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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 dri

by 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
    You can build and set off bombs. It's just heavily regulated. However, many people haven't really consented to driving. They drive out of necessity. Where they live and work is only marginally in their control and there are no other transport options. When I was poor, I would have loved to not have to pay for insurance, gas, maintenance, and the vehicle itself. I couldn't really afford it. But without it, I couldn't get to work to eat. There weren't other options. When I made a little more money I could finally afford to live close to work and public transport was an option. The trip was 5 minutes by car, over an hour by bus. I'm on board for heavily regulating driving and shifting that danger assessment as you suggest. But first I think there is a moral obligation to provide alternative modes of transportation. (This should not be interpreted as excusing drivers from their obligation to be skilled and safe.)
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      Yes, agreed. Driving at least in the american context should be understood as basically bimodal: at one end a regressive tax on the poor and at the other a luxury that allows the wealthy to live in the segregated enclaves they value. Both ends need to be addressed and it will make for a lot of changes in the middle too. But there's no solution that doesn't involve completely rewriting transportation.
- cgriswald 4y ago
  People feel better protected in their cars. They're in a private rolling cage with all kinds of safety features and a built-in ability to get away from danger. They can also avoid more dangerous areas, practice defensive driving, and otherwise mitigate their chances of being one of those statistics. Being confronted by a knife-wielding drug addict on public transit is just a scarier proposition all around even if the numbers suggest it shouldn't be. And it feels random where death in a car doesn't, even though for the victim it often is.
- dwighttk 4y ago
  >the reality is that two orders of magnitude more deaths occur each year on our highways. What is the throughput of highways vs public transit? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was two orders of magnitude greater person hours on roads in non public transit.
  - trothamel 4y ago
    You're right. According to https://www.bts.gov/content/us-passenger-miles https://www.bts.gov/content/us-passenger-miles , in the US in 2020, there were 4,935 billion passenger-miles on highways, versus 32 billion passenger-miles on transit. The highway mileage includes 306 billion passenger-miles on non-transit buses. Amtrak (6 billion passenger miles) isn't considered transit.
  - masterj 4y ago
    > What is the throughput of highways vs public transit? Regardless of what the US does, throughput is much higher on public transit than it is on highways. You can fit so many more people on buses and trains than in automobiles. For the actual numbers, compare deaths-per-passenger-mile in-city and deaths-per-passenger-mile between cities (highways vs buses, trains, etc), and you will see huge difference in fatality rate.
yongjik 4y ago
I don't understand. What control do I have over a tired/drunk/high truck driver running a red light into an intersection I'm passing in? I can be actually assured that no drunk driver will smash into my seat in a subway (the chance might not be zero but it's astronomically low). You may say it's not "control" because I didn't personally force all those drunk drivers out of railroads, but then again, I can't force them out of public roads either.
- TylerE 4y ago
  You can assure that you don’t drive drunk. You can’t assure your bus driver didn’t pop a few pills before they came on shift.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    There’s risk mitigation there in the form of training and testing.
  - toyg 4y ago
    You also can't be sure a random guy is not going to come from a side street on a red light at 90mph and T-bone you because he was answering a whatsapp and didn't notice the lights. I ride a motorbike. As part of training I was repeatedly told to wear protection not because of my riding skills, but because of everyone else's lack of skills.
    - googlryas 4y ago
      You can't assure it, but again, you can control your own actions to help mitigate the danger of others being reckless. For example by driving defensively, scanning to the left and right when passing through an intersection, etc.
    - willcipriano 4y ago
      Part of riding a motorbike (cycle here) is also driving defensively is it not? I don't assume people are going to stop at a given intersection, I take a look at their current speed and project it forward before determining if it's safe for me to go. If someone is going at a high rate of speed towards a stop sign or red light, I don't pull out just because I have the "right of way" I assume they are going to do something stupid. Another example: On the highway I get myself into a position where I have plenty of stopping distance for the car in front of me, but also behind me in case I need to stop rapidly myself.
