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Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

• woodruffw 4y ago
  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.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • jandrese 4y ago
    Imagine how angry people would be if at the end of an article about a train crash that killed 4 people the author included an anecdote about how there were 900 train fatalities in the previous year compared to 1.3 million car fatalities.
    • pessimizer 4y ago
      > 900 train fatalities And 600 of them were trespassers walking on the tracks, then the vast majority of the remaining were people who tried to beat the train at a crossing. The number of dead passengers was 6 and the number of dead train workers was 11, if I'm reading this correctly: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/railroad-deaths-and-injuries/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
  • js2 4y ago
    It's like a form of the Dunning–Kruger effect where everyone believes they're in control of their fate in a car, but not on public transit. People must think they're exceptional drivers and that they can dodge any accident.
    • pbuzbee 4y ago
      If I've learned anything from watching "Idiots in Cars" videos on Reddit, it's that you can go from "driving normally" to "in an accident" much faster than you think. Most people have very little experience reacting to imminent accidents on the road. Overall that's a good thing, but it certainly seems naive to think that simply being an attentive driver is enough to keep you out of accidents.
      • djmips 4y ago
        It's a good thing, because yes getting injured or killed in a car accident is horrible but it's not a good thing that they don't have any training at all. If driving was something done only in industry there would be proper training and a lot more safety precautions. I think about this every time I walk down this narrow sidewalk in my town that's 4 feet from the roadway. A friend of mine was recently in the crosshairs of a straying van and he was only saved by the luck of a telephone pole intervening.
      • rustybelt 4y ago
        Yes, but if half of all accidents involve idiots, not being an idiot is a legitimate way to reduce your risk of being in an accident. Meaning drivers do have some control over their level of risk behind the wheel.
        • scrumbledober 4y ago
          half of all accidents involve an idiot, but there only has to be one idiot in a two car collision.
          • rustybelt 4y ago
            Reduce risk, not eliminate it. Do idiots and non-idiots have the same risk of getting into an accident?
  • TylerE 4y ago
    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.
    • edmundsauto 4y ago
      Do you mean this is an actual important difference, or that it is a difference in how it’s perceived? My gut is public transit is still safer than even the most attentive and sober driver. So it’s the feeling of control that determines perception rather than an actual materially different risk profile.
    • woodruffw 4y ago
      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 on our highways.
      • giraffe_lady 4y ago
        > 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.
        • cgriswald 4y ago
  • jfengel 4y ago
    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.
    • intrepidhero 4y ago
      It's not just that people are bad at statistics (we are though). It's also that we place value on individual agency. Getting into a self-driving car (or onto a train) means giving up some of my agency and because of that I have higher expectations of safety from the self-driving car (or train driver) than I would if I had retained that agency. I don't think that's weird or unreasonable. We do need to get better at statistics and realizing that when we take on risk, we rarely are the only person impacted if something goes sideways. When I take the wheel of a car I become a risk myself and to others and I need to place as much value on their agency as my own.
      • djmips 4y ago
        I completely agree that we put a lot of value into personal agency but I do think it's a bit unreasonable. Agency when driving is only perceived. You could have a heart attack and smash into pedestrians. Your car could fail mechanically. You could be rear ended by a large truck. You could be killed by a drunk or inattentive driver. Your agency can not entirely prevent that. Also you may be in the top percentile in driving but like everything, everyone thinks they are a great driver so you can't take how you feel and generalize it to the population. I'm not arguing that self driving cars are solved but maybe they aren't quite as bad as people feel. We need proper statistics.
        • intrepidhero 4y ago
          That's a great point. Often the perceived agency is an illusion.
    • simion314 4y ago
      >People are of course famously bad at putting statistics into context. We can\t , current self driving is limited in many ways and Tesla is notorious for having the driver save the day multiple time in 30 minutes and Elon is not publishing this incidents. I can't stand the fanboys coming up with fake stats that only 5 people ddied this month in a Tesla where in fact you have video evidence of more people would have died if the driver would have not saved the AI, A Tesla employee should leak the data and we should then talk about stats, do Tesla saves the driver more then the driver saves the car. (i know that in reality FSD does not mean what the words imply and OP probably had no idea that there are no real FSD cars around that drive with no limitation so we can do real statistics)
  • ratsmack 4y ago
    >... while simultaneously handwringing over every incident ... And then there's those Tesla accidents that must happen thousands of time a day, because they're always in the news.
    • edmundsauto 4y ago
      My concern with auto driver accidents is they may be systemic rather than semi-random. Ie, it’s an attackable vector that can be repeatedly exploited versus the some stochastic human error.
    • woodruffw 4y ago
      I don't have a bone to pick there, but an observation: much of that news seems to be driven by a certain prominent car CEO claiming that his cars are (1) safer, and (2) capable of self-driving (beyond a bit of driver assistance). "Trains are safer" is a fact, but it's not a common part of messaging around why we should all take trains more often. The messaging there usually boils down to convenience, economic, and ecological arguments.
      • smegger001 4y ago
        I wish the train was more economical then I could take the train more but it is not economical (on the west coast of the US). I live approx half way between Seattle WA and Portland OR and there is a train station within walking distance of my home. every time I have checked the price of a Amtrak ticket to either city it was significantly cheaper to drive and pay for parking then to buy a single train ticket.
  • cscurmudgeon 4y ago
    This is a bad way to look at it. We should ask how many more people would die each day without cars. Somehow, this basic analysis is absent in all of the car-hate posts. Not considering pros and cons fairly is a not an honest approach. You can’t claim to be objective by just looking at negatives and proclaiming cars are bad overall. You need to sum up the negatives and positives (assuming an utilitarian view). Otherwise, just accept all car hate is based on subjective emotions. It is not like car users are cackling evil Captain Planet villains. Most of us are not rich enough to live near work and schools. That brings me to a related issue car haters miss: Bike-friendly cities should be designed for everyone, not just for wealthy white cyclists https://theconversation.com/amp/bike-friendly-cities-should-be-designed-for-everyone-not-just-for-wealthy-white-cyclists-109485 https://theconversation.com/amp/bike-friendly-cities-should-...
    • BlargMcLarg 4y ago
      Because that question is practically impossible to answer. You can't extrapolate current circumstances and draw a conclusion from there. The best you can do is compare with other countries, disregard any non-related-yet-ultimately-significant and draw a fairly weak conclusion from there. Most of those conclusions would not be in favor of cars, either. Especially not in light of environmental damage.
      • cscurmudgeon 4y ago
        It is not impossible. Car haters like to think it is impossible.
        • BlargMcLarg 4y ago
          Try it. I assure you, almost any angle you take can be poked through. Cars shine in large, low density zones. For good reasons. Most anti-car people are not in favor of removing cars in these zones or removing cars altogether, so arguing here is moot. Other places, whether removing a large amount of cars is beneficial or detrimental is decided either by culture, or by reinvestment options. And then, you're still stuck only comparing rationalities, with actual numbers being far harder to judge.
