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We, collectively, seem to accept car accidents because we think we can avoid them with good driving skills. Train accidents leave us helpless, and we can’t cope

by nikanj 9y ago

We, collectively, seem to accept car accidents because we think we can avoid them with good driving skills. Train accidents leave us helpless, and we can’t cope with that. The whole concept of ”bad things happen to good people for no reason” is extremely hard to bear. Somehow this reminds me of people who believe the right diet will protect them from cancer, the right prenatal care from birth defects, etc.

lotsofpulp 9y ago
Are you suggesting that different lifestyles don't result in different risks? Such as not smoking, not drinking alcohol while pregnant, not eating excessively?
stefan_ 9y ago
I don't think that is the crucial difference. In a train or plane crash, hundreds die in a single event. But when a hundred people die in a hundred car crashes every day, the individual event is barely worth a mention on page 6 of the news. It's the same mentality that means we have root cause analysis for plane and train crashes but for a car crash, SOP is pretty much to blame 1) whoever died or 2) noone at all, and 3) never the infrastructure.
- waqf 9y ago
  Not only are car crashes less salient than train crashes, but also the converse effect: the inconvenience of car speed limits is more salient than the inconvenience of train speed limits, because you're the one driving.
- kelnos 9y ago
  I think the cycle feeds into itself though: part of the reason planes and trains are so safe is because of the extensive root-cause analysis of crashes, which routinely result in suggestions for improvement that make the rest of travel safer. Remove the investigations and you'd end up with more plane and train crashes. When a car crashes, we just scrape up the debris and move on, after usually assigning blame to one of the drivers who ends up with higher insurance premiums or a lawsuit, assuming they survived. There's little effort to learn from the crashes.
  - nugi 9y ago
    Different risk profile. Trains generally don't have belts, crumple zones, padded surfaces, etc. Their risk profile dictates they avoid accidents. Cars are more chaotic, even in automated form. They are designed to crash safely as possible first, then anti-crash measures are added. Because trains depend soley on the anti crash measures, they must be stricter. The issue of harming dozens rather than a few humans also factors. Its an uneviable position for those responsible imho. Every move is going to be a little wrong and costly on some level.
bernardom 9y ago
This will be the hardest thing to accept about self-driving cars. If the US goes from 37k auto deaths per year to 1k deaths, but some of those are "my Tesla sped into a brick wall at 200mph with little Susie in it," how many people grab the steering wheel?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- maushu 9y ago
  For Susie parents it's basically: "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."
  - aetherson 9y ago
    It's not just that. Look, let's say a Tesla, oh, just as a random example, careens directly into a clearly visible truck because its cameras can't distinguish white trucks from bright sunny skies, killing "my daughter Susie." In this hypothetical, this is a truly autonomous Tesla, and overall, these truly autonomous Teslas are less crash-prone than the human average. As Susie's dad, my argument is that this accident was caused by Tesla. Yes, Tesla may have also saved some other people, under different circumstances, circumstances which are harder for humans to deal with and easier for cars to deal with. So what? That doesn't change the fact that Susie was killed by their product misbehaving in a way that a basically competent human driver wouldn't have. It's not like Tesla previously saved Susie's life, and at least she got to live longer than she would have in the counterfactual -- it's not like all the Susies out there in the world are all essentially doomed to die in auto accidents today. If Susie went to a doctor with a mild infection and he gave her an inappropriate drug and it killed her, you had better believe that I would sue the shit out of him and also want him prosecuted, even if in the year before that he saved 37 other kids' lives from other illnesses.
    - SolarNet 9y ago
      But that's the difference of being against self driving cars, and a specific model of a car (for which it's manufacturer is liable). The OP was saying, to use your analogy, we still use doctors in the U.S. because it changed deaths from medical problems from like 90% to 400,000 people killed every year by accident.
brightball 9y ago
You're absolutely correct about fear combined with lack of control. It's the same thing that powers fears over mass shootings even though, statistically, they are a tiny fraction of overall gun violence. Most of the rest, however, can be avoided by keeping yourself out of bad situations with gangs or drugs...so even though the stats are higher people feel more in control...vs just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
chiliap2 9y ago
I'm not lack of control is the deciding factor here. People still accept car accidents even if they're not the ones driving the car, such as when you're riding a bus.
- rocqua 9y ago
  Busses are really heavy, so they tend to 'win' in a crash by sheer inertia. A better example might be taxis, but there you kind of have the control of screaming "I want to get out NOW" if the driver seems incompetent.
gracenotes 9y ago
It's worth looking at "for no reason" in greater detail for cars, which is different from those other medical cases in significant ways. We collectively as a society decided that motorization of roads was worth pursuing at the expense of human health and safety, if you look at rhetoric at the time of cars' introduction, in no small part due to input from car manufacturers. This wasn't about driving skills; it was about restructuring all of society to make cars close to the bottom rung, not infrequently at the expense of minority groups. More recently, car-related deaths occur from bad design and usually refusal to fix it until sufficiently many lives have been taken. Any kind of "Vision Zero" which is focused on enforcement rather than infrastructure fixes is bound to fail. So if "bad things happen to good people for no reason" is unpalatable and it's the narrative for mass transit, and "bad things happen to drivers for reasons in their control" is the easy narrative for cars, I'd say "bad things happen to good people for reasons that are in our control but we still do nothing" is closer to the true narrative for cars, but it is also unpalatable. There is an element of this in many risk-related scenarios, but it is especially clear here.
aqme28 9y ago
The "Just World phenomenon." You also see it when people blame the victim in a lot of cases. "I wonder what they did to deserve that!"