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
Yet we push millions of people on the roads when they are still dead tired, at once, massively increasing risk factors from multiple sides. Heck, many of them rely on coffee to be anywhere close to a careful and attentive driver. You might want to elaborate on your definition of control.
toyg 4y ago
You say control, I say guilt. Society loves to attribute systemic problems to individual wickedness, because it empowers the judgemental elements while requiring no actual effort. As you say, careful drivers are not immune. But as long as someone, anyone, involved in the accident can be condemned as sinful (in many cases the sin of being tired from overworking forced on them by societal pressures), it can be explained away.
- libraryatnight 4y ago
  This extends in so many directions. I hear people speak this way about the homeless, the addicted, the laid-off, the sick. Cancer? Begin the list of things the person did, consumed, didn't do that could have caused it (no shortage of headlines to feed the lists). Homeless? Must have acted irresponsibly and made stupid choices. It's sort of hand in hand with the "It can't happen to me" mindset. I remember my wife telling me - during the George Floyd trial - one of her co-workers interrupted when someone referred to him as a man and said "He was a drug addict" like that should end the conversation, like that exempted him from being human, like some of her favorite celebrities weren't drug addicts. "To the dumb question 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: 'Why not?'" - Christopher Hitchens, from Mortality.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  > But as long as someone, anyone, involved in the accident can be condemned as sinful (in many cases the sin of being tired from overworking forced on them by societal pressures), it can be explained away. And indeed if we look at railway safety this is exactly what we saw. Originally, railway companies would say well, yes two passenger trains collided, killing a hundred people, but conveniently for us both drivers died in the collision so we'll blame them. The problem wasn't us, the railway company, who are great, it's those awful drivers, who fortunately are now dead so no need to investigate further. In fact, since there's no body to examine we can confidently declare that one of the drivers was drunk. Which explains why we've told his widow that she won't be receiving one penny from the death-in-service fund. Eventually (this kept happening, because of course it did) coroners weren't talking this bullshit, and they said it seems like the problem isn't these lone drivers who are conveniently dead, it's the company hiring them. If the drivers aren't good enough, the company should get better drivers. If instead the problem is elsewhere (e.g. maybe it'd be a good idea to invent signals so that you know if a train just around the corner has broken down so that your express doesn't hurtle into it at full speed...) that's something for the railway company too. This didn't magically fix things overnight, but it did push back against the useless "blame the driver" narrative. Modern safety agencies, focused on a blameless "Learn from the past, prevent future accidents" model have improved things considerably, but that did not happen automatically, somebody had to call the corporate entities on their bullshit. Maybe we should call individual private car owners on their bullshit too. One trend I don't like is people who resist the word "accident". It's an accident unless you think it was done on purpose. Accident prevention is a thing. We can, and should, prevent accidents.
userbinator 4y ago
Control, freedom, personal responsibility. Public transit offers none of that compared to driving. Thus it should be no surprise that many find it better to die or be injured as a result of one's own actions, than those of some faceless bureaucracy, regardless what the actual rates are.
black_puppydog 4y ago
So how do the pedestrians that make up a sizeable part of road deaths control the situation then?
- TylerE 4y ago
  By doing things like not walking in the middle of the street at night in a poorly lit area wearing dark clothes. Has happened several times times in my town recently.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  The same way drivers do. Avoid the handful of behaviors that seem to lead to the bulk of the deaths. Be attentive and maintain situational awareness. Cross your fingers.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
wahern 4y ago
> 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. You could have just stopped at "control". That's the fundamental dynamic by which we can explain this differential public sentiment--a sense of control or lack thereof, independent of whether that control actually exists, or whether that control translates to reduced risk. You went off the rails trying to link it to some objective reality; it's unnecessary, and in any event even the best of drivers takes on more risk while on the road than riding passenger rail. Control also figures into notions of ethics and justice. We're much more willing to accept losses when we attribute the proximate cause to "nature", "god", "chance", etc. But our moral calculus shifts dramatically when the decision of a particular person or group can be fingered (reasonably or not) as a primary factor. You already subtly did that by insinuating blame upon many traffic victims. (I'm not saying the insinuation was improper or impermissible... we all frequently do that; it's a staple of public discourse and even personal reflection. Just highlighting the extent to which notions of control color our views.)
