Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes • Hacker News Board

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#921

Post by refurb » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 2:42 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #890

refurb wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't agree with your assessment at all. Deaths are rising, yet what changes are happening? Deaths per miles driven have never been lower (2nd table). You can't just add up the negative impacts (deaths) without adjusting for positive impacts (miles traveled). https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit...

A mile driven is not a positive impact. A trip taken, an amenity experienced, a commute completed would be a positive impact. But every mile driven is a negative impact. If the amount driven is increasing, it's likely because the system is failing more.

Irrelevant to the point - driving is getting safer, not more dangerous.

And unless people deriving zero benefit, every mile driven is a positive outcome.

To ignore that is to look at the problem incorrectly.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#922

Post by notch656a » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 2:49 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #915

notch656a wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're operating on these kind of statistics I think you need to consider the age and race of your child. If you go by likelihood of death, a 19 year old black male (covered by the chart you cited) has a wildly different chance of firearms related death than a 4 year old white child (for that child, they're more likely to die by swimming pool) [0]. In fact the choice to include 18 and 19 year olds at prime age for…

If a bunch of people want to worship hunks of death inflicting metal as idols, I have zero problem with that as long as I'm allowed to live away from it. And I am allowed to! If somebody tells me that they go the firing range, that's just great, and I may even go with them some time. But I'm not allowed to live away from cars as a normal member of society.

Yeah I agree it's a lot harder to live a life on foot, and wish there were better options!

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#923

Post by achenatx » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 2:54 PM UTC

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…

the media treats it that way, but the government and many non profits work to reduce total deaths. You just dont hear about it because the media gate keeps the news.

seatbelts, car seats, antilock brakes, medians in dangerous intersections, speedbumps, drunk driving laws etc. Are all to reduce one off deaths.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#924

Post by scoofy » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 3:07 PM UTC

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #888

scoofy wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Measure in “trips” not miles. Measuring in miles rewards suburban culture. Highway driving isn’t where deaths happen. They happen most on urban roads.

Screw you both. Measure butt-in-seat hours.

That doesn’t count people who don’t get in a car wreck, simply because they walked to buy groceries

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#925

Post by bostonpete » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 3:08 PM UTC

MichaelCollins wrote: post #565

bostonpete wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes sense, but that still doesn't explain why we ignore tens of thousands of auto deaths per year but talk about one Uber ATG death for 5 years...

If a careless driver crashes into me, I've been wronged by an individual who made some bad decisions. If a self-driving car hits me, I've been wronged by a corporation that probably cut corners and sold a shitty product for profit. I have some sliver of sympathy for the culprit in the first case, but zero sympathy in the second.

10-15% of car accidents are cause by mechanical failure. Some of those could certainly be blamed on large corporations cutting corners, so my question still stands.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#926

Post by scoofy » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 3:10 PM UTC

juve1996 wrote: post #900

scoofy wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>those are thousands of ostensibly independent events that don't necessarily have a single common cause This is obviously incorrect reasoning for the United States. If countries around the world had statistically similar collision rates, then you would have a point, but this isn't some sort of power law or random distribution. The fact that our fatality rate are so significantly higher than other developed countries,…

Is it possible the US just has more bigger vehicles? Speed is obviously a huge part, but adding all that extra mass of many super-size me trucks and SUVs with poor visibility seems like it would factor in.

If you’ve studied the subject, the obvious reason is that Americans allow anyone to drive with minimal training. Regardless of past behavior. We even subsidize insurance rates for people who are so bad at driving they are uninsurable.

It’s a recipe for people getting killed.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#927

Post by tshaddox » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 3:12 PM UTC

rustybelt wrote: post #542

tshaddox wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but people are intuitively right to recognize that if they don't engage in risky behavior (like drunk driving) they're less at risk of being in an accident. To argue otherwise is basically saying driving drunk is no more risky than driving sober. Sure, that’s why it’s important to know how risky automobiles are if you discard the cases of drunk drivers injuring themselves. I suspect drunk drivers injuring themselve…

A quick google says that 26.8% of drivers killed or severely injured in a car accident had alcohol in their system. Not drinking and driving significantly reduces your risk.

That’s “drivers (excluding motorcyclists) seriously injured or killed in crashes and whose blood was collected at one of the par- ticipating trauma centers or by MEs” in 2020. There were 474 such drivers, 127 of which had alcohol in their system. But there were 38,000 automobile fatalities in 2020.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#928

Post by scoofy » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 3:13 PM UTC

oliwarner wrote: post #821

scoofy wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again... if you don't compare the US to any other countries, this line of reasoning might seem plausible. It's not. The US outpaces comparative countries significantly, exactly because our infrastructure and culture of driving is inherently more unsafe.

Even in the safest road-user countries[1], train incidents make the news, while most car accidents don't. We know trains (and planes) are outstandingly safe by design, and we know cars are driven by idiots and lawbreakers. Just as we intuitively expect that going to war, seeing and doing what needs to be done will have an enduring effect on people's mental health. We expect that from all higher-stress jobs. It's the…

The point is that any sensible society wouldn’t continue with a transportation infrastructure that costs more and is vastly more deadly.

The drip drip is deaths with no one doing anything to make it safer.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#929

Post by ccn0p » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 3:14 PM UTC

ansible wrote: post #402

ccn0p wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covid deaths: Simple solution, lockdown, virtual learning, 6-feet apart, cancel sports and after-school activities, miss graduations, etc. All the mental fallout from this: Too complex, just a way of life. Drip drip drip.

And if we hadn't done that stuff, we would have seen even more than the 1M deaths we did experience. Things could have gotten significantly worse as the hospitals filled up and space was not available for Covid patients and all the other people with heart attacks and other medical conditions. Even as it is, the medical staff have been overworked and extremely stressed. They've been quitting the medical field in very…

"It could have been much worse" seems to be a pretty common response to a few things these days. And even that single survey you point to... Many were seeking more money or career growth, or were laid off.

California and Florida couldn't have been further from each other in terms of policy and response, yet the age-adjusted mortalities weren't that far apart [1].

[1] https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-age-...

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#930

Post by ccn0p » Fri, Jul 22, 2022, 3:16 PM UTC

fnord123 wrote: post #556

nradov wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. Most of the non-pharmaceutical interventions were pointless pandemic theater. You can find examples of other countries that took less extreme measures and still had lower death rates.

Name two countries/areas that you want to use as an example in this argument. Otherwise if anyone else gives a counterexample you can easily move goalposts on them.

How about two states? As mentioned above, Florida and California couldn't be further from each other in terms of policy and response, yet age-adjusted mortality was about the same.

[1] https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-age-...