  • nonrandomstring 4y ago
    Yes, a very well written piece with good points and reasoning. It isn't just that the long tail of casualties falls below some threshold of attention. Large specialist organisations capable of industrial warfare or building industrial society cannot deal with human effects on an industrial scale. We tried it in the Northfield experiment [1] (mass psychotherapy for war trauma). [1] https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Northfield_experiments https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Northfield_experiments
  • digdugdirk 4y ago
    I find many of the issues brought up about public transit being unsafe revolve around the people you might encounter on public transit (drug users, homeless, mental illness, etc.) and the waiting around/walking to public transit stops (muggings, thefts, etc.) I've never had any issues myself, but have absolutely been exposed to those issues while taking transit. I've also witnessed those issues increase during/post lockdown. I have no solutions, just pointing out a different angle on the "unsafe" issue mentioned above. I'd love to hear if anyone has any experience or ideas to reduce this perception of a lack of safety.
    • giraffe_lady 4y ago
      Right, it's not not necessarily about safety it's about needing to feel safe. A big problem on this honestly is that news media focuses disproportionately on interpersonal crime compared to almost all other kinds of harm that can be done. Combined with generally decreased newsroom budgets, this has led to firmer reliance on, and less questioning of, direct police releases. We basically just let the cops tell us what to worry about, and they predictably tell us to worry about the things that get more funding for police. We've mostly decided that, while these things aren't good per se, they are downstream of other incentives and requirements that are good, or at least inevitable. I don't agree, but I also don't think there's much value in a "what could be different" conversation without having a "why is it like this at all" conversation first.
    • kieselguhr_kid 4y ago
      What we really need is a holistic approach to a lot of these issues. Ending the violent prohibition of drugs, building and providing housing for the homeless, better and more accessible mental health programs, denser cities, better transit, etc. We don't have a politics in the US that fully articulates the dynamic interconnectivity of all the issues and aggressively pushes for a set of solutions.
      • treeman79 4y ago
        Doesn’t San Fransisco do all of those? They spend a huge amount on it anyway. And being one the dirtiest cities possible.
  • hackernewds 4y ago
    That's because you believe you won't be affected since you're driving. While transit would be someone else's responsibility. Same standards apply to why autonomous driving has to clear a much higher bar than beating the averages.
• jandrese 4y ago
  The article focuses on trains, but the same thing could be said for autonomous vehicles. When one crashes it is national news because they are so rare. People who say autonomous vehicles won't be viable until the crash rate is zero are setting the bar far too high. The threshold should be fewer accidents and/or fewer fatalities per million miles driven than human drivers. In theory system improvements on the autonomous cars could further reduce those figures, while reducing the accidents involving human factors is very difficult. You can't change people that much. Most of the foreseeable improvements are basically the same ones you would need for autonomous vehicles anyway, like better sensors around the car to detect obstacles.
  • giantg2 4y ago
    "You can't change people that much." The point of licensing is to restrict the privilege to those who can responsibly and competently preform the task. If they can't conform to that, then they shouldn't be driving. Tougher licensing and enforcement would drastically reduce fatalities. We already see this in many European nations with stricter enforcement and licensing.
    • jandrese 4y ago
      In the US it is easier to invent autonomous vehicles than take away grandma's drivers license.
      • giantg2 4y ago
        The trouble that many elderly face with smartphones leaves me a little skeptical that autonomous cars are really a solution to that specific problem.
    • distant_hat 4y ago
      The thing is in the US driving is essential to having any sort of life for the most part leaving tiny enclaves like NYC aside. And freedom is an important part of US ethos. Autonomous cars as long as they are better than humans would be accepted by a range of people especially by elderly etc because what they want is to get from point A to point B, not necessarily to drive.
• pessimizer 4y ago
  I think it's just because car crashes aren't a wedge issue, so they don't politically matter. We certainly don't ignore car crashes on local news, where they make a great space filler. Amtrak (and train travel in general) certainly is a wedge issue ("Amtrak Joe"), so we fixate on the only thing interesting that ever happens with it (crashes.) We can then discuss the state of it, whether we should shut it down or expand it, whether flying is safer, etc.
• causi 4y ago
  Human response is never in actual proportion to reality. For example, veterans have a suicide rate lower than farmers, fisherman, construction workers, maintenance workers, and engineers.
  • ithkuil 4y ago
    How do veteran farmers compare to non-veteran farmers? (Or fishermen etc?)
    • j-bos 4y ago
      This is a thought provoking question, thanks for that.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • the_jeremy 4y ago
    I don't think you are correct on engineers. General suicide rate in the US in 2019: 16.8/100k[0]. Suicide rate of veterans in the US in 2019: 31.6/100k[0]. Suicide rate of engineers in the US in 2016: 23.2/100k [1]. [0]: https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/docs/data-sheets/2021/2021-National-Veteran-Suicide-Prevention-Annual-Report-FINAL-9-8-21.pdf https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/docs/data-sheets/2021/2021-N... [1]: https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/84275 https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/84275
    • Willish42 4y ago
      I didn't realize aggregated info on this type of thing was so readily available. TY for including references!
    • causi 4y ago
      I was using these numbers that combined architects and engineers: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-jobs-with-the-highest-rates-of-suicide-2016-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/the-jobs-with-the-highest-ra...
• giantg2 4y ago
  The engineering side is good to look at. We should also be looking at the education/credentialing side too. Many incidents are drivers making poor choices, not knowing the laws, or not understanding vehicle dynamics. Stricter licensing would be a good way to reduce incidents regardless of the redesigns. Arguably, that would be the fastest and cheapest route to effective change.
  • multiplegeorges 4y ago
    Yeah, every driver should have to re-do a driving test every 5 years to maintain a license and if they are convicted of a moving violation they should have to re-do the test within a year of that violation, in addition to the 5 year test. Driving is a privilege, not a right.
  • kiba 4y ago
    Or we could just get rid of the need to drive cars. The best part is no part.
  • malauxyeux 4y ago
    We've got strict credentialing here in France for obtaining your first license and we're well below the US in traffic deaths. It may be part of the picture, though I still witness plenty of dangerous/aggressive/stupid driving here. One thing we do have going for us, I believe, is "no permit" cars. These are tiny cars with tiny engines that don't require a permit to drive. Many (most?) drivers with revoked licenses still need to drive. And they can still legally drive a "no permit" car. It's believed anyway that this serves as a security valve for keeping drunk drivers out of heavy, more deadly vehicles. Of course, driving a "no permit" car under the influence is still illegal.
    • chasd00 4y ago
      i was in Paris and Southern France for two weeks a little bit a go. As a US driver, the chaos of your mopeds makes driving pretty harrowing haha. Still, i was impressed. In all the driving I did over those two weeks I didn't see a single accident. In the US I would have seen at least two being cleaned up on the highways.
• intrepidhero 4y ago
  This article presents one facet of automobile risk that is interesting. Essentially there is no governing body tasked to analyze and mitigates these risks to the same degree as with public transport. Rather, general consensus (maybe not majority but still some level of consensus) must be reached before safety measures begin to see widespread adoption in a very distributed system. > For auto crashes, we’re talking about block level interventions, the kind of fine-grained design details that transportation departments are not able to perform. To point out an alternative, transportation departments, if endowed with the authority, could mandate centralized control of all motor vehicles. There is no technical (nor practical) reason you couldn't turn over the whole thing to properly engineered centralized computer control. It would be incredibly expensive but it could certainly be done in such way to reduce the risk by orders of magnitude. And that is exactly the kind of top down intervention transportation departments are capable of implementing, at least structurally, if not with their current budget levels. And I think the question of why we haven't done this, and probably won't any time in the foreseeable future, is a fascinating way to explore our approach to risk.
  • TylerE 4y ago
    NHTSA?