- roughly 4y ago
  What's interesting here is that it's a very specific, narrow form of control. The driver of the car feels in control, because they're operating the motor vehicle, yet on the macro scale, they're operating a motor vehicle because of a whole host of other decisions outside their control. For most people, they don't have the option to not operate a motor vehicle and still live where they do, work where they do, etc. Likewise, the road construction and design operates a powerful influence on how they drive and how others drive around them, as well as how safely they can navigate to their destination - this too is out of their control. Regulations on the construction and maintenance of vehicles they and others on the road drive are also out of their control, but affect the environment in which the driver operates, and rules around who can drive and under what conditions similarly are not in the driver's control. The driver of the car exhibits control over only the narrowest and most immediate circumstances of their condition, and yet that veneer of control is sufficient for the majority of observers to put the blame nearly entirely on the driver for the outcome of their trip, absolving or ignoring the numerous other systems and decisions made which put them in circumstances in which accidents are alarmingly frequent. The article covers suicide, and here too the veneer of control at the point of action hides the entire complex environment in which someone dies of suicide - the social, economic, and political landscape that creates the conditions in which a former service member takes their life is not strictly personal, but we insist on treating it as such, because at the point of action, it is indeed the individual who commits the act.
djmips 4y ago
Not to derail but the lack of control of self driving cars could be one reason there is a big reaction when someone dies as a result of an accident.
goodpoint 4y ago
Where is the control when you get hit by a car as a pedestrian or cyclist or car driver? This is an excellent example of biased thinking.
UncleMeat 4y ago
This is true. But there are two cars in many fatal wrecks. A family friend was killed going to the supermarket by a car running a red light and hitting him in an intersection. A few weeks ago a semitruck slammed into stopped traffic at full speed on 95-S at the Georgia/Florida border. Nothing can be done by a safe driver to prevent that.
- mwint 4y ago
  Ever since being rear ended in stopped traffic on the freeway, I do make a practice of stopping a bit further from traffic than normal and watching the mirror, ready to speed away on the shoulder, until there’s a decent buffer of stopped carts behind me. This isn’t reasonable to expect everyone to do, but any individual can realistically minimize their risk in this regard.
tshaddox 4y ago
I'd love to see studies that attempt to control for attributes related to "driver skill" or "driver responsibility" that you could objectively test yourself on, so that you could more accurately predict your own risk and compare it against the risk of alternatives like public transit. It's not really good enough to say "I don't drive drunk, and I'm pretty sure I'm a more skilled driver than average, therefore I can discard all studies on the risks of injury of driving versus public transit."
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  The fact that we rarely if ever see such data sets is a strong data point by itself. Insurance cost (data is widely available) goes down with age and you can extrapolate from that to safety but it only falls fast initially and the rest is largely a reflection of how driving habits change with age. Occasionally someone like Tesla or Volvo will trot out some cherry picked data that boils down to "yes the very safe demographics who buy our very safe cars die less than the peasants". Other than those two there's not much.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    Can you? How about controlling for mileage driven? Older drivers are e.g. more likely to be retired and drive substantially fewer miles due to not commuting.
- rustybelt 4y ago
  I don't think you can completely discard all comparisons, but people are intuitively right to recognize that if they don't engage in risky behavior (like drunk driving) they're less at risk of being in an accident. To argue otherwise is basically saying driving drunk is no more risky than driving sober.
