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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-d

by 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
    My guess is just because self driving cars are new and rare. Once there are millions on the road, we will stop getting reports about each individual accident involving them.
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    It's because self-driving cars have alternatives, like automated trains or streetcars, that are safer and less resource intensive. Self-driving cars aren't just competing against human-driven cars. Unless you think cars are the only form of allowed infrastructure.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      If a train or streetcar isn’t an effective alternative to a human-driven car (as is the case in the overwhelming majority of car trips in the US), how are they an effective alternative to a self-driving car?
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    If a careless driver crashes into me, I've been wronged by an individual who made some bad decisions. If a self-driving car hits me, I've been wronged by a corporation that probably cut corners and sold a shitty product for profit. I have some sliver of sympathy for the culprit in the first case, but zero sympathy in the second.
    - robswc 4y ago
      How do you figure the self-driving car was built by cutting corners? Just to be devil's advocate... usually its a small team of people that genuinely care about making self driving better. What prevents it from simply being an accident?
    - bostonpete 4y ago
      10-15% of car accidents are cause by mechanical failure. Some of those could certainly be blamed on large corporations cutting corners, so my question still stands.
      - MichaelCollins 4y ago
        > Some of those could certainly be blamed on large corporations cutting corners I think most of them are probably caused by deferred maintenance, which may either be the result of the owner making poor decisions, or a circumstance forced on them by poverty. In cases where the car is defective as manufactured, I have no sympathy for the company that made it. If that happens, I want the car company to pay for it. Which I believe generally happens. Car airbags blow up in your face because of a detective design? The car company has to pay to fix that. So your question has a false premise; we don't ignore deaths caused by faulty manufacturing. Usually anyway, some car companies seem to get away with more than others..
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  It doesn't though. We accept unsafe intersection in America that could be made a lot safer. I've also lived in 6 different car dependent places in my life, and all of them are amenable to biking, its just a scary proposition with the current infrastructure. I think a lot of the deaths are put in the realm of "personal responsibility" - we don't pursue safer options, even for cars, because it's always someone's fault something bad happened, rather than intrinsic to the design of the road. We create roads where people would feel safe going 65mph down them, then slap a 35-45mph speed limit on it, and call it a day.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    > We accept unsafe intersection in America that could be made a lot safer. Related, Americans encountering a traffic circle, presumably for the first time and with their brains turned off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDaQZUzJCNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDaQZUzJCNM
- kjksf 4y ago
  Tilting at windmills here but: US is not some unique country designed for cars and other countries are not some car-free utopias. Per: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_... US is 7th country on cars / people metric, below New Zealand and just above Poland. Yet this is upteenth time I read that US is "designed" around cars as if dependance on cars was some unique property of US.
  - Findeton 4y ago
    Because you can walk in all cities and towns in Poland.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    Saying the US was designed around cars doesn't mean it is unique in that it is designed around cars. And the relevant metrics would probably be something like miles driven and average speed, not the number of cars per capita. Jay Leno or Jerry Seinfeld may have 1,000 cars each but they can only die in a car accident once. Every in San Marino owning a car doesn't mean anything if they only drive it 15 mph through their city streets which were mostly all designed before the advent of cars.
  - WesternWind 4y ago
    You have to look at kilometers driven per person, not just ownership. Americans drive far far more than most other industrialized nations. https://frontiergroup.org/blogs/blog/fg/fact-file-americans-drive-most https://frontiergroup.org/blogs/blog/fg/fact-file-americans-...
    - windows2020 4y ago
      America is huge and lots of it isn't densely populated.
      - nostrebored 4y ago
        Hence the claim it’s designed for cars
- Akronymus 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. I disagree on "possibilities cars open up". If it is optional to use a car basically everywhere, then sure, those are freedom. In the majority of the US you are locked to HAVING to have a car.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    I think we might agree - don't miss the earlier part of that quote - "to be heavily dependent on the possibilities cars open up" They are both a blessing and a curse. Cars let us commute 25 miles to work in any random direction easily, but a lot of times, that also means we are required to commute 25 miles to work in a random direction.
rtkwe 4y ago
The same pattern plays out all over the place. Diffuse deaths are just background noise to life where singular events breakthrough. Happens all the time with gun/heart attack/car/pollution/etc. deaths. The last 2 years of COVID proved that to me pretty definitively.