  • sonofhans 4y ago
    > There is no technical (nor practical) reason you couldn't turn over the whole thing to properly engineered centralized computer control. This is an extraordinary claim for which IMO you must provide extraordinary proof. I see zero evidence that this is technically possible today, regardless of expense or politics. It would be at-minimum a decades-long effort to computerize every car and develop central control for them. Putting aside the tech, we’re talking about a world where many people refuse to get vaccinated due to mistrust of government. How on earth will you talk these people into government-controlled vehicles? From my POV, the answer to “why” is not a mystery: (a) it’s literally not possible, (b) most people would be vehemently against it.
    • intrepidhero 4y ago
      Mythbusters set up radio control for cars all the time. There's a GPS, compass, and accelerometer in your pocket. The FAA seems to be pretty good at directing airplanes through airports. USAF has pilots operating drones on the other side of the world. It seems like all the tech is extant. It'd be hugely expensive like I said.... But that claim wasn't really the point I was trying to make. Pick some other more plausible (but still radical) safety measure we could take with cars. Way more stringent licensing, speed limiters, self-driving, or massive increases in public transport. > (b) most people would be vehemently against it. Why is that? 40,000 people die in the US every year. Why don't we allocate more resources to solving that? That's the question I think is interesting.
• elil17 4y ago
  The NTSB actually does investigate car crashes. Typically police do the actual footwork but if the cause is unknown NTSB agents will put boots on the ground. Unfortunately most of the causes are shared across many cases (speeding, distracted driving, drunk driving), so the cases end up getting lumped together into reports which can include tens of thousands of cases. However, they are performing root cause analysis. For distracted driving, for example, they break it down into distractions by other occupants, distractions by moving object inside vehicle (such as a fly), cell phone use (with hands), cell phone use (no hands), using component integral to vehicle (climate or audio), using component integral to vehicle (other), smoking, and many more. The problem is that decision makers don't do anything about it.
  • kiba 4y ago
    There's just more opportunities for things to go wrong when you give million of people across all walk of life the ability to control deadly vehicles and forced them to do it as a matter of daily routine. In contrast, public mass transit just have less things that can go home. Trains can be really safe if we wanted it to be.
  • chociej 4y ago
    I think Strong Towns would suggest they should include the infrastructure involved as a point to analyze when determining root cause. For example, if a driver was speeding, could the street or road have been built in a way that better discouraged speeding?
  • flaque 4y ago
    Human error isn’t a root cause. Why were they able to speed on that road? Why did they feel safe being on their phone? Every software engineer understands intrinsically that blaming the user does not improve outcomes. You cannot get folks to click the right button by putting “you must click the right button” into the terms of service, and then suing the users who click the wrong one.
    • kortilla 4y ago
      Yes it is. In many scenarios outside of software, things have already been optimized to a point where the human cannot be removed much further or the safety can’t be improved without violating some other constraint. > Why were they able to speed on that road? Every road can be sped on, especially if you’re going to crash. > Why did they feel safe being on their phone? They didn’t, but it was “an urgent reply”.
• EddieDante 4y ago
  • orionion 4y ago
    Does the 10k/year rise in last 7 years correlate to rise in ev use? Motor vehicle fatality rate in U.S. by year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... 2014 32,744 2015 35,485 2016 37,806 2017 37,473 2018 36,835 2019 36,355 2020 38,824 2021 42,915 How Many Electric Cars Are on the Road in the United States? https://www.treehugger.com/how-many-electric-cars-are-on-the-road-in-the-us-5192754 https://www.treehugger.com/how-many-electric-cars-are-on-the...
• narush 4y ago
  I _highly_ recommend consuming more of the content put out by Strong Towns [1]. If I were to summarize their message, it's that in the past 100 years, we've engaged in a large-scale experiment to design our places around cars. This is bad for safety, bad for the economy, and (most importantly!) bad for us people that live in these places! Content and education-wise, they are my favorite non-profit :) If you're looking for audio: their podcast [2] is great (this article came out yesterday as a podcast, and I listened to it while I was biking... and then got angry at all the cars driving around me, lol). If you're looking for something longer-form, I'd recommend reading Confessions of a Recovering Engineer [3]. It's literally fantastic, and changed the entire way I think about the suburbs and cities. I grew up in a suburb and recently moved to the city, and had this deep, under-thought feeling that the walking/biking (and the livability that came from it) was why I loved cities so much. This book helped me understand why I felt that way, what specifically is wrong with how we build place currently - and also practical things I could do about it! Not to be dramatic, but that book took me from pretty much _never_ thinking about place to: volunteering for a local bike advocacy group, biking twice as much, and literally being a more friendly neighbor. Effects not guaranteed, but I can't recommend this book highly enough if you're interested in this sort of thing. P.S. I am totally unaffiliated with Strong Towns. I just really like them :) P.P.S. If you're looking for some interesting drama, check out the lawsuit they are currently engaged in [4] with the Minnesota Board of Licensure. IANAL, but it kinda just seems like the engineering licenses boards are trying to shut down his speech because he points out that maybe letting only-technical engineers totally design our spaces isn't really the best idea! P.P.P.S. Donate here [5]! [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/ [2] https://www.strongtowns.org/podcast https://www.strongtowns.org/podcast [3] https://www.strongtowns.org/book https://www.strongtowns.org/book [4] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/2/21/the-latest-update-on-the-strong-towns-lawsuit https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/2/21/the-latest-upd... [5] https://www.strongtowns.org/membership https://www.strongtowns.org/membership
  • chroem- 4y ago
    You can't conduct commerce on a bike. Anti-car policies are also closely coupled with inflated housing prices, since they effectively reduce the available housing supply by requiring employees to commute from within public transit distance of their job.
• eesmith 4y ago
  > In fact, if we ask safety officials, as a group they officially blame driver error and reckless driving for fatal car crashes. In other words, don’t look at them. My understanding changed radically when I read about Sweden's "Vision Zero". Quoting Wikipedia: ] In most road transport systems, road users bear complete responsibility for safety. Vision Zero changes this relationship by emphasizing that responsibility is shared by transportation system designers and road users
• marsven_422 4y ago
• CapitalistCartr 4y ago
  My kid sister died in a car accident two weeks ago. Now I find the numbers unfathomable. How can 40,000 families be suffering like this, every year?
  • djmips 4y ago
    I agree, it's one of the things that I think of often... it's not logical. My condolences to you and your family... :`(
  • closewith 4y ago
    I'm sorry for your loss.
  • notjustanymike 4y ago
    Because even 40,000 people is only a lot relatively. It is just 0.012% of the American population and 0.00051% of the world population.
    • giraffe_lady 4y ago
      No even on that scale it is a lot of harm when you consider it as it actually is. As the person you're responding to notes, a preventable death touches many more than just the individual killed. You can argue that this cost is worth bearing, but you can't dismiss it as "just" .01% or whatever. Over a period of years this is almost every family touched by unnecessary death: people growing up without a parent, careers ended because of disability, spiraling into depression or addiction because of losing a child, all the second and third order effects of grief and loss and suffering. Again, maybe it's worth it. Make a point for why it is though, if you find it to be. Pointing at the numbers isn't enough.
      • lief79 4y ago
        Relatedly, that's just the fatalities. There are far more none fatal injuries, some of which are permanently life altering without bringing in the costs of health care in this country.
