Streets haven't gotten wider since then either. Maybe less of a problem in the US where everything is planned around humongous fire trucks, but in the EU if you had a street that could easily accommodate two moving lanes with parking on either side, that has basically narrowed down to one moving lane.
Also reminds me of all the regulation around car lights - you literally specified the beam pattern light intensity color and what not, but you couldn't be bothered to narrowly restrict the height off the ground? Great, now everyone in a sedan is being blinded by all sorts of SUVs and trucks. Utter failure.
To add to it, they should put a limit on Lumens on Headlight something like not to exceed 2000 lumens, Also its temperature should be 3000k range like old cars but new ones are like 8000k. yesterday night - saw a light that must be atleast 20000 lumens its like watching sun, cant see anything for a few seconds.
They (The RAC[0]) are actually pushing for regulation here in the UK along those lines.
There seems to be quite a push from the public to do something, so maybe it'll change one day..
"According to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, between the ages of 15 and 65, the time it takes to recover from glare increases from one to nine seconds.
At 60 miles an hour, that’s 250 yards in nine seconds.
Baroness Hayter said: "The Group’s first interaction with Ministers led them to say: No problem here, no evidence of deaths or serious injuries. Since then, the public have reached out to tell us they disagree, and that many are stopping driving at night, with eight out of 10 drivers surveyed wanting action to reduce glare.
"We know other countries share our concern, with drivers demanding action. The Government needs to heed our call for action and be on the side of road safety."
> Great, now everyone in a sedan is being blinded by all sorts of SUVs and trucks. Utter failure.
I drive a truck and live in a mountainous area. Trust me, it's not just sedans. Nearly everyone drives around with their brights on and it seems they no longer bother to turn them down when approaching traffic (automatic dimming features don't work well up here). Consequently, night time driving is dangerous. I don't know what their advertised beam pattern is, but it's like driving passed spotlights aimed at your eyes while on the road when you're on the outside lane.
FWIW mine are halogens (2014). Plenty bright (and aim-able—for towing), but they're useless when you're temporarily blinded by super bright LEDs.
I rode with a work acquaintance at night once, and noticed he kept his high beams on the whole time, despite oncoming traffic. I eventually said something, like shouldn't you dim your lights when there's someone oncoming? He looked at me like I had antlers growing out of my forehead. "Duh... The high beams are brighter and let me see better." That's the bottom line: Not even a thought about other drivers. And these people are everywhere.
My 10 years old VW turns off the high beams when it detects incoming traffic, or in general stronger ambient lights (like, street lighting in a locality). But in the US there are no such requirements, I assume.
I think you're right. That's more plausible than blaming tech, which I did.
Judging by the increasingly anti-social driving habits I'm seeing during the day time, this possibility definitely stands out (the worst being a tendency for people to slow down traffic 10-15 MPH under the posted speed only to speed up to 10-15 MPH over when someone attempts to pass them).
> automatic dimming features don't work well up here
That's disappointing to hear, but a counterpoint: the first car I ever drove that had auto-dimming was a Ford Escape rental in Utah. I drove from SLC to Moab and back, plenty of night driving in mountains, and it performed far beyond my expectations. I really never had to adjust the lights manually.
Which is to say, probably more to do with the specific implementation than the terrain.
That's a good point. If it were brighter, I'd pay more attention to the manufacturer of the vehicle to see if there were any obvious correlation.
(Truthfully, I'm just guessing that the drivers are relying on auto-dimming tech since it seems way too consistent to "just" be "oh, haha, I forgot." But, the latter is certainly possible given your sibling comment—perhaps more and more people genuinely don't care about other drivers.)
In proper urban design that's actually a feature. People don't care about the posted speed limit - they probably won't even notice the sign. Instead they drive at the speed which they feel is appropriate for the road.
A lot of the suburban infrastructure in the US was developed around collision safety. This means wide roads and large setbacks, all in order to get rid of anything to collide with. However, this means that a regular residential street now feels extremely safe to drive: it's essentially a highway, so people will drive at highway speeds.
On the other hand, plenty of suburban road infrastructure in Europe has been explicitly designed to feel unsafe. The roads are intentionally made narrow, visibility is poor, and you'll run into plenty of obstacles like chicanes. Although plenty of that is a leftover from the pre-car era, it's nowadays an intentional design decision for new roads even when there is plenty of space. It's physically impossible to drive on those streets at highway speeds, so people are forced to slow down. Anyone with even the vaguest sense of self-preservation will drive a lot slower with a 6-inch clearance to oncoming traffic than with a 6-feet clearance. The lower speeds in turn actually make the roads safer, and make it possible to share them with cyclists and other low-speed traffic.
Fun fact: the narrowest residential street allowed in the US is wider than a highway lane in The Netherlands.
Streets may not have gotten wider in a given city/town since then, but there's been a lot of population growth and development in that time in the sunbelt where urban planning has favored very wide roads. So even if roads themselves aren't getting wider, people have been moving to places where roads are wide.
This. I was recently in Phoenix for a meeting and was struck by the state of the roads there. Lots of paint on the roads bike lines on 4 or 6 lane 45 mph streets where lots of folks were doing 55+. I class myself as someone who will bike a lot of places in Seattle but I didn't see a single road (i'm sure there are some somewhere there) that I'd be willing to ride in Phoenix.
Also reminds me of all the regulation around car lights - you literally specified the beam pattern light intensity color and what not, but you couldn't be bothered to narrowly restrict the height off the ground? Great, now everyone in a sedan is being blinded by all sorts of SUVs and trucks. Utter failure.