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    > but people are intuitively right to recognize that if they don't engage in risky behavior (like drunk driving) they're less at risk of being in an accident. To argue otherwise is basically saying driving drunk is no more risky than driving sober. Sure, that’s why it’s important to know how risky automobiles are if you discard the cases of drunk drivers injuring themselves. I suspect drunk drivers injuring themselves accounts for a very small portion of automobile injuries, but we need to see the data. It’s not enough to say “I don’t drive drunk, and driving drunk is very dangerous, therefore automobile risk estimates don’t apply to me.” You could make the same argument about driving blindfolded.
otikik 4y ago
But the drunk driver can still invade your line on a split-second and frontal-crush you. If you’re in a bus instead of a car, you will be much more protected against that kind of thing.
smileysteve 4y ago
Your details really erase control though; To stick to the legal ones; Tired. 40% of Americans report not getting 8 hours of sleep a night. An only partially intersecting group reports they are regularly tired during daily activities. Is a driver's self actualization of tired accurate? Attentive; bad news, most drivers aren't attentive, hence we're still seeing deaths from texting while driving. Self actualization doesn't exist here either. Add in passengers (children, dogs, friend, partner) - deep thoughts on work, relationships - combined with doing something that is mostly mundane. Poor Maintenance. Brakes, nails in tires, low air pressure in tires, tires not suited for climate, other cars leaving oils on the roads, poor road maintenance, unexpected or untrained weather, check engine light (25%), potholes impact tie rods and steering, worn shocks, uneven loading. Very few drivers do this or pre-drive check every drive.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  >Poor Maintenance. Brakes, nails in tires, low air pressure in tires, tires not suited for climate, other cars leaving oils on the roads, poor road maintenance, unexpected or untrained weather, check engine light (25%), potholes impact tie rods and steering, worn shocks, uneven loading. Very few drivers do this or pre-drive check every drive. Your list started off good and then quickly went straight to bad faith BS. Nobody is getting in a crash because their worn out gas cap is causing the emissions system to pop a code. Furthermore, it's pretty clear from the statistics available and the widely varying conditions across the US with regard to vehicle inspections, weather and road conditions that these factors pale compared to human judgement related causes.
clairity 4y ago
the difference is the illusion of control. you can’t talk yourself past raw statistics that way. you might make a marginal difference in risk, but the bulk of the risk is beyond personal control. even with attentiveness, if you’re 1 of 100 drivers on the road, you’re at best controlling for 1% of that one risk. and i’d argue attentiveness (anti-distractedness) is the most important mass mitigation we could make, but it’s also practically impossible to maintain over a driving lifetime and nearly as impossible to enforce (without significant rights violations).
- TylerE 4y ago
  It's way way higher than 1%. 30% of crashes involve a drunk driver. 30% of the drivers on the road are not drunk.
  - clairity 4y ago
    and it’s orders of magnitude higher than 100 drivers on the road with you. you’re doubling down on a misunderstanding of risk. you have no control over most of the situations and circumstances that cause collisions, injury, and death. you not drinking and driving doesn’t make all the other drunk drivers sober up miraculously. your “control” has quite marginal effects at best.
- rustybelt 4y ago
  Are you arguing that drivers don't have any control over their level of risk on the road? Sure they can't eliminate 100% of risk, but not speeding and not driving drunk absolutely influences a driver's likelihood of being in an accident.
  - clairity 4y ago
    no, speeding hardly changes risk at all, but reckless driving certainly can, but that’s beside the point. the point is that changing your own behavior (i.e., “control”) has a negligible marginal effect on reducing your overall risk. nearly all of the practical risk is external and therefore out of your control (unless you manufacture additional risk by being distracted, reckless, and/or impaired). you can’t really lower risk, which is what “control” implies. that’s simply a falsehood some folks choose to believe that’s unsupported by a basic application of stats & probability.
wbsss4412 4y ago
The difference is really just the perception of control.
ErikVandeWater 4y ago
I'd say the difference is density of deaths. When people die in regular road accidents, it's just a few at a time. Not compelling enough for even a mention in national news coverage. When a plane or train crashes, it's hundreds simultaneously. Often with a good debris field too. Good enough to lead with.
neuralRiot 4y ago
I’d say that it is blame rather than control. We tend to focus more in finding the responsible to point the finger at rather than the cause. If 1000 drivers die in car accidents it’s easy to shift the responsibility at themselves but if 2 die on an Amtrak derailment, the responsible is Amtrak or American Airlines, Airbus, Boeing or whatever.

