The country also factors into it because inertia depends on weight and increases exponentially by speed so if there are more trucks and SUVs, that rate goes up rapidly. The average car size also increases YOY, so it's continually getting more fatal to be hit by a car.
Two tracks, one with 50 people tied where the switch is currently set, and the other with somewhere between 0 and 5 people tied. You could switch the trolley to the other track...
...but the trolley passengers would be upset at you because they'd be 4 minutes later to work every day. Oh no.
I'm trying to figure this out too. Those distances seem really suspicious. At 30km/h, I'm pretty sure I can stop my (admittedly small) car in less than 1 car length. Maybe half a car length, something like 2m? Way less than 9m.
And looking at 60km/h, that's 17m/s and they are claiming a 43m stopping distance. That would be like hitting the breaks and your car just slides on the pavement for 2.5 seconds, traveling the distance of an Olympic swimming pool, before stopping. That's only reasonable in the worst possible driving conditions. Or maybe with an enormous and heavily loaded vehicle?
Or maybe I'm being too optimistic here? Maybe these are numbers from actual accidents and in real life people hit the break slowly at first and stuff like that?
Yep. 2.5s is the average perception reaction time. This includes
Perceiving the person
Understanding the situation and thinking about whether you need to stop
Moving your foot to the brake pedal
Keep in mind, most people feel comfortable driving and not expecting to have to make an emergency stop at all times. Sure, you'd be ninja-fast if you were in some test environment where you expected the hazard and were trigger happy on the brake but that's not the real world.
A few US states, including California, have adopted a standard driver reaction time of 2.5 seconds. The United Kingdom's Highway Code and the Association of Chief Police Officers ACPO Code of Practice for Operational Use of Road Policing Enforcement Technology use 3.0 seconds for driver reaction time.
Quite likely where the limit of the sturdiness of bones and organs lies. It's not unreasonable to have a point where important parts fail no matter how you are hit or land, below which it's more unlucky hits that do damage to specific parts of your body that cause death.