- ccn0p 4y ago
  Covid deaths: Simple solution, lockdown, virtual learning, 6-feet apart, cancel sports and after-school activities, miss graduations, etc. All the mental fallout from this: Too complex, just a way of life. Drip drip drip.
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    Well, those solutions don't really work because of the contagiousness, so they are going out of favor. What is needed is effective prophylactics (beyond mRNA vaccines) and effective treatment. But the effort spent on that is, sadly, minimal.
    - bsder 4y ago
      Exactly. For example, how many buildings have UV sterilized return air, now? A tiny, tiny fraction. And this would benefit us for way more than just Covid.
      - Enginerrrd 4y ago
        Honestly, I don't think UV return air would work as well as you think. The real solution is increased ventilation rates. UV bulbs are expensive (and invisible unless you get to poke around a buildings mechanical room.), they need to be replaced typically ~annually (they won't be). If they get dust on them, they don't work as well. Etc. etc. And here's the issue: To actually deal with high concentration infectious aerosols you need to get that air out of the room ASAP. (i.e. negative pressure rooms) If you can sterilize the return air that's great, but frankly I suspect dilution and air movement is going to be the dominant effect in reducing infection chains.
colpabar 4y ago
This is totally off topic, but aside from the numbers being lower, we do the exact same thing with gun deaths.
- jvm___ 4y ago
  Which baffles the rest of the world as we see the aggregate number and are dumbfounded that nothing is done.
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    The question under dispute is what is to be done. Removing guns from law abiding citizens is preferred by one vocal faction, rather than imprisoning criminals who use them in committing crimes (and who usually don't possess their guns legally). The other faction says that removing guns from law abiding citizens actually increases crime[0]. [0] https://twitter.com/AnneMarieWTHR/status/1549484122497843200?s=20&t=nQU-aG3Cy25NNJUqt2xPXg https://twitter.com/AnneMarieWTHR/status/1549484122497843200...
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      > Removing guns from law abiding citizens …who will later be law not abiding when they shoot someone. People want to prevent violence not punish it more. I’ve never seen any real claim that people aren’t getting arrested for hurting people, but I’ve seen a lot of people that want to stop the violence before it happens.
    - notahacker 4y ago
      As the OP said, other countries look on with bemusement at people arguing with a straight face that an anecdote involving one gun owner shooting another gun owner after he'd killed three people with an assault weapon widely and legally available locally proves that a policy of encouraging universal gun ownership is better than alternatives. Not least because some of said countries have four orders of magnitude fewer per capita gun deaths Sure, we get that changing US gun culture might be a bit more challenging than, say, the UK, where there weren't that many people with handguns to start off with when they were banned, and so it was particularly easy to convince even most criminals carrying wasn't worth the additional penalties. What we find bizarre is that someone buys an assault weapon in the sort of store that's ubiquitous in the US and nonexistent in other countries, walks into a mall with it because local regulations say there's no reason to apprehend somebody entering a mall with assault rifles until they've killed someone, and that event gets chalked up as a win for local gun policy because the casualties were in the single digits this time due to the rare use of a civilian gun against a mass shooter
mbostleman 4y ago
COVID must be an exception then as 1000s died in different places but the public was obsessed. Or the media was at least.
- icedistilled 4y ago
  *1,020,000 died in the US and counting.
jscipione 4y ago
The same goes for the vaccines and the FDA.
- icedistilled 4y ago
  Example of the "the brave maverick comment" like the "the brave maverick doctor" mentioned in this npr article https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/07/19/1111794832/doubting-mainstream-medicine-covid-patients-find-dangerous-advice-and-pills-onli https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/07/19/1111794...
KptMarchewa 4y ago
The same happened to nuclear energy, despite the fact that coal kills 100x people yearly than total nuclear energy deaths.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  Try 10,000 times more and you’d be closer, but that’s probably still an underestimate.
- nightfly 4y ago
  The disasters that happen when nuclear energy fails are amazingly bad though. Even discounting immediate human deaths, 80 square miles around Fukushima and 1,000 square miles around Chernobyl are effectively ruined forever.
