Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

This is why, when I have to visit a city, I much prefer to park my car at the first convenient opportunity and walk. Having a car is pretty straightforward and definitely a must in the rural areas where I live (sadly, public transit is effectively nonexistent), but driving a car in a city is difficult and often terrifying, specifically because of the limited control (you're stuck going forward at a particular speed, and if you realize too late that the GPS/map/printed out directions/copilot navigator was indicating that street to turn on, you just have to keep going and hope that you can loop back around somehow without losing too much time...or you risk permanent/exorbitantly expensive damage to your car, someone else's car, and/or one or more humans).

> But as long as someone, anyone, involved in the accident can be condemned as sinful (in many cases the sin of being tired from overworking forced on them by societal pressures), it can be explained away.

And indeed if we look at railway safety this is exactly what we saw. Originally, railway companies would say well, yes two passenger trains collided, killing a hundred people, but conveniently for us both drivers died in the collision so we'll blame them. The problem wasn't us, the railway company, who are great, it's those awful drivers, who fortunately are now dead so no need to investigate further. In fact, since there's no body to examine we can confidently declare that one of the drivers was drunk. Which explains why we've told his widow that she won't be receiving one penny from the death-in-service fund.

Eventually (this kept happening, because of course it did) coroners weren't talking this bullshit, and they said it seems like the problem isn't these lone drivers who are conveniently dead, it's the company hiring them. If the drivers aren't good enough, the company should get better drivers. If instead the problem is elsewhere (e.g. maybe it'd be a good idea to invent signals so that you know if a train just around the corner has broken down so that your express doesn't hurtle into it at full speed...) that's something for the railway company too. This didn't magically fix things overnight, but it did push back against the useless "blame the driver" narrative.

Modern safety agencies, focused on a blameless "Learn from the past, prevent future accidents" model have improved things considerably, but that did not happen automatically, somebody had to call the corporate entities on their bullshit. Maybe we should call individual private car owners on their bullshit too.

One trend I don't like is people who resist the word "accident". It's an accident unless you think it was done on purpose. Accident prevention is a thing. We can, and should, prevent accidents.

No even on that scale it is a lot of harm when you consider it as it actually is. As the person you're responding to notes, a preventable death touches many more than just the individual killed.

You can argue that this cost is worth bearing, but you can't dismiss it as "just" .01% or whatever. Over a period of years this is almost every family touched by unnecessary death: people growing up without a parent, careers ended because of disability, spiraling into depression or addiction because of losing a child, all the second and third order effects of grief and loss and suffering.

Again, maybe it's worth it. Make a point for why it is though, if you find it to be. Pointing at the numbers isn't enough.

It's way way higher than 1%. 30% of crashes involve a drunk driver. 30% of the drivers on the road are not drunk.

What's required are actually very significant structural changes. Veterans suicides are the result of war, which is mass killing normalized by false mythology. And it not enough to just say that's a bad idea, the problem is deeply rooted in the core global paradigm which is fundamentally uncivilized. You can't just say that hegemony is bad, you need an alternative, which is a very difficult task.

The problem with traffic deaths is again, structural. You are mixing 3000 pound vehicles, most of which contain only one passenger, with pedestrians in the same space. You have humans driving them.

The solution is small autonomous vehicles completely separated from pedestrians. This is very hard, but possible, and the materials wasted on oversized vehicles that are underutilized, office buildings that are mostly empty, incredibly poor density, etc. can also be used for that purpose.

Cities should actually be entirely redesigned.