Notices by Shauna GM (shauna@social.coop), page 4

Singer goes deep into the work of civil engineer Eric Dumbaugh, who studies road engineering.

Most of the US road engineering guidelines were written in the 50s and 60s. This was in the middle of the auto industry's campaign to convince the public it wasn't to blame for the tens of thousands of people who were suddenly being killed by cars.

They blamed "jaywalkers", they blamed individual bad drivers, and they also blamed roads. So road engineers tried to design roads to prevent accidents.

Engineers tried to make a "forgiving roadside". They tried to make suburban+city streets like interstates: straight, wide, and with as few trees and poles and people as possible. But that only encourages cars to treat city streets like interstates.

"Those curves, trees, and benches that engineers removed had actually been making drivers slow down to avoid the risk these hazards presented—without all that, drivers felt less at risk and more in control" so they drove faster & killed more people.

You might think road engineers would update their guidelines, but apparently they haven't!

Moving on. How do road engs determine the speed limit for a road? Turns out they measure how fast cars are already going on it Usually about 85% of the cars are going the same speed, and 15% are going faster. They set the limit at that threshold between the average speed and the 'fast car' speed.

"We look at how fast cars are going and we assume that is the safe speed of the roadway" says Dumbaugh

Singer also discusses the White Male Effect. "White men felt the
least threatened by every [kind of accidental risk], from nuclear waste to suntanning to plane crashes." This was particularly true of "white men who were wealthier, more educated, and more politically conservative."

This isn't rich white men being reckless. They are accurately perceiving that they're at less risk.

How many people does this methodology for setting speed limits kill? We don't know!

In 2018 9,000 people died in crashes attributed to speeding. But more than 36,000 people were killed in traffic accidents. If any of those accidents were caused by a road that was given too high a speed limit, it wouldn't be labeled as caused by speeding.

And if you thought the process for setting speed limits was bonkers and reckless, wait until you hear about crosswalks!

Guess how they decide where to place crosswalks! Whatever you're thinking, it's not callous enough.

"the rules actually discourage installing crosswalks or pedestrian walk signals at intersections unless the risk of an accident is extreme. According to those rules, a lower-risk way across a street—like a crosswalk and traffic signal—is only warranted if one hundred people cross a street every hour for four hours. **Ninety-nine people running across the highway is not enough of a risk.**"

Given how roads are designed, speed limits set, and crosswalks placed, I have to agree with Dumbaugh when he calls road engineering a "fraud discipline".

Why is it so bad? One cause might be education. The majority of traffic engineering programs in the U.S. "do not have a single course that covers the issue of road safety".

One study found that less than 25% of programs said they offered a safety course, and of those, a third didn't actually offer one.

Singer lays out a long and grotesque list of accidental injuries, all of which are more likely to happen to you if you're Black, Latino, Indigenous and sometimes Asian.

Indigenous people are most likely to die of every single kind of accident except exposure to smoke and fire (where they're edged out by Black people) and "death by falling, a subcategory which is fatal mainly for older adults. To die by accidental fall, you need to live a long life, which is less likely if you’re Indigenous."

Singer makes a really good point about how technologies can magnify harm:

"Applied to a whole system, the consequences of misperceiving risk get multiplied across the population [...] The risk perception of a person with power can create dangerous conditions for us all."

This is absolutely something us software devs need to grapple with. Silicon Valley is obsessed with scale, but as tools and systems scale, so does the potential harm of what might otherwise be small errors and oversights.

Ch 5 tackles stigma:

"While you may see an accidental overdose as different from a car accident, in many respects it is not," Singer writes.

"An accidental overdose happens when dangerous conditions stack up—addictive drugs marketed as nonaddictive, a lack of access to health care, or the threat of criminal prosecution if you call for help. [...] Stigma is what doctors call a “fundamental cause” of health disparities—an inescapable reason why some people die by accident and others do not."