  - KptMarchewa 4y ago
    Coal is (probably) permamently destroying 510 million square kilometers of Earth. Few square miles is amazingly small price for a carbon free energy.
    - andrepd 4y ago
      Even if it were true, the Chernobyl exclusion zone is mostly habitable now.
      - thrown_22 4y ago
        It's also the worlds largest nature reserve. There is something poignant that nuclear apocalypse is better for the environment than human civilization as it normally functions.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    > The disasters that happen when nuclear energy fails are amazingly bad though. Even discounting immediate human deaths, Are you sure you're not discounting that figure because it's contrary to your conclusion? Very few people have ever died as the indirect long-term result (let alone by direct immediate result) of nuclear energy accidents, even according the highest estimates from histrionic ideologues like Greenpeace.
LeifCarrotson 4y ago
I think that's a little uncharitable: If even a handful of people (regardless of location) are harmed by causes that we don't accept as normal, those are tragedies and we'll broadcast news about that tragedy 24/7 and use enormous institutions to move heaven and earth to eliminate that harm. If thousands of people are harmed by causes that we do accept, that's life as usual. That might be obvious, but it bears some thinking about. About 19 people in the US have been killed by Takata airbags in the years since 2008, and we've spent $24 billion recalling vehicles for repair, because that's a risk that we don't tolerate. 100 people will die today in cars - probably more than 19 people in the next hour, it's going on rush hour and people will be tired and in a hurry - and it's just another Thursday. Also, close to 19 veterans will commit suicide today. We accept that as normal, and I feel strongly that we shouldn't; consideration of that outcome should enter into the public consciousness as we consider the ethics and justifications of military recruitment and our involvement in conflicts across the globe. Where the deaths happen doesn't really matter. I think it's more about a human ability to name and blame an antagonist: Takata. 9-11. Firestone. Putin. Covid-19. Katrina. Comparatively, 'car culture', senelescence, social and cultural reintegration, and other issues are diffuse to the point of being pervasive and and human brains have a hard time running the numbers on the risk analysis.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > ethics and justifications of military recruitment Putin's War shows what happens when you don't have a strong military.
  - scrumbledober 4y ago
    it shows what happens when you don't have a strong military and try to invade a neighbor...
    - vel0city 4y ago
      The invasion of Ukraine started in 2014, back when Ukraine had practically no military. Putin escalated this invasion due to the fact Ukraine had been building up its army in response to key parts of its country being occupied by a foreign invader. If Ukraine had a large military in 2014, I very much doubt Putin would have invaded Crimea nor would there be Russian troops in the Donbas.
paulpauper 4y ago
Like covid. THoussands of deaths daily became background noise
- coding123 4y ago
  Well, 2 years ago it did not. it was more of an "event". Now that it's something we have decided we can't stop (in the sense that we've done as much as we can without forcing more things - the public has reach a hard limit) it's a lot like car crashes.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    We also realized (IMO realized is more accurate than decided) we can’t stop all deaths from influenza.
chris_va 4y ago
To play devil's advocate, we already employ hundreds of thousands of "cities, planners, and civil engineers" continuously to battle these distributed deaths.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- masterj 4y ago
  This is addressed at length by StrongTowns in this book: https://www.confessions.engineer/ https://www.confessions.engineer/
- akira2501 4y ago
  This person just missed the agency that _actually does this already_. It's not the NTSB, it's NHTSA. There's a database of every fatility that happens in a vehicle on American roadways. You can download it. It's amazing. https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-reporting-system-fars https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-report... Every fatal accident is documented. Often in incredible detail. I'm annoyed that this is often overlooked. Particularly in this case. And yes, drivers get blamed a lot, because drivers are most often at fault. Drugs or alcohol and/or speeding are factors in the majority of fatal accidents. This is already known. For an article that's attempting to so strenuously walk the high road, the omission of these facts is bizarre to me. How serious can they be?
- TheCoelacanth 4y ago
  Those people are generally more focused on making sure that cars can go fast than on preventing deaths.
