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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

#121

Post by ErikVandeWater »

TylerE wrote: post #15
woodruffw wrote: post #2

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.

I'd say the difference is density of deaths.

When people die in regular road accidents, it's just a few at a time. Not compelling enough for even a mention in national news coverage. When a plane or train crashes, it's hundreds simultaneously. Often with a good debris field too. Good enough to lead with.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#122

Post by Gordonjcp »

jfengel wrote: post #9
woodruffw wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Self-driving cars aren't safer than humans, though, and I doubt they ever will be.

All the real love for self-driving cars seems to be in the US, where they are basically competing with completely untrained drivers and a strong drink-driving culture.

No self-driving car on the road today would even come close to passing a UK driving test. They wouldn't last the first five minutes.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#123

Post by zucker42 »

mywittyname wrote: post #105

"We" don't ignore them. Every major government has a body dedicated entirely to automobile safety. 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 effectiven…

US DOTs have people devoted to safety no doubt, but they also endorse road and city designs which have safer alternatives.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#124

Post by hanselot »

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#125

Post by ericmay »

egypturnash wrote: post #118
ericmay wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only we could take this further. What’s more in “control” than driving? Walking and riding a bike. That’s ultimate control.

When I am on a bike I am definitely not in control of all the people in cars around me, especially the ones who are drunk, are assholes, or are badly-programmed robots who barely know what a “bicycle” is.

Which would be true of any form of transit, including driving or riding a bus or walking down the street. So I’m not following your point here.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#126

Post by TylerE »

hgomersall wrote: post #82
googlryas wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but you would probably rather be driving a car if your bus driver was suicidal that morning.

How many suicidal bus drivers have we had? I mean ever.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dz5kk/bus-driver-china-kill...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37328824

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-04-08-me-52192-...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2011/10/12/ttc-d... (Not a suicide, but it's on topic)

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#127

Post by giraffe_lady »

woodruffw wrote: post #24
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.

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 o…

> human beings take all kinds of risks, lots of them for fun, and I'm not interested in restricting others' behavior on that basis.

No but we do have a strong, though admittedly weakening, tradition of restricting the fun of others when the danger posed is not solely to themselves. For example building and setting off bombs is fun as hell but we're not allowed to do it because it's pretty unhealthy for the neighbors.

Driving cars is pretty dangerous not just for the driver but also for other people around who have not necessarily consented to being put in danger. When pedestrians and children are routinely getting killed (as they have been in my city this summer) we should shift the danger assessment a little away from the skydiving end of the spectrum and a little more to the backyard bombs zone.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#128

Post by chroem- »

narush wrote: post #109
chroem- wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Check out the book! You'll get a lot from it I think -- even if it's just a better understand of a different viewpoint :)

No thank you: I don't care for content that's searching for evidence to support a preconcieved position. There is too much dogma and not enough pragmatism in this space.

I already get enough of their content on HN to recognize dogma when I see it. Quite frankly, it's a circlejerk where everyone else is wrong unless they follow the ST-scene's ideologically-founded prescriptions, and if you post evidence to the contrary you'll often get shouted down.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#129

Post by ericmay »

gottastayfresh wrote: post #108
ericmay wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only we could take this further. What’s more in “control” than driving? Walking and riding a bike. That’s ultimate control.

Exactly, but it's not ultimately convenient. Control ends where convenience begins (that's not to say its totally accurate, but the phrase looks nice).

> Exactly, but it's not ultimately convenient

Strictly by design and active and reinforced choice. Not for any other reason. Period.

Re: Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

#130

Post by epistasis »

mywittyname wrote: post #105

"We" don't ignore them. Every major government has a body dedicated entirely to automobile safety. 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 effectiven…

I can't agree with your assessment at all. Deaths are rising, yet what changes are happening?

And in particular the NHSTA doesn't give a damn about those outside of the car.

The very greatest threat to the life of my children is cars. It would be easy, trivial almost, to fix this by legalizing building for houses and businesses that don't allow cars, but are served only by public transit. Yet this very simple, very desirable concept is illegal in the US except for a few tiny islands.

We prioritize cars over life in nearly every single aspect of law. We modified law to make drivers not culpable for the death they inflict on others, because if drivers had to pay for the damage they caused, we would not be driving at all.

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