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Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

strongtowns.org

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Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#441

Post by pkulak »

WalterBright wrote: post #404
profile53 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not wearing a seatbelt is also a choice to force the healthcare system to support the person for 50 years after they break their neck in a preventable way. The choice is individual but the consequences are societal.

One of the things I don't like about free health care is it comes with the notion that the government should force you to do things to reduce those costs.

The alternative is letting people die on the street who may not be able to pay. No developed country will ever have a health care system that shifts 100% of costs to the individual.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#442

Post by cdkmoose »

yongjik wrote: post #33
TylerE wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't understand. What control do I have over a tired/drunk/high truck driver running a red light into an intersection I'm passing in? I can be actually assured that no drunk driver will smash into my seat in a subway (the chance might not be zero but it's astronomically low). You may say it's not "control" because I didn't personally force all those drunk drivers out of railroads, but then again, I can't force the…

Bu can you be assured that a drunk/tired/* train engineer doesn't run a signal and crash into another train?

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#444

Post by bpye »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #138

quality of life improvements make it so most people are okay with the risk. just like skiing, let people decide what risks they want to take. covid has emboldened the authoritarians. stop trying to tell other people how they should live.

What about other people that don't drive, pedestrians, cyclists, etc. They are also paying the cost of increased road traffic deaths, except they are no part in the cause.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#445

Post by pkulak »

Shaanie wrote: post #440
pkulak wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gonna go ahead and say the unthinkable here... so what? The person driving fast endangers themselves and everyone else around them. In what other area of society do we tolerate extremely dangerous behavior (40,000+ deaths a year) because to not would be an inconvenience? Guns, I suppose. But I'm not a huge fan or our polices around those either.

Don't forget alcohol, and arguably smoking and being obese.

Those doesn't endanger other people though.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#446

Post by cityofdelusion »

wizofaus wrote: post #206
jiveturkey wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares if you kill yourself through your own negligence? There shouldn't be a fine at all for seatbelts. DUI, OTOH, should be treated even more harshly than it is.

Aside from the fact your own death is always going to impose a cost on society, I'd assume having a seatbelt on as a driver significantly increases your ability to maintain at least some control of a vehicle in a collision, reducing your chance of injuring others (both in and outside said vehicle).

Curious, is there actually evidence of this? I've been in a few accidents and I can't think of how a seat belt would maintain control. I feel that anything that would throw you out of the seat is basically uncontrollable. My accidents with any significant force all happened in the blink of an eye.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#447

Post by coding123 »

paulpauper wrote: post #249
flaque wrote: post #96

There’s an audio version of the same point here: https://podcast.strongtowns.org/e/the-drip-drip-drip-of-traf... A ”best effort” summary of this article: if thousands of people die in once place, it’s one of the great tragedies in American history. However if thousands of people die in thousands different places, it is ignored and considered a fact of life. When a plane or train crashes, we stop everything and redesi…

Like covid. THoussands of deaths daily became background noise

Well, 2 years ago it did not. it was more of an "event". Now that it's something we have decided we can't stop (in the sense that we've done as much as we can without forcing more things - the public has reach a hard limit) it's a lot like car crashes.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#448

Post by [deleted] »

notjustanymike wrote: post #107
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #44

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?

Because even 40,000 people is only a lot relatively. It is just 0.012% of the American population and 0.00051% of the world population.

[deleted]

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#449

Post by toast0 »

GuB-42 wrote: post #284
dmead wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are, but cars will function without them being used.

At least in Europe, there is a very annoying beep if you don't wear the seatbelt. You can still drive, and there are ways to disable it, but most people just wear their seatbelt. I don't think it is mandatory, but it counts in the EuroNCAP score, and since it is one of the easiest safety feature to implement, they all have it.

The beeps in the US are not that annoying. Ding ding ding ding ding for 30?seconds at start up, again when you put it into drive, and then again when you hit a certain speed (around 7-10 mph) and/or periodically. It's not pleasant, but it's tolerable when I'm moving cars around between my house and my barn. Yeah, I probably should still buckle up, but it's not critical for sub 15 mph, private road driving for a minute or two.

My first car didn't have a seatbelt reminder, and it needed a bit of time to warm up, so I got in the habit of starting it and then buckling, and 20 years of driving with seatbelt reminders hasn't trained me to switch the order.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#450

Post by nemild »

On a related note, a few years ago, I went through an entire year of top headlines in the New York Times (top few pages), and mapped them against actual death rates:

https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html

It's obvious that these would be different, but it was especially glaring just how much we focused on intentional deaths in our media coverage. It also makes sense that this is newsworthy (aka profitable), but it leads to some terrible inferences and decisions if that's all we see.

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