- notatoad 4y ago
  that assumes that city planners and civil engineers have a goal of battling these distributed deaths. it's obviously a biased source, but "the war on cars" podcast has an interesting episode with Jessie Singer where she recounts her interviews with traffic engineers. A municipal traffic engineer's only goal is to shield the jurisdiction they work from from liability. as long as the industry standard best practices are implemented faithfully, you probably can't be sued. any attempt to do something different from the status quo opens you up to liability.
pdonis 4y ago
> 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. My summary is different: if thousands of people die because the government specifically puts them in harm's way but doesn't give them the best available protection against harm, particularly when, in retrospect, the government's reasons for putting them in harm's way were, to say the least, somewhat contrived, we take it very seriously and we demand that the government do better. But if thousands of people die because they individually made serious enough errors of judgment that it ended up killing them, we consider it a fact of life--because it is. No amount of social engineering is going to be able to always protect people from the consequences of their own poor choices. You can't design perfect roads that will magically prevent all accidents. What we can do as a society is to at least give people the proper incentives. Many people routinely ignore traffic laws (the most common is probably speed limits). Why? Because they can plainly see that many traffic laws are not there to actually improve traffic safety, they are there to give governments additional revenue sources (again speed limits are the most common example). And that means people lose respect for all laws, including those that actually are there to improve safety (such as seat belt laws). The way to fix all that is, first, to stop penalizing people that haven't caused harm. If I'm speeding, but I don't cause an accident, a cop should not be able to give me a ticket and force me to either pay a fine or go to court. (Not to mention that, during the time the cop has me pulled over just for being X mph over the speed limit, event though I haven't caused harm or even been driving outside the normal flow of traffic, how many other drivers that were doing the same thing have gone whizzing by? Obviously enforcement of such laws is going to be random, which just makes the incentive problem worse.) Even if I'm driving recklessly, or under the influence, but I don't cause an accident, a cop should not be able to give me a ticket and force me to either pay a fine or go to court. A cop should be able to stop someone who, in their judgment, is driving in a way that endangers other drivers. "Stop" here means pull them over, just as they would now, and, if in the cop's judgment that person is, at that time, not capable of driving safely (for example, if they fail a breathalyzer), don't allow them to drive. Ask them if there is someone they know who can come pick them up. If necessary, lock their car and take them to the police station and let them contact someone from there. But don't force them to pay a fine or go to court if they haven't caused harm. Second, many of the proper incentives can be better enforced by private entities. For example, I mentioned seat belt laws (and another poster, a former cop, mentioned them also). What if, instead of having seat belt laws, your car insurance policy had a rider that, if you were in an accident and were found to not be wearing your seat belt, either your deductible becomes much higher (say $10,000 instead of $1,000), or your coverage is denied altogether? What if, instead of DUI laws, there were a similar rider for having an accident if you were found to be under the influence? That would give exactly the right incentive, for people to not cause harm due to those kinds of errors of judgment. Even the law itself could be written the same way: no penalty for simply not wearing a seat belt or driving under the influence, but if you cause an accident and you are found to not be wearing a seat belt or driving under the influence, you are presumed to be at fault and you can suffer increased penalties. In short: put the responsibility for individual accidents where it belongs: on the individuals that actually cause harm.
ErikVandeWater 4y ago
In addition, the extra expense associated with regulation to make planes ultra-safe makes it unaffordable for some people. Those people then go on to use a vastly less safe form of transportation.
- toss1 4y ago
  This is confusing. You seem to be suggesting that we should let the kind of barely-competent people who typically operate & maintain automobiles with a minimum of attention also operate aircraft systems with a similarly casual approach in order to make it more affordable? The nature of aviation, where unplanned problems result in unplanned non-optional landings in random locations (instead of just pulling off the side of the road), would rapidly turn aviation into the most dangerous transport mode. Aviation would soon become unsustainable, and available to no one. How does making it less safe help anything? (note that I'm not discussing the FAA's massive inefficiencies, many of which I'm sure could be improved without compromising safety)
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    > You seem to be suggesting that we should let the kind of barely-competent people who typically operate & maintain automobiles with a minimum of attention also operate aircraft systems with a similarly casual approach in order to make it more affordable? We do though. In America you can build/buy and fly your own airplane with no license, regulation or certification at all. The catch is that it must be a very small airplane; single seat, under 115kg empty, max 5 gallons of fuel, etc, etc. You can buy or build many of them for about the price of a motorcycle or used car. They're fairly dangerous to the pilot, but are so small and light they probably don't pose much risk to others. Of course if one crashed straight into you, you'd probably die, but that doesn't happen very often.