The driver was charged with a hit and run. But, shockingly, Nelson too was blamed. She was charged with vehicular homicide. Again: she and her children were hit by *somebody else's car*. An all-white jury convicted Nelson, a Black woman, but after media attention arose the judge offered a retrial and she ended up sentenced to a year's probation.

Blaming Nelson may seem absurd. Blaming the driver may seem fair. But, Singer warns us, blaming either of them lets the system off the hook.

Stigma gives rise to absurd situation where it is far easier to prescribe addictive drugs than drugs that treat addiction.

Doctors need no special training to prescribe OxyContin, but for buprenorphine, an opioid substitute which facilitates safe recovery, "doctors must fill out a pile of paperwork, get a special waiver from the Drug Enforcement Administration, and undergo an eight-hour training session. After all that, they’re only permitted to prescribe to a limited number of patients."

Nelson's family crossed the street where they did because it was where the bus stop was. The nearest crosswalk was 20 min out of the way.

In the aftermath of the "accident", traffic engineers inspected the place where Nelson's child died. They decided there were not enough pedestrians to justify installing a crosswalk or a traffic light.

Meanwhile in the greater Atlanta area, a quarter of all pedestrian fatalities occurred within 100 ft of a bus stop, and over half occurred within 300 feet.

Bias and stigma also influence who gets access to buprenorphine. Doctors are 35 times more likely to prescribe it to white people than to black people.

This even though overdoses among black people are rising faster than overdoses among white people.

Singer writes: "In accidents, stigmas stack up, and race trumps them all."

In Chapter 9, Singer quotes Susan P Baker, who tells us her approach to accident prevention: make the world safe for drunks.

“The bottom line is if you make this world safe for drunks, you make it safe for everybody. If you focus on making the world safe for the average, reasonably smart, sober person, then the drunks, the sleepyheads, the guy who is worried about his child’s operation and trying to get home in time for it, it is not going to be safe for them.”

Singer describes a vicious cycle wherein Black people are more likely to be harmed or killed in accidents due to systemic causes (manufactured vulnerabilities) but are then more likely to be blamed for it, as individuals and as a race.

According to scholars Barbara Fields and Karen Fields, this is a form of "racecraft": when racism itself makes race seem more real.

Fields & Fields wrote a book about Racecraft, which is now on my reading list: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/233136/racecraft-by-barbara-j-fields-and-karen-e-fields/

On to the last chapter, "Accountability".

When Boeing created the 737 Max it had some problems. It was designed to be more fuel-efficient, but ended up less aerodynamic. Rather than redesigning the plane, Boeing created some automated software, MCAS, which made the plane easier to fly.

Singer writes: "To cover for the plane’s poor maneuverability, the software would sometimes push down the plane’s nose without input from the pilot. If this software failed, Boeing expected the pilot to fix it"

CW for child death.

There are two diagnoses doctors use when babies die in bed. One, SIDS, is a medical condition. The other is "accidental suffocation and strangulation in bed" (ASSB).

Diagnoses of SIDS are generally declining, and diagnoses of ASSB are generally on the rise. But SIDS rates are falling faster and ASSB rates rising faster among people of color.

Researchers hypothesize this is because doctors are more willing to blame parents of color for the death of their children.

Black, Latino and Indigenous pedestrians are more likely to be struck and killed by drivers. Relatedly, research shows that drivers are less likely to yield to black pedestrians.

Research also shows that people asked to place the role of a police officer are more likely to "accidentally" shoot black figures over white figures.

"To review: Boeing built a plane that was difficult to fly, then added software that autocorrects these difficulties, but decided that if that software fails, the pilot should save the day by figuring out how to fly the difficult-to-fly plane."

They didn't even tell the pilots about the software.

The pilot of the first crashed 737 Max spent his final minutes "paging through the pilot manual, trying to determine what was going wrong. This was futile; any mention of MCAS had been removed."