When drivers are the leading cause of dead children, AND when killing a kid with your car is considered to be a fault of the child (and their parents) and not the driver, it makes sense to think of the children indeed.
Yeah, we live on the backside of a circle with no through traffic and today I watched a teenager race around the circle going faster than 20mph for several laps. My driveway is sloped and balls roll into the road that my small children go after all the time. Its been a point of focus for me to convince them to check the road, stop, look both ways, ALWAYS, and make sure there are no cars.
Even if they dont clock it car, its my hope the driver sees them on the side while they pause to check. Them getting hit by a car in my own neighborhood is my biggest fear and also the most likely disaster that can probably befall them.
I also love transporting them in our van, so its just a very complicated issue. I wish our populace was more into walkable solution and more attentive at driving.
I'm talking about "Think of The Children™", for example falsely claiming that they're murdering children or asserting without evidence that anti-car policies would "stop the child murder".
But… they do. Policies that keep cars away from kids reduce the number of kids killed. And operating Large dangerous vehicles where kids are likely to be is wilful negligence, at best.
No they don't. That's as ridiculous as falsely claiming that peanuts murder children and that banning peanuts would "stop the child murder", or that bicycles murder children and that banning them would "stop the child murder". It's just disinformation and handwringing lies.
To be fair, motor vehicles are only the #2 leading cause of child deaths, right after guns [1]. I guess guns don't kill people either? Shrug.
Some interesting statistics:
"Rollins says every week in our country, 110 kids are hit by vehicles in parking lots and driveways.
“Picture 110 children standing in front of you. Every week, that’s how many children are being run over because drivers just can’t see them,” Rollins said.
Of those incidents, 60 of them are frontovers and 50 are backovers." [2]
If your point is on the semantics regarding the word “murder”, I’ll concede the point (though I still think driving dangerously, looking at a phone, etc where there are people walking and cycling is up there with “well I was bird hunting in downtown manhattan, I didn’t -mean- to hit anybody with buckshot!”).
But measures that separate kids from cars seem to be why kids are only a fifth as likely to be killed walking (and only a quarter as likely to be killed cycling) in 2003 vs in 1985 in the Netherlands. Do you propose an alternate causality?
My point is on the lies and misinformation around the meanings of the words used, yes. I was going to apologize for the miscommunication, but I looked back on my comments and see that they are all very short and clear about that.
> But measures that separate kids from cars seem to be why kids are only a fifth as likely to be killed walking (and only a quarter as likely to be killed cycling) in 2003 vs in 1985 in the Netherlands. Do you propose an alternate causality?
I don't propose anything. As I said, I wasn't judging the merits of policies.
Since I looked, the paper you link appears to be a study of England and Wales. In that case I would propose there is probably not much direct causality between the improving British numbers from 1985 to 2003 and the anti-car movement and resulting policies in the Netherlands.
It's quite possible that similar "anti-car" efforts in Britain contributed somewhat, but the paper don't necessarily support the conclusion AFAIKS. Not least because the numbers show car commute distances for children has increased 70% over the period and walking and cycling have declined 19% and 58%, so by that metric Britain has moved in the pro-car and anti-cycling/pedestrian direction in terms of transporting children.
But child vehicle passenger fatalities per mile have also decreased enormously. Better and safer cars, roads, better training and regulation and enforcement around drivers (reported drink-driving accidents declined by about 4x over a similar period despite increasing car miles driven https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-the-war-on-drunk-drivin...) have certainly had a big impact and would have almost certainly contributed somewhat to pedestrian and cyclist deaths. Better cycling practices, better bikes, safety gear, reflectors, lights, etc., might have helped too. How to untangle all the variables? You probably can't with superficial numbers like these.
With all that said this is really going off topic because I have nothing to really argue about one way or the other with respect to policy. Making cycling safer and infrastructure that lets more people cycle would be great. It would be also great for advocates and lobbyists of all types used facts and rational arguments rather than appeals to emotion, disinformation, guilt tripping,and lies.
Similar comments probably apply to the Dutch data, and they don't conclude a causal relationship with anti-car initiatives either, but seem to speculate on a bunch of different things which are similar to what I said.
You do realize now that bringing up those statistics in the first place did not address what I wrote though, right? And that in fact I explicitly said that I wasn't commenting on the merits of policies? I'll assume good faith that you just unintentionally couldn't follow the conversation.
> I fail to see any guilt tripping or disinformation?
I don't know what your question is. If you are genuinely interested in discussing my point, please re-read the thread from the beginning and I would then be happy to respond to comments that actually address what I wrote.
Yeah that's what I thought too until recently, this being one such example from 50 years ago which I why I commented on it. I just found it funny that it's always been around, despite the dogma that it's a uniquely "conservative" thing.
