staying safe

[topaz]

It's that time of the year again: the weather's warming up, everyone has a smile on their face and lots of people are out taking joy rides in the sun!

It can be lots of fun to go for a drive in the springtime, but it's also important to keep remember how to stay safe on the roads. After all, our public roads are not just for passenger cars. Many truck drivers share them too. While the rules of the road apply equally to the drivers of cars and trucks, it's a good idea to yield to truck drivers whenever possible. After all, most trucks are bigger, heavier and deadlier than your car.

So just remember to follow these tips to stay safe on the road:

• When passing a pedestrian or a slower-moving car, blow your horn courteously or shout "on your left" out of the car window to make sure they're aware of you.
• If a semi is coming up behind you, move over to let them pass.  You should pull off the road if necessary to give them a safe passing distance.
• Keep traffic flowing smoothly: if you're on a highway or high-traffic artery and are holding up the trucks behind you, be polite and take the next exit.  Follow side roads to your destination.
• Don't listen to the radio or carry on a conversation with passengers while you're driving.  You need your full attention on the road!

Above all, remember the simple laws of physics: in a collision between a car and an 18-wheeler.... the 18-wheeler always wins.

Comments

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Do you have any numbers on this? Safety equipment doesn't trump mass differentials, which are pretty substantial in both cases. (It looks like a loaded semi weighs around 20 times as much as a car, which is at least in the same ballpark as for the m part of mv and ½mv² as for humans vs cars. Humans have less padding, but car-truck collisions likely average higher speed given that a bigger fraction occur on the highway.) Even among cars of more comparable masses, small cars have substantially higher death rates in accidents than large ones (http://www.iihs.org/externaldata/srdata/docs/sr4404.pdf) in both multi- and single-car accidents.

But while I can find numbers (http://www.iihs.org/research/qanda/trucks.html) on car-truck fatalities (which, unsurprisingly, show that car-truck crashes are disproportionately fatal to car occupants relative to their numbers-- 4% of vehicles are large trucks, but they're involved in about a quarter of fatal multivehicle accidents, and 98% of the fatalities are to the people in the cars, not the truck), I can't find a comparison with car-bike crashes.

(Are there estimates of deaths per passenger-mile for bikes out there, broken down by type of accident? That might provide a starting point, at least.)

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

See my comment below. Probably not good statistics.