by TylerE 4y ago

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
  You can build and set off bombs. It's just heavily regulated. However, many people haven't really consented to driving. They drive out of necessity. Where they live and work is only marginally in their control and there are no other transport options. When I was poor, I would have loved to not have to pay for insurance, gas, maintenance, and the vehicle itself. I couldn't really afford it. But without it, I couldn't get to work to eat. There weren't other options. When I made a little more money I could finally afford to live close to work and public transport was an option. The trip was 5 minutes by car, over an hour by bus. I'm on board for heavily regulating driving and shifting that danger assessment as you suggest. But first I think there is a moral obligation to provide alternative modes of transportation. (This should not be interpreted as excusing drivers from their obligation to be skilled and safe.)
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    Yes, agreed. Driving at least in the american context should be understood as basically bimodal: at one end a regressive tax on the poor and at the other a luxury that allows the wealthy to live in the segregated enclaves they value. Both ends need to be addressed and it will make for a lot of changes in the middle too. But there's no solution that doesn't involve completely rewriting transportation.
cgriswald 4y ago
People feel better protected in their cars. They're in a private rolling cage with all kinds of safety features and a built-in ability to get away from danger. They can also avoid more dangerous areas, practice defensive driving, and otherwise mitigate their chances of being one of those statistics. Being confronted by a knife-wielding drug addict on public transit is just a scarier proposition all around even if the numbers suggest it shouldn't be. And it feels random where death in a car doesn't, even though for the victim it often is.
dwighttk 4y ago
>the reality is that two orders of magnitude more deaths occur each year on our highways. What is the throughput of highways vs public transit? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was two orders of magnitude greater person hours on roads in non public transit.
- trothamel 4y ago
  You're right. According to https://www.bts.gov/content/us-passenger-miles https://www.bts.gov/content/us-passenger-miles , in the US in 2020, there were 4,935 billion passenger-miles on highways, versus 32 billion passenger-miles on transit. The highway mileage includes 306 billion passenger-miles on non-transit buses. Amtrak (6 billion passenger miles) isn't considered transit.
- masterj 4y ago
  > What is the throughput of highways vs public transit? Regardless of what the US does, throughput is much higher on public transit than it is on highways. You can fit so many more people on buses and trains than in automobiles. For the actual numbers, compare deaths-per-passenger-mile in-city and deaths-per-passenger-mile between cities (highways vs buses, trains, etc), and you will see huge difference in fatality rate.

yongjik 4y ago

I don't understand. What control do I have over a tired/drunk/high truck driver running a red light into an intersection I'm passing in? I can be actually assured that no drunk driver will smash into my seat in a subway (the chance might not be zero but it's astronomically low). You may say it's not "control" because I didn't personally force all those drunk drivers out of railroads, but then again, I can't force them out of public roads either.

TylerE 4y ago
You can assure that you don’t drive drunk. You can’t assure your bus driver didn’t pop a few pills before they came on shift.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  There’s risk mitigation there in the form of training and testing.
- toyg 4y ago
  You also can't be sure a random guy is not going to come from a side street on a red light at 90mph and T-bone you because he was answering a whatsapp and didn't notice the lights. I ride a motorbike. As part of training I was repeatedly told to wear protection not because of my riding skills, but because of everyone else's lack of skills.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    You can't assure it, but again, you can control your own actions to help mitigate the danger of others being reckless. For example by driving defensively, scanning to the left and right when passing through an intersection, etc.
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    Part of riding a motorbike (cycle here) is also driving defensively is it not? I don't assume people are going to stop at a given intersection, I take a look at their current speed and project it forward before determining if it's safe for me to go. If someone is going at a high rate of speed towards a stop sign or red light, I don't pull out just because I have the "right of way" I assume they are going to do something stupid. Another example: On the highway I get myself into a position where I have plenty of stopping distance for the car in front of me, but also behind me in case I need to stop rapidly myself.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

