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this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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Fuck Cars
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That’s actually surprising. I would think damage to lower extremities (delicate knee joints) would be far more severe from a concentrated impact area than a large area impact distributed over the entire body - when it occurs with a low speed impact.
Lower-fronted cars may cause more severe lower body injuries, but likely cause less severe injuries overall because the point of impact isn't the torso (which is where humans keep a lot of their important bits and bobs).
I guess that’s the question. For low speed impacts the body is pretty well protected compared to the lower extremities because the energy of impact is more readily absorbed without serious damage.
There's nuances here, but in principle you are incorrect. A car can be assumed to be infinitely heavier than a pedestrian. That means that every part of their body that's in contact with the car will be accelerated to car speed. So it's not that with a larger area the force is spread out, there's actually just more places that have force applied. In other words, a low car will break your legs, a high car will break your legs and torso.
I tend to agree with you, of course, but I wonder if the large study were re-run with mass as the cause it would show similar distribution against the 6000lb+ vehicles. Mass tends to reduce braking deceleration and I didn’t see that as an explicit parameter. The “cause” is more salient to the second, smaller study which shows the “kneecap and hood carry” physics reduced hip and head injuries compated to the “body block and throw” mechanics of the flat- fronted cars.
Not to defend the Mack-Truck styling - I don’t disagree at all with the smaller impact study - I question the original implied hypothesis that the prevalence of large flat fronts as the cause of increase in deaths following the nadir in 2009. Of course anecdotes are not evidence, but I live in a college town and have since 2000 and the actions of pedestrians have changed substantially over the years. Specifically, the advent of smartphones has resulted in risky behavior both in pedestrians and behind the wheel. In 2009 less than 20% of phones were “smart.” Few of those were connected to the internet and fewer still to social media and entertainment services. Since then, the prevalence has increased to 80% and the consumption of media by orders of magnitude (measured by data usage and hours engaged). The original study implies the increase in pedestrian death solely due to nose geometry, but the quantity of impacts and conditions may not be as causative as the article seems to claim.