    - toss1 4y ago
      True, but not particularly relevant. You're referring to the Ultralight or Light Sport Aircraft categories. These are almost entirely for recreation and not for transportation. The basic rules limit use to VFR (Visual Flight Rules), so daytime only on nice days, limited range, etc. Wonderful for getting up and enjoying the sky, but highly impractical for transportation. We don't see grocery stores ir office/industrial parks installing short airstrip fields for the shoppers or commuters arriving in Ultralights, but they do install bicycle racks. I'd say a bicycle is far more useful in any practical sense. So yes, in using aircraft for transportation, we're almost entirely in the regime of high regulation and expense.
m463 4y ago
there's one exception: some technologies have unusual publicity. a gasoline car fire? not a peep. an electric car fire? the media goes crazy. also nuclear power. Fukushima got a lot of attention, but radiation deaths linked to burning coal are significantly higher but not touched by the media.
- _yoqn 4y ago
  How often do gas cars catch on fire randomly (and not under the hood but under the passenger compartment as with EVs) compared with spontaneous electric car fires? This is reminiscent of the Galaxy Notes that were exploding in people's pockets some years ago.
  - Ancapistani 4y ago
    I’ve had it happen once, in a 1988 Toyota pickup. The (OEM) radio wiring caught fire while driving at slow speed.
  - vel0city 4y ago
    There are tons of ICE car fire recalls. My sister in law's car recently had a recall for the ABS system starting a fire. A neighbor of mine had their house burn down in the 90s from a car parked for several days in their garage from what would later be a recall. Ford had a massive recall of millions of cars because the steering column would catch fire. I've owned multiple cars which have had some kind of recall which resulted in a fire risk. Zero of them have been EVs. Sure, those aren't all starting in the passenger compartment, but a lot of these battery fires aren't always starting in the passenger compartment either.
    - hnick 4y ago
      Kia had a major recall fairly recently for this too. I think the fix was adding a single fuse but they recommended parking outside until then. > a lot of these battery fires aren't always starting in the passenger compartment either A lot of EVs have batteries under the car which I think was the point. Though I can't see it being a huge issue or I would've heard a lot of stories of people being cooked by now.
naasking 4y ago
> 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. But that makes sense statistically, because those are thousands of ostensibly independent events that don't necessarily have a single common cause, where the massacre of a thousand people in one place obviously has a single common cause. So of course the natural reaction is to shrug in the former case, because there's no obvious connection between them. Of course, if you can prove that those have a single common cause that can be tackled, then it makes sense to tie them all together.
- porknubbins 4y ago
  Yes the author seems to state that there are many more traffic deaths than commercial transport deaths as if the point is self evident but I do not see it. From my perspective its a minor miracle that there aren't more traffic deaths. We let any private individual drive up to a 20,000 something pound vehicle with pretty minimal licensing requirements (in most places in the US). The news story is that it mostly goes ok.
  - throwaway6734 4y ago
    my personal theory is that people's overconfidence in their ability as drivers and underestimating the risk of driving ends up making the process much safer than if people were more grounded in reality
    - iforgotpassword 4y ago
      Now I'm really curious for the reasoning behind that.
      - throwaway6734 4y ago
        I think it's like the difference between balancing on a plank of wood a foot off the ground and one ten feet off the ground. The act is the same, but the perception of risk is way different and the performance would be as well
Graffur 4y ago
Thanks for the summary although it doesn't say _why_
zamfi 4y ago
Individual deaths can result in local change, perhaps mediated by liability concerns. It's become the cynic's take to point out how quickly an unprotected pedestrian crossing gets a traffic light after a fatal accident there. The media makes the thousand deaths at once -- and its response -- more salient than a thousand individual deaths. There is a decent bit of literature around the role of the human and his/her purported error in a plane or train crash, compared with the culpability of a negligent operator (i.e., driving drunk) of a motor vehicle. Also, the FAA and NTSB have a very broad mandate when it comes to regulating planes and trains, while the NHTSA has traditionally not been willing to impinge on individual rights, perceived or otherwise, in the name of safety.
