101–110 of 1001 posts
The primary reason why I ignore car crashes is because I ensure that I do the following things, all of which greatly reduce my risk factor compared to the average: 1. I always drive attentively with both hands on the steering wheel. 2. I completed on-track driving instruction in a race car, multiple times, and also took training in evasive driving maneuvers. 3. I constantly maintain situational awareness of what's go…
My kid sister died in a car accident two weeks ago. Now I find the numbers unfathomable. How can 40,000 families be suffering like this, every year?
This 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.
and i’d argue attentiveness (anti-distractedness) is the most important mass mitigation we could make, but it’s also practically impossible to maintain over a driving lifetime and nearly as impossible to enforce (without significant rights violations).
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The point is, every driver you interact with might be drunk or distracted. In a collision with a drunk in a car, I'd rather be in a bus.
Sure, but you would probably rather be driving a car if your bus driver was suicidal that morning.
In the USA, this is NHSTA - National Highway Safety & Transportation Administration. They maintain an information system of traffic fatality statistics in the USA, called FARS (fatality analysis reporting system). This system is used to determine new safety devices and standards for vehicles and to test their effectiveness.
And they are a powerful organization. A car cannot be sold in the USA without NHSTA approval. At the tap of a keyboard, they can cost a company billions of dollars. They power reaches far beyond the USA as well. Not too long ago, the NHSTA issued a recall that bankrupted the largest producer of airbags in the world.
I'd say the USA focuses a lot on reducing automotive fatalities.
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>... 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.
I don't have a bone to pick there, but an observation: much of that news seems to be driven by a certain prominent car CEO claiming that his cars are (1) safer, and (2) capable of self-driving (beyond a bit of driver assistance). "Trains are safer" is a fact, but it's not a common part of messaging around why we should all take trains more often. The messaging there usually boils down to convenience, economic, and ec…
My kid sister died in a car accident two weeks ago. Now I find the numbers unfathomable. How can 40,000 families be suffering like this, every year?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. You could have just stopped at "control". That's the fundamental dynamic by which we can explain this differential public sentiment--a sense of control or lack thereof, independent of whether that control actually exist…
If only we could take this further. What’s more in “control” than driving? Walking and riding a bike. That’s ultimate control.
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I'd highly recommend reading Confessions of a Recovering Engineer before debating my communication of it. There's a lot more depth to the arguments than the one-sentence summary a novice (me) can give :) Namely, Strong Towns isn't anti-car! In fact, they explicitly arguing _against_ removing cars from city centers in most cases, for reasons related to those that you mention. If I remember correctly, many towns tried…
> That being said, _requiring_ cars and _allowing_ them are very different things. Being anti-bulldozing city blocks to put in 6-lane highways isn't anti-car, it's pro people! That's a semantic argument that doesn't address the real problems that skimping on commuter infrastructure can cause. San Francisco and Seattle have both achieved some of the highest housing prices in the nation thanks to chronic underinvestmen…
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Motor vehicle fatality rate in U.S. by year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
2014 32,744
2015 35,485
2016 37,806
2017 37,473
2018 36,835
2019 36,355
2020 38,824
2021 42,915
How Many Electric Cars Are on the Road in the United States? https://www.treehugger.com/how-many-electric-cars-are-on-the...