• tristor 4y ago
  The primary reason why I ignore car crashes is because I ensure that I do the following things, all of which greatly reduce my risk factor compared to the average: 1. I always drive attentively with both hands on the steering wheel. 2. I completed on-track driving instruction in a race car, multiple times, and also took training in evasive driving maneuvers. 3. I constantly maintain situational awareness of what's going on around and with my vehicle. 4. All of my vehicles are relatively new (less than 10 years old) and impeccably maintained, and provided with the highest quality tires available replaced on a regular cadence based on service life. 5. I do not drive when I am overly tired, after having consumed any alcoholic substance, or in adverse weather conditions. In any of these situations, I either do not travel or I find an alternate way to travel that doesn't incur the risks of driving. A simple example of #5 is that I was on a road-trip headed North in the US, and we had a late-Spring snowstorm happen around mid-day. I had originally planned to get a further 150 miles down the road before stopping for the night, but I instead immediately pulled off and booked a hotel room, and left again the following morning after the roads had cleared and traffic had let up. Could I have made it? Almost certainly. Was my vehicle equipped for the weather? Yes, absolutely. Was it worth the risk? Not at all. A hotel room was $120 for the night, which was cheap insurance against possibly dying on vacation. If I get onto a public bus, or into a ride share, or a taxi, I can't guarantee any of the above. The driver might have personal issues causing them to have stayed up late the night before, and then they had a few martinis to help them sleep, and started the morning with heavy coffee drinking, constantly checking on the status of their personal issues on their phone while they're driving. The bus due to it being a public service may be maintained at the margins of acceptable standards with tires and other consumable maintenance items being used to the full extent of their service life, rather than being replaced preventatively. We've all seen the "gators" on public roads of tire treads ripped off of truck and bus tires that were retreaded rather than replaced, or shredded rubber from large tire blowouts. The bus could be 17 years old with a spotty history and frame damage. All of these things are out of my control. But I can control myself, my driving, my vehicle, and ensure I always leave enough spare tire capability to evasively maneuver. I'm nearing 40 years old and I've avoided HUNDREDS of accidents that could have happened due to other drivers. I have never once in my entire life been in an accident where I was at fault. In fact, I've been in multiple accidents, all of which involved my vehicle being entirely stopped and stationary and being rear-ended by an inattentive driver, sometimes with me not even being in the car when it happened. As long as I am actively moving down the roadway, I consider my risk to be massively below the national average, because I am a better driver than nearly anyone else I've ever met and I drive better quality vehicles that are maintained better than nearly any other vehicle on the public roads. It's as simple as that.
• sytelus 4y ago
  My favorite: Number of people die from cancer each year is same as number of people died in World War II each year. How much resources did we allocated to each? As former chimps, our ability grasp probability and statistics is astonishingly limited.
  • noirbot 4y ago
    Isn't some of that skewed though? Most of the people who fought and died in WW2 were 18-40 year old folks in the prime of their life, or minorities killed in atrocities. My guess, and correct me if it's wrong, but a lot of people who die from cancer are generally unwell in other ways, or more elderly. It's also that there's not just one "cancer" we have to fix, and we already spend quite a lot of resources on studying and treating cancer.
  • badpun 4y ago
    It's not a fair comparison, because world population in 1940 was just 2.3 billion. So, in relative terms, WW2 killed almost four times as many people per year as cancer does. Not to mention that the goal of WW2 spending wasn't to improve some abstract death prevention statistics, it was actually to prevent madmen from taking over the whole world and turning it into totalitarian hell.
• indymike 4y ago
  The answer here is that the convenience of being able to jump in a car, and get to your destination quickly is worth the risk of occasionally being injured or dying on the way to most people. You also have to compare against what came before the car: horses and walking, both of which may have been perilous in comparison with DC Beltway traffic on the way home from work. Ah... never mind - braving the elements and bears might be better than the DC Beltway at rush hour.
  • codemonkey-zeta 4y ago
    That's not the alternative strongtowns advocates for. You can have more convenient and more safe municipalities at the same time. I recommend the "stroads" essay on their site (as well as the others too). Strongtowns really provides a very compelling thesis when you consider the whole of their proposals.
• dontcontactme 4y ago
  Another factor is that people are more afraid of scary things when they feel like they can’t control them. Driving makes people feel like they are in control, which makes drivers underestimate their chances of crashing. This is the same reason that airplane crashes and autonomous vehicle crashes are also huge news events: if people feel like crashes are being caused by something they can’t control, that scares them.
  • kieselguhr_kid 4y ago
    I want to make clear that I agree completely, but I've been injured in two car crashes in my life. Once, I was a pedestrian and crossing the street in a crosswalk with a signal when an old lady drove into me and then drove off. We had made eye contact while I crossed, but for whatever reason she decided to start driving nonetheless. The other time, I was stopped at a red light and someone arguing with their partner rear ended me. Incidentally, I caused minor injuries to others in a similar crash when I was a teenager. Clearly, there was no element of control to the injured parties in any of those three stories. It'd be really nice if we could figure out how to convey to people that they don't have any significant control over their safety when driving, so that we can finally start making rational attempts to drive down the number of motorist and pedestrian deaths.
    • kfarr 4y ago
      Yes, the feeling of control is an illusion.
  • jjav 4y ago
    > Driving makes people feel like they are in control It doesn't just make them "feel like they are in control", the driver is in control of manouvering the car. I guess you're arguing for the fact that not 100% of crashes are avoidable by the driver? Yes, that's true. But a very large percentage is very much avoidable by the driver and the choices they make. In contrast to a plane crash where the passengers literally have nothing at all they can do to avoid death.
• wahern 4y ago
  > No NTSB team is going to mobilize to investigate those tragedies. Nobody is going to seek the underlying causes or ponder the multiple contributing factors. In fact, if we ask safety officials, as a group they officially blame driver error and reckless driving for fatal car crashes. In other words, don’t look at them. Perhaps a touch too hyperbolic? Here's what the NTSB has to say about the matter: > The National Transportation Safety Board, an independent federal agency, has the authority to promote motor vehicle safety, determine the probable cause of motor vehicle-related crashes, and make safety recommendations aimed at preventing crashes. Over the years, NTSB has made recommendations to NHTSA.... Below is a list of open recommendations. https://www.nhtsa.gov/ntsb-open-recommendations-nhtsa https://www.nhtsa.gov/ntsb-open-recommendations-nhtsa
• AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Roadside bombs were Iran-sourced, and played into political actors desires to 1) stay in Iraq 2) invade Iran. Well and 3) actors who want us out of Iraq. Suicides of soldiers work as a deterrent to military action. No political actor wants that tool to be removed from their toolbelt. They want their "Defense Department" to be deployable at will with no hesitation from the American Public. Traffic deaths are a necessary evil of transportation, economic activity, and the profits of the oil industry.
• flaque 4y ago
  There’s an audio version of the same point here: https://podcast.strongtowns.org/e/the-drip-drip-drip-of-traffic-deaths/ 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 redesign the entire network to prevent this from happening again. But each individual death from car accidents is not enough to trigger the same response in cities, planners, and civil engineers.
  • hanselot 4y ago
  • googlryas 4y ago
    It makes sense because, for most of America, we have designed our environment to be heavily dependent on the possibilities cars open up for us. It is not the same with air or train travel. Those are useful, but not necessary for almost all people.
