I think the numbers on traffic injuries and fatalities really do speak for themselves. A full percent of the US population gets injured by cars every year — tha

I think the numbers on traffic injuries and fatalities really do speak for themselves. A full percent of the US population gets injured by cars every year — that's a pretty staggering number. I'm not a fan of the reasoning the article gives behind why we have normalized them ("toxic individualism"), because I think there are a lot more obvious culprits. For example, the auto industry is extremely effective at lobbying, and has been for a very long time. The reason there are jaywalking laws on the books, for example, was in large part because the auto industry pushed for them [1][2]. Urban streets were not really built with fast-moving cars in mind, and people treated them as safe places to be. Cars were much faster than anything else using the streets, so their introduction caused a sharp uptick in fatalities. A really successful PR campaign painted the people crossing the street as the ones at fault over the drivers, and the resulting laws still exist in many places in the US. We normalize a lot of stuff, and it's easy to argue that it's because of a stereotype about Americans (that we're all aggressively individualist, which may be true to some extent). But decades of policies that require parking in new buildings, that encourage driving for even small errands, and that rezone urban areas to accommodate car traffic make it really hard to imagine a world without them. No one thinks car crashes are good, but few people have alternatives (even in denser urban areas). Crashes feel like an unavoidable side-effect. 1: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25497772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25497772