Yet we push millions of people on the roads when they are still dead tired, at once, massively increasing risk factors from multiple sides. Heck, many of them rely on coffee to be anywhere close to a careful and attentive driver. You might want to elaborate on your definition of control.

toyg 4y ago

You say control, I say guilt. Society loves to attribute systemic problems to individual wickedness, because it empowers the judgemental elements while requiring no actual effort. As you say, careful drivers are not immune. But as long as someone, anyone, involved in the accident can be condemned as sinful (in many cases the sin of being tired from overworking forced on them by societal pressures), it can be explained away.

libraryatnight 4y ago
This extends in so many directions. I hear people speak this way about the homeless, the addicted, the laid-off, the sick. Cancer? Begin the list of things the person did, consumed, didn't do that could have caused it (no shortage of headlines to feed the lists). Homeless? Must have acted irresponsibly and made stupid choices. It's sort of hand in hand with the "It can't happen to me" mindset. I remember my wife telling me - during the George Floyd trial - one of her co-workers interrupted when someone referred to him as a man and said "He was a drug addict" like that should end the conversation, like that exempted him from being human, like some of her favorite celebrities weren't drug addicts. "To the dumb question 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: 'Why not?'" - Christopher Hitchens, from Mortality.
tialaramex 4y ago
> But as long as someone, anyone, involved in the accident can be condemned as sinful (in many cases the sin of being tired from overworking forced on them by societal pressures), it can be explained away. And indeed if we look at railway safety this is exactly what we saw. Originally, railway companies would say well, yes two passenger trains collided, killing a hundred people, but conveniently for us both drivers died in the collision so we'll blame them. The problem wasn't us, the railway company, who are great, it's those awful drivers, who fortunately are now dead so no need to investigate further. In fact, since there's no body to examine we can confidently declare that one of the drivers was drunk. Which explains why we've told his widow that she won't be receiving one penny from the death-in-service fund. Eventually (this kept happening, because of course it did) coroners weren't talking this bullshit, and they said it seems like the problem isn't these lone drivers who are conveniently dead, it's the company hiring them. If the drivers aren't good enough, the company should get better drivers. If instead the problem is elsewhere (e.g. maybe it'd be a good idea to invent signals so that you know if a train just around the corner has broken down so that your express doesn't hurtle into it at full speed...) that's something for the railway company too. This didn't magically fix things overnight, but it did push back against the useless "blame the driver" narrative. Modern safety agencies, focused on a blameless "Learn from the past, prevent future accidents" model have improved things considerably, but that did not happen automatically, somebody had to call the corporate entities on their bullshit. Maybe we should call individual private car owners on their bullshit too. One trend I don't like is people who resist the word "accident". It's an accident unless you think it was done on purpose. Accident prevention is a thing. We can, and should, prevent accidents.

userbinator 4y ago

Control, freedom, personal responsibility. Public transit offers none of that compared to driving. Thus it should be no surprise that many find it better to die or be injured as a result of one's own actions, than those of some faceless bureaucracy, regardless what the actual rates are.

black_puppydog 4y ago

So how do the pedestrians that make up a sizeable part of road deaths control the situation then?

TylerE 4y ago
By doing things like not walking in the middle of the street at night in a poorly lit area wearing dark clothes. Has happened several times times in my town recently.
throwaway0a5e 4y ago
The same way drivers do. Avoid the handful of behaviors that seem to lead to the bulk of the deaths. Be attentive and maintain situational awareness. Cross your fingers.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

wahern 4y ago

> 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. You could have just stopped at "control". That's the fundamental dynamic by which we can explain this differential public sentiment--a sense of control or lack thereof, independent of whether that control actually exists, or whether that control translates to reduced risk. You went off the rails trying to link it to some objective reality; it's unnecessary, and in any event even the best of drivers takes on more risk while on the road than riding passenger rail. Control also figures into notions of ethics and justice. We're much more willing to accept losses when we attribute the proximate cause to "nature", "god", "chance", etc. But our moral calculus shifts dramatically when the decision of a particular person or group can be fingered (reasonably or not) as a primary factor. You already subtly did that by insinuating blame upon many traffic victims. (I'm not saying the insinuation was improper or impermissible... we all frequently do that; it's a staple of public discourse and even personal reflection. Just highlighting the extent to which notions of control color our views.)