    • bostonpete 4y ago
      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...
      • cupofpython 4y ago
        probably because self-driving has fuzzy accountability and is the same driver in all vehicles. if a taxi driver crashes, youve got a bad taxi driver somewhere you will probably never interact with. If a self-driving car crashes, you've got possibly hundred of thousands of potential accidents waiting to happen from the same "bad driver" the regular car accident conversations have all been had. what else is there to say?
      • googlryas 4y ago
• mywittyname 4y ago
  "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 effectiveness. And they are a powerful organization. A car cannot be sold in the USA without NHSTA approval. At the tap of a keyboard, they can cost a company billions of dollars. They power reaches far beyond the USA as well. Not too long ago, the NHSTA issued a recall that bankrupted the largest producer of airbags in the world. I'd say the USA focuses a lot on reducing automotive fatalities.
  • zucker42 4y ago
    US DOTs have people devoted to safety no doubt, but they also endorse road and city designs which have safer alternatives.
  • epistasis 4y ago
    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.
    • panzagl 4y ago
      > 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. Is that all? Just move everyone in the country? What do you consider non-trivial?
• wyager 4y ago
  Because it's worth it. The question is why we don't ignore other causes of death that are also worth it.
• dukeofdoom 4y ago
  quality of life improvements make it so most people are okay with the risk. just like skiing, let people decide what risks they want to take. covid has emboldened the authoritarians. stop trying to tell other people how they should live.
  • chasd00 4y ago
    > covid has emboldened the authoritarians this is an important point. When the lockdowns and things were being talked about i thought it would never happen. I thought there's no way people will stand for it. I was shocked how many people would just do what they're told. I think it surprised a lot of people in power and now they're seeing how far they can push it before the people push back. I wonder what the response would be if someone in power just went on TV and said they were mandating no more driving between the hours of 9Am and Noon across the nation. I bet 60-70% of the people would comply with no more reason than "that's what they told me to do". To re-iterate, covid has emboldened the authoritarians
  • bpye 4y ago
    What about other people that don't drive, pedestrians, cyclists, etc. They are also paying the cost of increased road traffic deaths, except they are no part in the cause.
• throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  (Un)friendly reminder that it's tautologically impossible for the general public to be bad at a subjective task like risk assessment or a subjectively assessed task such as driving because the general public is what sets the baseline for the subjective assessment.
• ilaksh 4y ago
  What's required are actually very significant structural changes. Veterans suicides are the result of war, which is mass killing normalized by false mythology. And it not enough to just say that's a bad idea, the problem is deeply rooted in the core global paradigm which is fundamentally uncivilized. You can't just say that hegemony is bad, you need an alternative, which is a very difficult task. The problem with traffic deaths is again, structural. You are mixing 3000 pound vehicles, most of which contain only one passenger, with pedestrians in the same space. You have humans driving them. The solution is small autonomous vehicles completely separated from pedestrians. This is very hard, but possible, and the materials wasted on oversized vehicles that are underutilized, office buildings that are mostly empty, incredibly poor density, etc. can also be used for that purpose. Cities should actually be entirely redesigned.
• CodeAndCuffs 4y ago
  I was a cop for several years. I worked hundreds of crashes, and a few fatalities. If cars had a max speed limit of 85 mph, and required the seatbelt to be engaged to work, we'd cut our fatality rate in half. Most nations' DUI laws consider a 0.05 BAC as illegal. In most US states 0.08 is presumed under the influence, 0.06 - 0.079 is considered no presumption either way, and under .06 is considered not under the influence. My alcohol tolerance is fairly average, but after some off the cuff experiments with whiskey and a preliminary breathalyzer, I shouldn't drive at a .055. My wife shouldn't drive at a .03 Something like 80% of fatal crashes involve either alcohol, no seatbelt, or excessive speed, but not wearing a seatbelt is like a 50 dollar ticket, and a secondary offense, in many jurisdictions.
  • JoeAltmaier 4y ago
    A Patrol officer I knew said once "I never unbuckled a dead man"
    • koheripbal 4y ago
      It's a nice zinger, but obviously false.
      • robotresearcher 4y ago
        The quote is not "No one ever unbuckled a dead man".
      • bee_rider 4y ago
        There were around 42k traffic deaths in 2021 (a 16 year high apparently) and around 610k patrol officers https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-traffic-fatalities https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra... https://www.statista.com/statistics/751015/number-of-police-officers-in-the-us-by-industry/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/751015/number-of-police-... So, assuming every fatality is wearing a seat belt and is handled by a cop ('optimistic' assumption for it to be 'obviously false'), it would still be around a 7% chance per year for a cop to "unbuckle a dead man." So this isn't obviously false, depending on the career length. For example, after 10 years, assuming independent probability of such an encounter per year, .93^10 ~= .48.
• darig 4y ago
• umvi 4y ago
  I think there's another reason too we "ignore" car crashes: loose coupling with politics. Say a DUI driver kills a random family of 5. Is that going to make national headlines? Probably not. Very little to be gained politically. It doesn't really enrage us because we love and celebrate alcohol too much to be capable of villainizing it like guns. So as a result, it doesn't spread very far on social media. Now say a raging incel shoots 5 people at a mall (2 die, 3 are injured). Is that going to make national headlines? You bet. It easily enrages at least half of us since guns are a wedge issue. Hence, it spreads like wildfire on social media. As it's spreading, it is further coupled to politics whenever people use the story to further political goals like mobilizing peers to go out and protest, drum up support for a preferred candidate, and more. You won't see a public reaction to car accidents similar to guns until the media decides either alcohol or cars are villains that need to be eradicated from society.
  • Willish42 4y ago
    I think the car deaths vs. gun deaths asymmetry with representation in media can more reasonably be explained by how "terrifying" that news is to viewers, more likely to get web traffic and broadcast viewers, etc. Healthcare expenses is a similar political wedge-issue that causes tons of deaths (Medicare for all, etc.) and doesn't get nearly as much media coverage because it's less terrifying. You can see this even irrespective of how many deaths there are, like when there's a really big fire/explosion/storm that gets news coverage but casualties are zero or very low. Those are more likely to get coverage than a single car crash that killed more people
  • rootusrootus 4y ago
    > It doesn't really enrage us because we love and celebrate alcohol too much to be capable of villainizing it like guns I hear a lot more ads on the radio informing me about all the ways a DUI will screw over my life, even if I don't kill anyone, but almost nothing about guns. Now, at a national level, sure, guns dominate. But I'd say the larger differentiating factor is intent. The killer on a shooting spree sparks terror in a way that a stupid drunk driver does not, even if the latter is more of a risk.
  • Bhilai 4y ago
• smm11 4y ago
  July 18, 2022: 196 Covid deaths in the USA 2020: 1909 deaths daily from heart disease in the USA
• ladyattis 4y ago
  It reminds me of how here in the US we often overuse signage and other markings on roads to 'prevent' accidents but roads with less markings that are obvious and direct tend to have less accidents by comparison. I wonder if part of the problem with American roads is the fact we assume people need information they don't need or use. I know that roads here aren't actively calmed by changing the quality of the road (roughness, width) and that often people ignore or outright get confused by whatever signage and markings are put up.
