Human response is never in actual proportion to reality. For example, veterans have a suicide rate lower than farmers, fisherman, construction workers, maintenance workers, and engineers.
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Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
21–30 of 1001 posts
Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
#22This is a really excellent read, and neatly summarizes a thought that flashes through the back of my mind whenever someone tells me that public transit is unsafe. If over 100 people died each day on public transit, we'd have banned it by now. But we accept it in our automotive culture, while simultaneously handwringing over every incident that happens on public transit.
Or self-driving cars. Every incident is Big News, while ignoring the fact that 40,000 people die every year in traffic accidents (and 4.8 million injuries) -- in the US alone. People are of course famously bad at putting statistics into context.
It's not just that people are bad at statistics (we are though). It's also that we place value on individual agency. Getting into a self-driving car (or onto a train) means giving up some of my agency and because of that I have higher expectations of safety from the self-driving car (or train driver) than I would if I had retained that agency. I don't think that's weird or unreasonable.
We do need to get better at statistics and realizing that when we take on risk, we rarely are the only person impacted if something goes sideways. When I take the wheel of a car I become a risk myself and to others and I need to place as much value on their agency as my own.
Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
#23This is a really excellent read, and neatly summarizes a thought that flashes through the back of my mind whenever someone tells me that public transit is unsafe. If over 100 people died each day on public transit, we'd have banned it by now. But we accept it in our automotive culture, while simultaneously handwringing over every incident that happens on public transit.
The difference is control . While a careful, attentive driver in a well-maintained vehicle certainly isn’t immune, their risk is much lower than someone who drives tired, drunk, or high in a car with bald tires and bad brakes.
Do you mean this is an actual important difference, or that it is a difference in how it’s perceived?
My gut is public transit is still safer than even the most attentive and sober driver. So it’s the feeling of control that determines perception rather than an actual materially different risk profile.
Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
#24This is a really excellent read, and neatly summarizes a thought that flashes through the back of my mind whenever someone tells me that public transit is unsafe. If over 100 people died each day on public transit, we'd have banned it by now. But we accept it in our automotive culture, while simultaneously handwringing over every incident that happens on public transit.
The difference is control . While a careful, attentive driver in a well-maintained vehicle certainly isn’t immune, their risk is much lower than someone who drives tired, drunk, or high in a car with bald tires and bad brakes.
Sure. I also won't claim that driving is dangerous, in the abstract: human beings take all kinds of risks, lots of them for fun, and I'm not interested in restricting others' behavior on that basis.
It's merely thought provoking: every HN thread on transit will have the same half-dozen comments about violence and danger on public transit, when the reality is that two orders of magnitude more deaths occur each year on our highways.
Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
#25The engineering side is good to look at. We should also be looking at the education/credentialing side too. Many incidents are drivers making poor choices, not knowing the laws, or not understanding vehicle dynamics. Stricter licensing would be a good way to reduce incidents regardless of the redesigns. Arguably, that would be the fastest and cheapest route to effective change.
Or we could just get rid of the need to drive cars. The best part is no part.
Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
#26The NTSB actually does investigate car crashes. Typically police do the actual footwork but if the cause is unknown NTSB agents will put boots on the ground. Unfortunately most of the causes are shared across many cases (speeding, distracted driving, drunk driving), so the cases end up getting lumped together into reports which can include tens of thousands of cases. However, they are performing root cause analysis.…
I think Strong Towns would suggest they should include the infrastructure involved as a point to analyze when determining root cause. For example, if a driver was speeding, could the street or road have been built in a way that better discouraged speeding?
Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
#27This is a really excellent read, and neatly summarizes a thought that flashes through the back of my mind whenever someone tells me that public transit is unsafe. If over 100 people died each day on public transit, we'd have banned it by now. But we accept it in our automotive culture, while simultaneously handwringing over every incident that happens on public transit.
>... while simultaneously handwringing over every incident ... And then there's those Tesla accidents that must happen thousands of time a day, because they're always in the news.
My concern with auto driver accidents is they may be systemic rather than semi-random. Ie, it’s an attackable vector that can be repeatedly exploited versus the some stochastic human error.
Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
#28This is a really excellent read, and neatly summarizes a thought that flashes through the back of my mind whenever someone tells me that public transit is unsafe. If over 100 people died each day on public transit, we'd have banned it by now. But we accept it in our automotive culture, while simultaneously handwringing over every incident that happens on public transit.
Or self-driving cars. Every incident is Big News, while ignoring the fact that 40,000 people die every year in traffic accidents (and 4.8 million injuries) -- in the US alone. People are of course famously bad at putting statistics into context.
>People are of course famously bad at putting statistics into context.
We can\t , current self driving is limited in many ways and Tesla is notorious for having the driver save the day multiple time in 30 minutes and Elon is not publishing this incidents. I can't stand the fanboys coming up with fake stats that only 5 people ddied this month in a Tesla where in fact you have video evidence of more people would have died if the driver would have not saved the AI,
A Tesla employee should leak the data and we should then talk about stats, do Tesla saves the driver more then the driver saves the car. (i know that in reality FSD does not mean what the words imply and OP probably had no idea that there are no real FSD cars around that drive with no limitation so we can do real statistics)
Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
#29This is a really excellent read, and neatly summarizes a thought that flashes through the back of my mind whenever someone tells me that public transit is unsafe. If over 100 people died each day on public transit, we'd have banned it by now. But we accept it in our automotive culture, while simultaneously handwringing over every incident that happens on public transit.
Or self-driving cars. Every incident is Big News, while ignoring the fact that 40,000 people die every year in traffic accidents (and 4.8 million injuries) -- in the US alone. People are of course famously bad at putting statistics into context.
The accident rate for "self-driving cars" (a nebulous term including both actually autonomous cars like waymo cars as well as driver-attention-required cars operating under the false advertising of "full self driving") is higher than human operated cars.
Currently "self driving cars" get in twice as many accidents as humans do per million miles driven.
Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
#30I _highly_ recommend consuming more of the content put out by Strong Towns [1]. If I were to summarize their message, it's that in the past 100 years, we've engaged in a large-scale experiment to design our places around cars. This is bad for safety, bad for the economy, and (most importantly!) bad for us people that live in these places! Content and education-wise, they are my favorite non-profit :)
If you're looking for audio: their podcast [2] is great (this article came out yesterday as a podcast, and I listened to it while I was biking... and then got angry at all the cars driving around me, lol).
If you're looking for something longer-form, I'd recommend reading Confessions of a Recovering Engineer [3]. It's literally fantastic, and changed the entire way I think about the suburbs and cities. I grew up in a suburb and recently moved to the city, and had this deep, under-thought feeling that the walking/biking (and the livability that came from it) was why I loved cities so much. This book helped me understand why I felt that way, what specifically is wrong with how we build place currently - and also practical things I could do about it!
Not to be dramatic, but that book took me from pretty much _never_ thinking about place to: volunteering for a local bike advocacy group, biking twice as much, and literally being a more friendly neighbor. Effects not guaranteed, but I can't recommend this book highly enough if you're interested in this sort of thing.
P.S. I am totally unaffiliated with Strong Towns. I just really like them :)
P.P.S. If you're looking for some interesting drama, check out the lawsuit they are currently engaged in [4] with the Minnesota Board of Licensure. IANAL, but it kinda just seems like the engineering licenses boards are trying to shut down his speech because he points out that maybe letting only-technical engineers totally design our spaces isn't really the best idea!
P.P.P.S. Donate here [5]!
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/
[2] https://www.strongtowns.org/podcast
[3] https://www.strongtowns.org/book
[4] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/2/21/the-latest-upd...