roughly 4y ago
What's interesting here is that it's a very specific, narrow form of control. The driver of the car feels in control, because they're operating the motor vehicle, yet on the macro scale, they're operating a motor vehicle because of a whole host of other decisions outside their control. For most people, they don't have the option to not operate a motor vehicle and still live where they do, work where they do, etc. Likewise, the road construction and design operates a powerful influence on how they drive and how others drive around them, as well as how safely they can navigate to their destination - this too is out of their control. Regulations on the construction and maintenance of vehicles they and others on the road drive are also out of their control, but affect the environment in which the driver operates, and rules around who can drive and under what conditions similarly are not in the driver's control. The driver of the car exhibits control over only the narrowest and most immediate circumstances of their condition, and yet that veneer of control is sufficient for the majority of observers to put the blame nearly entirely on the driver for the outcome of their trip, absolving or ignoring the numerous other systems and decisions made which put them in circumstances in which accidents are alarmingly frequent. The article covers suicide, and here too the veneer of control at the point of action hides the entire complex environment in which someone dies of suicide - the social, economic, and political landscape that creates the conditions in which a former service member takes their life is not strictly personal, but we insist on treating it as such, because at the point of action, it is indeed the individual who commits the act.

djmips 4y ago

Not to derail but the lack of control of self driving cars could be one reason there is a big reaction when someone dies as a result of an accident.

goodpoint 4y ago

Where is the control when you get hit by a car as a pedestrian or cyclist or car driver? This is an excellent example of biased thinking.

UncleMeat 4y ago

This is true. But there are two cars in many fatal wrecks. A family friend was killed going to the supermarket by a car running a red light and hitting him in an intersection. A few weeks ago a semitruck slammed into stopped traffic at full speed on 95-S at the Georgia/Florida border. Nothing can be done by a safe driver to prevent that.

mwint 4y ago
Ever since being rear ended in stopped traffic on the freeway, I do make a practice of stopping a bit further from traffic than normal and watching the mirror, ready to speed away on the shoulder, until there’s a decent buffer of stopped carts behind me. This isn’t reasonable to expect everyone to do, but any individual can realistically minimize their risk in this regard.

tshaddox 4y ago

I'd love to see studies that attempt to control for attributes related to "driver skill" or "driver responsibility" that you could objectively test yourself on, so that you could more accurately predict your own risk and compare it against the risk of alternatives like public transit. It's not really good enough to say "I don't drive drunk, and I'm pretty sure I'm a more skilled driver than average, therefore I can discard all studies on the risks of injury of driving versus public transit."

throwaway0a5e 4y ago
The fact that we rarely if ever see such data sets is a strong data point by itself. Insurance cost (data is widely available) goes down with age and you can extrapolate from that to safety but it only falls fast initially and the rest is largely a reflection of how driving habits change with age. Occasionally someone like Tesla or Volvo will trot out some cherry picked data that boils down to "yes the very safe demographics who buy our very safe cars die less than the peasants". Other than those two there's not much.
- TylerE 4y ago
  Can you? How about controlling for mileage driven? Older drivers are e.g. more likely to be retired and drive substantially fewer miles due to not commuting.
rustybelt 4y ago
I don't think you can completely discard all comparisons, but people are intuitively right to recognize that if they don't engage in risky behavior (like drunk driving) they're less at risk of being in an accident. To argue otherwise is basically saying driving drunk is no more risky than driving sober.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  > but people are intuitively right to recognize that if they don't engage in risky behavior (like drunk driving) they're less at risk of being in an accident. To argue otherwise is basically saying driving drunk is no more risky than driving sober. Sure, that’s why it’s important to know how risky automobiles are if you discard the cases of drunk drivers injuring themselves. I suspect drunk drivers injuring themselves accounts for a very small portion of automobile injuries, but we need to see the data. It’s not enough to say “I don’t drive drunk, and driving drunk is very dangerous, therefore automobile risk estimates don’t apply to me.” You could make the same argument about driving blindfolded.

