to anticipate them. In fact the most telling statistic could be one that differentiates roads with sidewalks from roads that don't have them.
Road size and general design.
Another reason left turns could be more deadly is that, assuming the pedestrian who's hit is crossing the street that the driver is turning onto, the car has already built up significant speed. This is particularly true on wide, multilane streets.When I run across with the green, I'm constantly looking back over my shoulder for left turning vehicles which generally approach at high speed.
Left turns are dangerous for pedestrians because drivers are more focused on oncoming traffic than a pedestrian entering the street. Pedestrians on the driver's left who are traveling the same direction as the car are especially hard for drivers to notice. As a pedestrian nearly all my near misses were left turning vehicles on very crowded city streets. They are just so focused on zipping between oncoming cars, they don't notice the walk sign and the pedestrians.
I wonder how much vehicle design impacts this. We actually got rid of a car because the front pillars covered exactly where pedestrians and bicyclists would be as you approached an intersection. It was horribly unsafe to drive in urban areas where parked cars and buildings up close to the street meant you had limited advanced knowledge of pedestrians anyway.
For minivans there may also be issues with driver distraction. Screaming children can do that. Yet, of all the cars I've had, my minivan has resulted in far fewer "where the heck did that pedestrian come from" moments than other vehicles.
They hit more oncoming traffic turning left, too.
This rule is true for motorcycle collisions, too. They're hit by left turners more often.
I assume cars are just easier to stop, and collisions with right turners are less lethal, and therefore less reported.
Road design.
People turning left are not looking at the crosswalk that is 60 feet away from them because our roads (and stroads) are huge. It stands to reason that most crashes happen on the streets/roads that have the most traffic, which is not your 25mph residential streets but your 35mph (with 50mph design speed) 6-lane monstrosities. Not that we don't need those things, but we have an obsession with funneling traffic out of neighborhoods and towards "feeders" and "arterials" - this is fine to a degree, but we've gone too far with it. It doesn't help that it's integral to the suburban design experiment.
Anecdotally, there is a problem intersection 2 blocks from my house. I walk the dog through it often. Left-turners from a given direction (and right-turners in the reciprocal) are rarely paying attention to whether there are any pedestrians at the intersection/in the crosswalk. It's not even all that large of an intersection: a 2-lane road and a 3-lane road. People are just looking to blaze through and aren't watching.
Russian soldiers in tanks do a pretty good job of killing pedestrians too. Nuke the fuckers. I’ll trade south Florida and NYC for Moscow and St. Petersburg. It’s a fair trade.
Why are you going out of your way to bring something like this up in response to a post about car crashes?
What kind of sick person advocates for a nuclear holocaust?
Trolls.
Meh… it struck me as odd to debate the finer points of pedestrian safety under the circumstances. It’s a funny thing about obscure bloggers. They can navel gaze on these silly things while ignoring the catastrophe around them. Oh well. Coping mechanisms.
Drivers in NC *want* to pick off people walking along the road?
Don't laugh. I've heard a fair number of drivers talking about how much they hate those darned joggers and would clip them off, given the chance.
Could be where these vehicles are located to. When the last time you saw a pick-up in the city where the speed limits are slow?
The most dangerous left turn has gotta be 45 mph roads where someone is at full speed and doesn’t slow down when it’s already green. Those are more in the suburbs/smaller towns and I feel like larger trucks are more common there
No explanation why right turns aren’t more dangerous as well though
Maybe right turns are tighter so you have to slow down more for them?
There are no sedans in this study, only big vehicles and bigger vehicles. It would be useful to have "compact sedan" as the baseline vehicle category to compare the others against.
Cars are already the baseline, which is why the results are expressed as increase in odds relative to cars. Unless you think there is a significant difference in differentiating specific types of cars like.
They used two different sets of data, North Carolina state crash data and the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) for the US. An obvious reason for the difference is that different criteria were used to classify the incidents, or maybe they were reported by different groups of people, for exampl police vs traffic workers.
Left turns are more problematic for pedestrians because of the reason several people have mentioned - namely, the driver is looking to the left and fails to look back to the right to see if anyone from the right has started crossing (particularly at unsignalized in which the cross traffic has no stop sign).
Left turns are also more problematic for peds because (again especially at unsignalized intersections but also even at signalized intersections without protected left turn arrows in the cycle) left turning cars are focused on squeezing through moving "windows of opportunity" in the stream of oncoming traffic. As they try to time this window to complete their turn, they completely zone out on any pedestrians anywhere. This is how I myself usually find myself at risk of getting hit - crossing a multilane arterial intersecting with another multilane arterial that the state hasn't deemed dangerous enough (yet!) to install a proper left turn arrow, and so even when I do have a green light, I have to turn my head and often judge whether the car edging forward to turn left into my path actually sees me or not. (Often times, they just turn when car traffic allows and then come to a screeching, visibly-pissed-off halt when they realize I'm in the crosswalk.)