  • ArrayBoundCheck 4y ago
    A couple years ago I saw a video of a guy filming himself talking to a road maintenance worker. In an angry tone he said they didn't have enough pylons and noone can see them when they drive uphill and they're causing accidents. The worker said policy says to use 3 (or 5 or something) pylons. As the worker was saying it you can hear someone slamming on their breaks. The guy turning his camera and catches a guy who swerved into the fence so he wouldn't hit the workers car or anything The guy filming immediately says (something like) "you see. That's what I said". The problem is also policy is made for typical situations and people are trained to ignore problems because its a pain in the butt to deal with policy makers Under using is probably more common but I wouldnt be surprised if some places used too many that people started ignoring it -Edit- I think it was this. Apparently my memory isn't very good because I forgot all the cuts https://youtu.be/sCEzEVJkO1U?t=20 https://youtu.be/sCEzEVJkO1U?t=20 Actually at 1m 18s guy says "there's 5 cones". Maybe my memory isnt terrible lol
    • ladyattis 4y ago
      Nice video. Yeah, that scenario is really bad. And it really shows how some roads aren't well designed or people aren't good at setting up buffers/warning zones to get people to slow down.
• jmyeet 4y ago
  I have a simpler explanation: people collectively are quite willing to let thousands of people they don't know when the alternative is any form of even mild inconvenience to themselves. Sensible gun regulations like red flag laws for those with mental issues or convictions for domestic violence or even just background checks? Well that might make it slightly more difficult to buy a gun so that's a "no". More than a million Americans died of Covid, at a peak of over 3,000 a day. For reference, that's basically a 9/11 every day. Mask mandates to reduce transmission rate? Getting vaccinated to hopefully reach herd immunity? Nope. American corporations routinely outsource activity to other countries that frequently use effective if not actual slave labor or otherwise horrible working conditions? Nope, we're OK with that too. How easily we trade convenience for the lives of people we don't know says a lot about human nature.
• dannylandau 4y ago
  I had two friends that were killed in a car crash inside city limits. One guy was turning left, and the other guy going 90 miles an hour in a 40 mile zone. Happened around midnight. Hit them perpendicular, and killed two friends and critically injured driver who survived and is recovering. Have become much more sensitive about car crashes and speeding as a result obviously. Forces you to re-assess your life. Realistic solution - Install speeding cameras everywhere, and most intersections. And levy heavy fines if a person is speeding 20 miles above speed limit, possibly even revoking driver's license in that case.
  • ladyattis 4y ago
    Another thing we can do is force city and state government transportation departments into rebuilding roads as they wear down into more actively calming roads. Making them narrower, put in raised pedestrian walkways (basically turns the intersection into one speed bump for cars), reduce the signage and markings to the essentials, and even make residential or high density roads physical rougher as to make it feel worse to drive fast. All these could help with residential/non-highway accidents.
• WalterBright 4y ago
  It's because we feel we can control the circumstances of the car crash. We cannot feel in control of airliners. We're hapless baggage.
  • Ottolay 4y ago
    Generally agree, although I think it is largely an illusion. Many people die in car accidents they did not cause.
    • WalterBright 4y ago
      > Many people die in car accidents they did not cause. True, but that doesn't disprove the fact that most people are a party to the accident they are in, regardless of who was at fault. For example, if someone is driving with an insecure load, I give them a very, very wide berth. There's a word for it - defensive driving.
• youamericanloo 4y ago
  well, because we can. I mean, we have some mental buffer to accept the conseuqences.. check deep inside! I think reacting to amtrak crash makes sense since it moves on rails! how on earth something moving on rails could possibly crashes? doesn't make sense... but cars are different.. if you be honest with yourself you should always wonder how on earth we can get to a point without an accident with cars! think about that.. sorry this is just harsh reality.
• eckesicle 4y ago
  Here's an interesting factoid: The annualized mortality rate of a US soldier is ~100 per 100,000. The annualized mortality rate of the average US man between the age of 25-34 is 177 per 100,000. (It's 199 per 100k for ages 18-24).
  • lief79 4y ago
    Interesting. Note, soldiers are initially filtered for health conditions. It's not the same starting point.
  • theptip 4y ago
    What's the annualized mortality rate among US men fit enough to pass the PFT (Physical Fitness Test)? (Put differently, I don't think there are any morbidly obese people in the military which skews the comparison you're laying out here.)
    • eckesicle 4y ago
      Yeah, of course this is probably the big differentiating factor. It's part selection bias, part staying healthy, part not being exposed to accident prone environments. Still though, as a lifestyle choice it's really safe.
• theptip 4y ago
  > It is widely recognized that there is an epidemic of suicides among current and former military personnel, especially those who have been on active duty in a combat theater... There were 3,481 combat deaths in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Since 9/11, there have been over 30,000 military suicides. Over 20 soldiers a day take their own lives. Pet peeve: while I really like the general point of the article, I wish the author had actually provided statistics that support the claim they are making here. 30k suicides sounds like a lot, but what's the base rate in the general population? The numbers provided don't actually tell you whether the rate of military suicides is higher than civilian ones, and that kind of undermines the point. To be concrete I'm looking for something like "the base rate of suicide is X% chance per year, whereas amongst soldiers it's Y% chance per year, suggesting a risk factor of (Y-X)% caused by military service." A quick search finds some research (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_veteran_suicide#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20the%20VA%20released,year%20from%202008%20to%202017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_veteran....) that suggests the rate of suicide among veterans is 1.5x the base rate, which is substantial. Using those numbers suggests that 10k of those suicides quoted above were specifically attributable to military service (and 20k would be "baseline civilian risk of suicide").
  • jedimastert 4y ago
    > Using those numbers suggests that 10k of those suicides quoted above were specifically attributable to military service (and 20k would be "baseline civilian risk of suicide"). This would be the case if probability of joining the military was independent of the risk factors for suicide, which I seriously doubt. Not disagreeing with the point at large, just that the statistical analysis would be even more complicated, at least finding similar demographics between the two populations
  • montag 4y ago
    Another pet peeve: The effect of gun ownership on suicide rates goes totally ignored. Suicide accounts for 21k out of 33k annual gun deaths in the US[1]. If we're outraged by school shootings, we should be apoplectic about facilitating suicide. [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/
• languagehacker 4y ago
  I think J.G. Ballard said everything that could be said about this in his 2004 Academy Award winning film "Crash"
• SwetDrems 4y ago
  What other engineering field has acceptable death rates? We design roads EXPECTING people to die on them. Insane.
  • BitwiseFool 4y ago
    >"What other engineering field has acceptable death rates?" I'd say virtually all of them, in some form or fashion. Everything has a tradeoff. There is an acceptable death rate electrocution, if there wasn't we wouldn't allow our homes to have electricity.
  • jjav 4y ago
    > What other engineering field has acceptable death rates? All of them? I can't think of any engineering area which has a mandate of guaranteeing it will be 100% impossible to have an accident with the product, or it doesn't get built. Can you?
• intrasight 4y ago
  We don't ignore them - we just accept that risk Data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Statistics 0.00000003% chance of dying if you drive a kilometer to the yoga studio. Want to make it less risky personally? Drive less, or drive a safer car. https://www.iihs.org/ratings/top-safety-picks https://www.iihs.org/ratings/top-safety-picks
  • kminehart 4y ago
    It sure would be nice if we could just "drive less". Unfortunately the cities we live in, at least in the US, are designed such that it's the only option we have. That's a huge focus of the website / book in the OP called, "Strong Towns."