by nikanj 9y ago

lotsofpulp 9y ago

Are you suggesting that different lifestyles don't result in different risks? Such as not smoking, not drinking alcohol while pregnant, not eating excessively?

stefan_ 9y ago

I don't think that is the crucial difference. In a train or plane crash, hundreds die in a single event. But when a hundred people die in a hundred car crashes every day, the individual event is barely worth a mention on page 6 of the news. It's the same mentality that means we have root cause analysis for plane and train crashes but for a car crash, SOP is pretty much to blame 1) whoever died or 2) noone at all, and 3) never the infrastructure.

waqf 9y ago
Not only are car crashes less salient than train crashes, but also the converse effect: the inconvenience of car speed limits is more salient than the inconvenience of train speed limits, because you're the one driving.
kelnos 9y ago
I think the cycle feeds into itself though: part of the reason planes and trains are so safe is because of the extensive root-cause analysis of crashes, which routinely result in suggestions for improvement that make the rest of travel safer. Remove the investigations and you'd end up with more plane and train crashes. When a car crashes, we just scrape up the debris and move on, after usually assigning blame to one of the drivers who ends up with higher insurance premiums or a lawsuit, assuming they survived. There's little effort to learn from the crashes.
- nugi 9y ago
  Different risk profile. Trains generally don't have belts, crumple zones, padded surfaces, etc. Their risk profile dictates they avoid accidents. Cars are more chaotic, even in automated form. They are designed to crash safely as possible first, then anti-crash measures are added. Because trains depend soley on the anti crash measures, they must be stricter. The issue of harming dozens rather than a few humans also factors. Its an uneviable position for those responsible imho. Every move is going to be a little wrong and costly on some level.

bernardom 9y ago

This will be the hardest thing to accept about self-driving cars. If the US goes from 37k auto deaths per year to 1k deaths, but some of those are "my Tesla sped into a brick wall at 200mph with little Susie in it," how many people grab the steering wheel?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
maushu 9y ago
For Susie parents it's basically: "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."
- aetherson 9y ago
  It's not just that. Look, let's say a Tesla, oh, just as a random example, careens directly into a clearly visible truck because its cameras can't distinguish white trucks from bright sunny skies, killing "my daughter Susie." In this hypothetical, this is a truly autonomous Tesla, and overall, these truly autonomous Teslas are less crash-prone than the human average. As Susie's dad, my argument is that this accident was caused by Tesla. Yes, Tesla may have also saved some other people, under different circumstances, circumstances which are harder for humans to deal with and easier for cars to deal with. So what? That doesn't change the fact that Susie was killed by their product misbehaving in a way that a basically competent human driver wouldn't have. It's not like Tesla previously saved Susie's life, and at least she got to live longer than she would have in the counterfactual -- it's not like all the Susies out there in the world are all essentially doomed to die in auto accidents today. If Susie went to a doctor with a mild infection and he gave her an inappropriate drug and it killed her, you had better believe that I would sue the shit out of him and also want him prosecuted, even if in the year before that he saved 37 other kids' lives from other illnesses.
  - SolarNet 9y ago
    But that's the difference of being against self driving cars, and a specific model of a car (for which it's manufacturer is liable). The OP was saying, to use your analogy, we still use doctors in the U.S. because it changed deaths from medical problems from like 90% to 400,000 people killed every year by accident.

brightball 9y ago

You're absolutely correct about fear combined with lack of control. It's the same thing that powers fears over mass shootings even though, statistically, they are a tiny fraction of overall gun violence. Most of the rest, however, can be avoided by keeping yourself out of bad situations with gangs or drugs...so even though the stats are higher people feel more in control...vs just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

chiliap2 9y ago

I'm not lack of control is the deciding factor here. People still accept car accidents even if they're not the ones driving the car, such as when you're riding a bus.

rocqua 9y ago
Busses are really heavy, so they tend to 'win' in a crash by sheer inertia. A better example might be taxis, but there you kind of have the control of screaming "I want to get out NOW" if the driver seems incompetent.

gracenotes 9y ago

It's worth looking at "for no reason" in greater detail for cars, which is different from those other medical cases in significant ways. We collectively as a society decided that motorization of roads was worth pursuing at the expense of human health and safety, if you look at rhetoric at the time of cars' introduction, in no small part due to input from car manufacturers. This wasn't about driving skills; it was about restructuring all of society to make cars close to the bottom rung, not infrequently at the expense of minority groups. More recently, car-related deaths occur from bad design and usually refusal to fix it until sufficiently many lives have been taken. Any kind of "Vision Zero" which is focused on enforcement rather than infrastructure fixes is bound to fail. So if "bad things happen to good people for no reason" is unpalatable and it's the narrative for mass transit, and "bad things happen to drivers for reasons in their control" is the easy narrative for cars, I'd say "bad things happen to good people for reasons that are in our control but we still do nothing" is closer to the true narrative for cars, but it is also unpalatable. There is an element of this in many risk-related scenarios, but it is especially clear here.

aqme28 9y ago

The "Just World phenomenon." You also see it when people blame the victim in a lot of cases. "I wonder what they did to deserve that!"