otikik 4y ago

But the drunk driver can still invade your line on a split-second and frontal-crush you. If you’re in a bus instead of a car, you will be much more protected against that kind of thing.

smileysteve 4y ago

Your details really erase control though; To stick to the legal ones; Tired. 40% of Americans report not getting 8 hours of sleep a night. An only partially intersecting group reports they are regularly tired during daily activities. Is a driver's self actualization of tired accurate? Attentive; bad news, most drivers aren't attentive, hence we're still seeing deaths from texting while driving. Self actualization doesn't exist here either. Add in passengers (children, dogs, friend, partner) - deep thoughts on work, relationships - combined with doing something that is mostly mundane. Poor Maintenance. Brakes, nails in tires, low air pressure in tires, tires not suited for climate, other cars leaving oils on the roads, poor road maintenance, unexpected or untrained weather, check engine light (25%), potholes impact tie rods and steering, worn shocks, uneven loading. Very few drivers do this or pre-drive check every drive.

throwaway0a5e 4y ago
>Poor Maintenance. Brakes, nails in tires, low air pressure in tires, tires not suited for climate, other cars leaving oils on the roads, poor road maintenance, unexpected or untrained weather, check engine light (25%), potholes impact tie rods and steering, worn shocks, uneven loading. Very few drivers do this or pre-drive check every drive. Your list started off good and then quickly went straight to bad faith BS. Nobody is getting in a crash because their worn out gas cap is causing the emissions system to pop a code. Furthermore, it's pretty clear from the statistics available and the widely varying conditions across the US with regard to vehicle inspections, weather and road conditions that these factors pale compared to human judgement related causes.

clairity 4y ago

the difference is the illusion of control. you can’t talk yourself past raw statistics that way. you might make a marginal difference in risk, but the bulk of the risk is beyond personal control. even with attentiveness, if you’re 1 of 100 drivers on the road, you’re at best controlling for 1% of that one risk. and i’d argue attentiveness (anti-distractedness) is the most important mass mitigation we could make, but it’s also practically impossible to maintain over a driving lifetime and nearly as impossible to enforce (without significant rights violations).

TylerE 4y ago
It's way way higher than 1%. 30% of crashes involve a drunk driver. 30% of the drivers on the road are not drunk.
- clairity 4y ago
  and it’s orders of magnitude higher than 100 drivers on the road with you. you’re doubling down on a misunderstanding of risk. you have no control over most of the situations and circumstances that cause collisions, injury, and death. you not drinking and driving doesn’t make all the other drunk drivers sober up miraculously. your “control” has quite marginal effects at best.
rustybelt 4y ago
Are you arguing that drivers don't have any control over their level of risk on the road? Sure they can't eliminate 100% of risk, but not speeding and not driving drunk absolutely influences a driver's likelihood of being in an accident.
- clairity 4y ago
  no, speeding hardly changes risk at all, but reckless driving certainly can, but that’s beside the point. the point is that changing your own behavior (i.e., “control”) has a negligible marginal effect on reducing your overall risk. nearly all of the practical risk is external and therefore out of your control (unless you manufacture additional risk by being distracted, reckless, and/or impaired). you can’t really lower risk, which is what “control” implies. that’s simply a falsehood some folks choose to believe that’s unsupported by a basic application of stats & probability.

wbsss4412 4y ago

The difference is really just the perception of control.

ErikVandeWater 4y ago

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

neuralRiot 4y ago

I’d say that it is blame rather than control. We tend to focus more in finding the responsible to point the finger at rather than the cause. If 1000 drivers die in car accidents it’s easy to shift the responsibility at themselves but if 2 die on an Amtrak derailment, the responsible is Amtrak or American Airlines, Airbus, Boeing or whatever.