  • avianlyric 4y ago
    What about all the pedestrians that are killed by vehicles (which is rapidly trending up)? Do just have accept that even those that don’t benefit from car must still suffer the consequences of cars?
    • intrasight 4y ago
      IIHS safety tests are getting more aggressive on pedestrian safety. And as their results have a huge impact on what the manufacturers do, I expect that in two years time a) a TOP SAFETY PICK+ rating will require passing a night-time pedestrian test, and b) manufacturers will figure it out.
  • elwell 4y ago
    It's not spinning the roulette wheel; the skill/sobriety/self-control of the driver has a lot of influence on the probability per kilometer.
  • jjav 4y ago
    > Want to make it less risky personally? Drive less, or drive a safer car. In addition, avoid doing the things that cause most accidents. Don't drive impaired (sleepy, drunk, etc), pay attention, get some car control training (not required in the US so most people don't). It'll never get you to zero risk of course, but you can have far lower chance of car crashes than the national average if you make all these choices.
• AlwaysRock 4y ago
  Never owned a car of my own until two years ago. Our car has been hit three times in the last two years. Once totaled on the high way (another drivers fault) and twice while parked. Roughly 50K in damages across the two cars and 3 months in the shop doing repairs. We spent 20K on a new car after the old one was totaled and insurance paid out a fraction of what a similar car would cost. We've paid close to 2K in deductibles, way too much for car insurance from a company that doesnt give a shit about us, and close to 1k on car cameras and backup batteries. Thankfully we havnt been hurt but we got lucky. When the car was totaled it was in heavy traffic going 40+ mph and caused a 4 car pile up. I know people who have died in accidents or had their kids die. My immediate family was incredible lucky to not be killed by a drunk driver in a very bad accident early on in my life. Driving sucks.
  • thecatwentup 4y ago
    Another anecdote on the other side of this: I've been driving since I was 15 for many thousands of miles and have only been involved in two incidents. Both my fault involving icy roads, but both where so minor that only paint damage occurred (no insurance involved). I live in the north-eastern United States for reference. Edit: I wouldn't say that my driving style is cautious either, I do drive attentively though.
    • franciscop 4y ago
      Same here, I drove for 7-8 years (not that much though) and my major "accident" was with a thin and curvy tree that was on a dead spot of the rear mirrors while backing up. Was in 3 close calls where the results would have been much worse. In motorbike in contrast, you touch a wet patch or a gravel bit and it slides right away, 2 minor accidents like that for a total of ~8 weeks driving motorbikes (minor since I knew there was gravel/water and was going really slow).
      • saiya-jin 4y ago
        > In motorbike in contrast, you touch a wet patch or a gravel bit and it slides right away Not a motobiker, but I find this part strange - I see people who commute daily on scooters, sports bikes and choppers too and they don't mind mild rain and wet roads much. They do drive slightly slower through city (and on highways too), but not more than 10kmh less. If its anything similar to bicycle then you just take care on bends/intersections but thats just about it.
• slifin 4y ago
  Cars are glorified and incredibly ingrained in culture Some people can't even imagine walking anymore and are blind to even how much road furniture and infrastructure they litter everywhere Some of the biggest structures we have are roads created in the last 100 years Absolutely crazy
  • cityofdelusion 4y ago
    I think the real issue is that people are just incredibly lazy. My area isn't "walkable", but its what I could call "walkable enough" -- you can get a meal and a hair cut and lots of kids could walk to school. Of course, the sidewalks are empty here. Just an occasional cyclist. Even areas around here that are much more walkable like a grouping of shops, people all seem to prefer driving shop to shop! We're talking like maybe 100 meter walk max. Cars are the default, and if you suggest walking, you get looked at like you're nuts. These same people don't even like cars or driving. I think they just like a comfy seat and air conditioning. The car is basically a mobile sofa to the population. Shove them into the crappy cars of the 60s and 70s with no A/C and I think they start walking a bit more.
    • rootusrootus 4y ago
      It just comes down to time. I can drive to the store in 5 minutes, or walk there in 20. Then I have to carry it home. You can call that lazy, but there are only 24 hours a day and a third of them are spent sleeping, a third working, and so that last third is precious.
      • scoofy 4y ago
        The reason it takes 20 minutes to walk to a store is because of the automobile. I live in SF, and very few areas of the city are more than a 5 minute walk away from a grocery store. The problem of the automobile is a problem of development and saturation. The automobile is ideal when few have them. This is exactly why the proliferated widely, now that we have 1.8 automobiles/household, the problems of automobile culture are inescapable unless we revert areas of our cities to pre-automobile urban design.
• olivermarks 4y ago
  Talk to any racing driver and they will spell out the importance of seatbelts for safety and to maintain control position. For many years there were TV spots explaining why you wouldn't be disfigured if you wore one. In modern cars those films could play repeatedly on the dashboard if you failed to buckle up or sat on top of the buckled belt. Once people understand why something is essential they will do it, but we have to keep fresh generations of drivers informed and involved imo.
• Blackthorn 4y ago
  While in retrospect The Dark Knight was almost comically heavy handed and clumsy, the Joker's speech about "the plan" was pretty solid and holds up.
• Ottolay 4y ago
  On a personal level, this reminds me of a concept called normalization of deviance. [1] Every time we do something which we know may be risky, but we do not have a catastrophic result, we further reduce the perceived risk that the catastrophic result will occur to us. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
• phyzome 4y ago
  A potentially larger reason is that we've decided car deaths are acceptable -- perhaps because the alternative implicitly might be some kind of impingement upon personal-car-culture, and that is pre-decided as unacceptable.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• nemild 4y ago
  On a related note, a few years ago, I went through an entire year of top headlines in the New York Times (top few pages), and mapped them against actual death rates: https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html It's obvious that these would be different, but it was especially glaring just how much we focused on intentional deaths in our media coverage. It also makes sense that this is newsworthy (aka profitable), but it leads to some terrible inferences and decisions if that's all we see.
• gringoDan 4y ago
  If cars were invented today, they would be illegal. We give 16-year-olds minimal training, then entrust them with the control of a 3,000 lb. weapon for the rest of their lives. You can be an awful driver, but even if you get into multiple accidents, your license will rarely be taken away. If cars had not been invented, we would have designed 20th century cities around people, rather than the automobile. We'd have a robust public transportation network that would all but eliminate the need for cars, at least in cities and suburbs (see Japan). Between the death toll and the alienation from living in places designed for cars, I'm not sure if the car has been a net positive for society.
• leroy_masochist 4y ago
  My theory of why we ignore car crashes as a source of deaths boils down to a basic reality of American politics: old people vote. I'm a volunteer firefighter in a rural town in the Northeast. We handle a fairly large area and go to about 80 motor vehicle accident calls a year, of which about 20-25 require patient extrication and about 5-8 involve one or more fatalities. More of these MVAs involve a non-intoxicated elderly person who made a driving error than involve an intoxicated driver (that's including people who nod off on heroin, not just drunks). If we had a clear-eyed view of risk mitigation, we'd make people over, say, 75 take a comprehensive vision and neuromotor exam to keep their drivers licenses current but we don't, because old people vote.
  • rootusrootus 4y ago
    Nationally, close to 30% of all traffic fatalities are caused by drunk driving. About 20% of all fatalities are elderly.
    • leroy_masochist 4y ago
      Our area has an older-than-average population so I guess this tracks.
