Disclosure: I work for a GM. What follows is my opinion and solely my own opinion. If cars were introduced as a new product today, they would be rejected as un

Disclosure: I work for a GM. What follows is my opinion and solely my own opinion. If cars were introduced as a new product today, they would be rejected as unsafe. But cars are not being introduced today, they were introduced in the horse and buggy era. Cars should be safer. People work on making them safer over time. Public infrastructure should be built for humans. We are not good at this. If you use miles travelled as a metric, cars are in the top 5 safest ways to travel [0]. People were killed by horses, being thrown, trampled, etc. Horses were expensive, in maintenance terms. Horses caused pollution - poop. Horse poop in small amounts is very manageable and useful as fertilizer etc. In large amounts it is a real pain. I ride a bicycle, walk, and drive a car. I've had more injuries on the bike (on paved paths, not due to cars) than I have had in a car. I've had more injuries walking than I have had in the car. Anyway my big point here is that you have to consider things and solve things in human terms. 0. You have to be careful and deliberate with how you measure this. Depending on what you exclude and how you group things you can many anything the safest or the most dangerous. If someone says something like top 5, or most dangerous, or safest, they have made choices to include or exclude or to bucket or to add weight. In human terms, people want to get to an end destination (Last Mile). Airplanes don't take you to an end destination. Trains don't generally get you to the last mile. Cars do. Bikes do. Motorcycles do. Buses do. Some light rail/subway systems do (depends on the city), but you have to get people to agree to pay for these.