Timed traffic signals can give pedestrians a chance to cross before cars start turning. They probably cost a lot.
My procedure is to wave a car, truck, PU, Minivan through so I walk behind not in front of a vehicle - if possible. When driving and waving a pedestrian across I take my hands off the steering wheel. I have two big trucks and I try to stay out of trouble. Selling both. Anyone need a Dodge 3500 diesel PU?
When I am driving I have only one job - driving.
Apropos of nothing, Consumer Reports did a story several months back on how the increasingly tall fronts, not to mention long hoods, on pickups and SUVs will obscure most pedestrians crossing in front of the vehicle.
Agree with the concept of "concentrating" on left turns as others have said.
What is often "concentrated on" is making the left turn quickly enough to beat an oncoming vehicle through the intersection.
In the fraction of a second it takes to make that decision, the left turning car is totally committed.
If a pedestrian happens to be crossing the first reaction of the left turning vehicle is NOT going to be to stop, its going to be to make sure to make it through the left turn before being t boned by the oncoming car that the left turner has timed the turn to barely miss.
"The first thing you'll notice is that the numbers are way higher for left and right turns but about the same for everything else. Why?"
Same reason several have mentioned. Turning left, drivers tend to get tunnel vision focused entirely on the incoming traffic (which from a driver's point of view is where a direct impact would come from). All the near misses I've had as a pedestrian have been with drivers stopped at the intersection looking left without ever turning their head back to the right to check for pedestrians before they start moving. For cars turning right it isn't as bad because even if they are still focused on their left before turning, they instinctively turn their head to the right once they actually start moving, so they have a bit more time to notice pedestrians crossing the street.
As for the why the other three are about the same nationally, but not so in NC, I think that is purely the effect of washout. Impacts parallel to the road will be very dependent on local speed laws and zoning, so State by State the numbers will vary, and when polled together, they cancel each other. While turning impacts are more likely to be even across the board since speed laws are less likely to affect them.
Zoning differences is also why I think minivans have the highest odds of darting impacts at intersections both in NC and Nationally, since minivans are more likely to be used in greater proportion to other vehicles in zones where there are schools, parks, playgrounds, and other areas with higher pedestrian traffic involving minors, which are the more likely people to dart at intersections without looking.
The conclusion has to be left turns should simply be illegal.
In regards to pedestrians hit while walking along the road, a good question would be, How many of these occur at night and in places without street lights (or sidewalks)?
If you live in a well-lit area, as I do, it's easy to forget how pitch dark it can be at night, and how easy it is to out-drive your headlights.
Pingback: Raw data: Pedestrians and bicyclists involved in motor vehicle crashes – Kevin Drum
Error bars?
Speaking of common wrecks,
Roger Stone unveils a doozy of a plan to install Donald Trump as president,
https://www.rawstory.com/roger-stone-unveils-a-doozy-of-a-plan-to-install-donald-trump-as-president/
I often can't decide if this kind of thing is the result of too much imagination or not enough.
I'm not at all sure your interpretations are correct.
These are the INCREASED ODDS relative to cars. They don't say anything about how the odds of being in a pedestrian crash in NC vs the US total. They only say that the patterns for cars vs other vehicles are different in NC and the US.
There may be no good reason for that OR is may be that there are differences in the patterns for CARS in NC vs CARS in US that affect these patterns
Meh
Ok KD let me clear a few things up (or make them more confusing)
NC is a right turn on Red (after stop) state We have pedestrian and bicycle crossings that are timed but if you are turning RIGHT on red you have to be very careful to watch for pedestrians and riders who are crossing while the autos are stopped but the RTOR allows for right turners to make the turn.
In addition we also have left turns on flashing caution (yellow arrow) at MOST intersections. Which means that if you approach an intersection and you are turning left - and in the turn lane you can proceed IF there are no cars coming the other way through that intersection so long as you exercise caution. Once the light changes to solid yellow you are supposed to know that it will turn red momentarily. Of course you can proceed of the light is a solid green arrow
We like to kill people here in NC............no matter which way they turn it seems
And most people can't remember all that so they just blast on through?
and we also have the 'Carolina squat' on pickup trucks (front end jacked up higher than the back end) ...
Doesn't that leave your truck nuts dragging on the ground?
I just live here. but yeah, it can be tricky.
Right on red after a stop just tells the entitled drivers to slow down a bit it seems.
Its the left turn on flashing caution that is really dangerous. At least to me it is
But what does "Walking along roadway" mean? In my neighborhood, it means walking out in the middle of the damn street at night instead of using the sidewalk.
Don't really have a whole lot of sympathy for that.