  • ip26 4y ago
    There’s more to it, elderly who can’t drive wind up stranded & isolated which is a problem in itself. If we look the other way when they slowly become unfit to drive, we aren’t forced to solve those other problems.
    • leroy_masochist 4y ago
      Yeah, this is a good point. There are a lot of lonely and sad old people out there, many of them living in increasingly hoarder-y situations as they age and lose executive function. We go on some pretty sad medical calls/welfare checks. Check in on your old relatives.
• CHB0403085482 4y ago
  If USAians can ignore daily multi-death shootings, it can ignore any tragedy.
• dbrueck 4y ago
  No need to overcomplicate it: we ignore it because it's not that common. I mean, for every one person that dies in a car accident in the U.S., 16 die from heart disease and look at how good we are (collectively) at not really tackling that as a source of deaths!
  • alar44 4y ago
    Exactly, we don't ignore it. The author is just shitty at risk assessment.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• sk8terboi 4y ago
• woevdbz 4y ago
  This fails to note an important factor in both suicides and car crashes, which is (in the US especially) strong popular preference for personal freedom over personal safety. People would rather be able to freely own guns (even if they are routinely used for suicide) or drive their own cars at fast speeds (even if it causes deadly accidents). Trains and planes get such strong safety assurances because they are typically commercially operated, so they are subject to another popular feature, which is commercial operators' permanent fear of liability lawsuits. It's much harder for people to accept to trade off personal freedom for safety than it is for people to demand safety guarantees in commercial transportation services.
• oliwarner 4y ago
  Author obviously has a service to sell but the illustrative comparisons here bother me. Amtrak runs 300 trains a day, very rarely has accidents because the environment is so controlled. The US runs 120 million cars and trucks a day. 93 fatal accidents a day, many through driver fault. The risk profile is entirely different. We expect people to crash cars. It's why cars have seatbelts and airbags, and why Amtrak doesn't. We don't ignore car crashes, we just pay a lot more attention to rail failures because it shouldn't ever happen. They're preventable. Automotive accidents aren't, yet.
  • scoofy 4y ago
    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.
    • oliwarner 4y ago
      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 deviation from our expectations that makes it "newsworthy" or not. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do stuff about it, or that we should be happy with our expectations, but they're big fish outside the scope of the point I'm trying to lean on here. [1]: I'm British. Not the safest, but up there and relatively high density.
      • scoofy 4y ago
        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.
• moistly 4y ago
  British Columbia has the Insurance Corporation of BC, a publicly-owned company that used to be the sole provider of automobile insurance in the province. Back in the good old days, they funded improvements to high accident rate intersections, corners, roads, etc. Because as a public company, they were mandated to reduce insurance costs. That’s all by the wayside now, of course, because we elected a government that turned the company into a general revenue cash cow, leaving little funding for safety improvements.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• mysore 4y ago
  if the government had any integrity they would ban human drivers and invest billions into self driving tech.
• havblue 4y ago
  So how much of this increase is because of increase in car weight and how much is it "road rage" or whatever you want to call it? I definitely have noticed more aggressive drinking post covid and I hear about it more. Even a gas station worker mentioned randomly to me how people in our city are crazy drivers. This is anecdotal but I've become more worried about driving with the family.
  • xputer 4y ago
    Both are definitely a factor, but don't forget that a lot of the irritate driving behavior is because in America people are forced to drive. Even if they don't want to or really shouldn't be driving, they still have to drive to get around town. Here is a video that explains it further: https://youtu.be/d8RRE2rDw4k https://youtu.be/d8RRE2rDw4k
• maerF0x0 4y ago
  As more people do a thing, and do it more, it's natural consequences happen more. Funny how that happens? Using my eyes to approximate the changes from this graph[1] * Death rate per mile driven is down like 95% or nonetheless drastically since 1925. * Current deaths per year is less than 1975, despite driving like 50% more miles Now, safety likely could be much greater if people gave the same care to driving as in the past. Two phenomenon are likely happening : 1. Driving is more familiar, so its approached with less care, and 2. People have become accustomed to the safety technologies aiding them such that they increase the riskiness of their behavior to match their base risk tolerance. Eg: as brakes get better people drive faster and closer. As cruise radar gets better people use their phones more and rely on it braking. Alas, this may fall to the same issue with greenhouse gasses / climate change -- Technological change is simply not fast enough for the goals of society, and a net reduction must occur. We cannot make our economy green enough soon enough such that we must simply reduce our consumption, and it seems our safety standards cannot keep up with increasing consumption [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_traffic_deaths_per_VMT,_VMT,_per_capita,_and_total_annual_deaths.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
• Cupertino95014 4y ago
  > For auto crashes, we’re talking about block level interventions, the kind of fine-grained design details that transportation departments are not able to perform. An assumption that's nowhere even stated, let alone supported: that auto crashes are amenable to highway engineering changes. Why is "reckless driving" dismissed as obviously wrong? > They need to recognize that the growing crash fatality rates are a direct challenge—even a rebuke—to their theory of traffic safety, excuse me: growing crash fatality rates?? Shouldn't he at least demonstrate that they ARE growing? As maerF0x0 demonstrates below, they are NOT growing, and roads and cars are certainly WAY safer than they were 50 years ago.
• listenallyall 4y ago
  For the same reason the obituaries, listing perhaps 5-10 dead people, is nowhere near the front page of the newspaper, while a murder of just 1 or 2 often is.
• SEJeff 4y ago
  In 2020, there were around 173,000 highway vehicle fires reported in the United States. These are generally totally ignored as well unless they are one of the exceptionally rare Electric Vehicle cars. Then they are all over the news ZOMG TESLA CAUGHT ON FIRE!?!
• eyelidlessness 4y ago
  Title should be “why we ignore hundreds of thousands of deaths in our war analogies before we even get to an analysis”. Unless I’ve missed it, neither the article nor any comments at time I’m reading acknowledge that a war of aggression led to orders of magnitude more Iraqi deaths than the scale of death the author is registering as large. I’m not going to dismiss the 3000ish US military fatalities either, but someone should mention the half a million or more deaths that were suffered by people who didn’t invade a country or start a war.
• Trias11 4y ago
  It's hard to monetize politically.
• nvarsj 4y ago
  It's insane to me that we don't at least: 1) Require regular re-certification of people's driver licenses, and have much more stringent tests. 2) Mandatory speed limiters in all vehicles, using GPS to limit speed based on location.
• LatteLazy 4y ago
  Control. If 1000s of people die in ways we deem them able to control (be it car crashes or obesity) that's on them. If they die in ways deemed beyond their control (plane crashes) then that's something you have to stop.
• Tiktaalik 4y ago
  I came across a 1940s Edmonton Journal a while ago and one of the most remarkable differences from a modern newspaper was at the bottom centre of the front page was a number detailing the number of traffic deaths that year similar to a sort of "x days since this factory has had an accident" sign. What a remarkable thing to track in such a prime location. Clearly at some point someone cared quite a bit about traffic deaths. Not sure if this was some hyper local Edmonton issue for a while or there was broader concern around car deaths during this part of the 20th century. At some point though this concern about the startling amount of traffic deaths clearly ended.
• neycoda 4y ago
  People use cars far more than they use guns, there's far more cars owned than guns, and and cars are far more regulated. However, the US is unique in the amount of gun deaths in the world... far higher than other countries, with regulation far lower.