byw 4y ago
I think Volvo is one of the few car makers that investigates every crash (involving a Volvo) in Sweden.
hibikir 4y ago
It doesn't have to be like this though: Other countries pay attention to crashes, especially with fatalities. One of my uncles was a civil engineer working in Spain's government, now retired. All crashes reported to the police would be marked in maps, with an extra layer for fatalities. Then they'd be grouped by the kilometer of road, to look for the sections of road that were the most dangerous. The worst locations would be considered "black spots", and you'd see them in reports that hit the media. Part of the process of prioritizing road upgrades involved sending engineers in, evaluating what made the stretch of road so dangerous, and look for mitigations: From just road markings and using police as a traffic calming measure, to complete rebuilds. The US has a whole lot more miles of road, and a lot more miles traveled, but I'd be extremely surprised if there weren't areas that prove to be far more dangerous than any other mile of road, and where some efforts couldn't minimize the problem. The way we look at traffic is so much different though: In Spain most roads where cars travel fast tend to be outside of cities. In the US, we have a wide variety of streets rated at 30-40mph, With width and sight lines like roads where you could do 60, but that are really suburban streets where people might actually attempt to cross the street. Who is going to want to track, and fix, the fact that there are a lot of accidents near a high school, in a place where people do 45mph, and teenagers are trying to cross the street to get to the only nearby convenience store? We build more dangerously, and organize our government in ways where it's far less likely accountability will happen.
- dcsommer 4y ago
  The US has this concept of "black spots" too. However, they are ironically named "safety corridors." We get a nice sign [0] to mark the death zone and then traffic continues unabated. [0] https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2010/04/inflated_traffic_fines_in_unof.html https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2010/04/inflated_traffic...
  - autoexec 4y ago
    I had assumed that every city I've ever lived in was doing the rest of the work too, sending out engineers to asses the reasons for the higher than average deaths and making changes like adding stop lights, clearing anything obstructing people's view, or adjusting speed limits. Seems defeatist (or more cynically, exploitative) to just throw up a sign and extract more money from speeders. I mean, I want to know when I'm on a road that's got problems, so it's useful for that much I guess, but we kind of have that already in form of the roadside memorial (Descansos) trend that crept north from Mexico and Texas, If a road merits a "safety corridor" sign changes should be being made, otherwise you risk an incentive to build dangerous roads or to do nothing more about them in order to make more money on traffic tickets.
Bolkan 4y ago
> When a plane or train crashes, we stop everything and redesign the entire network to prevent this from happening again. They do that because planes and trains are expensive and owned by big corps/government.
- QuarterReptile 4y ago
  I can't speak to the government part, but the cost part can't be right. There have been 20 commercial aviation incidents in the last 20 years in the US of any type and size that included any fatalities by any means. 7 of those included jets, with 1 being a 777, one a 767, and everything else 737 or smaller. A 767 costs about 100 million (list price 200, but the internet says you always get discounts..?) So we'll ridiculously overestimate the per year cost of airplanes at 100 million, assuming fallaciously that these airplanes are always totaled (they're not) and that they're always 767s (they're not). On the other hand, let's assume (optimistically) that fatal car crashes always total two people per car, and that they all occur in affordable $10,000 cars (the average new car last year cost almost 5x that at 47K). That gets you 10,000*20,000, or 200 million per year in auto costs.
  - Bolkan 4y ago
    If your car crashes, you'll be the one who'll pay for it, either directly or indirectly through insurance.
tialaramex 4y ago
> When a plane or train crashes When a scheduled aviation passenger plane crashes. GA (General Aviation, "private pilots") flights crash all the time, people in them even die most days. If it happened in their catchment it'd probably make your local TV news, but it won't be their main story and it won't be a national headline unless somebody "important" died. A few hundred people die this way, in the US, in a normal year. The reasons are much the same as for private car ownership: - The private pilot cuts corners. They cut corners on maintenance and fuel, they cut corners on training, they cut corners on procedures. So their plane may fail more often than it should, or when one thing goes wrong there's less slack left than there should be. - The private pilot is subject to very relaxed medical requirements, especially in the US. So too often these pilots will become disabled in flight, and they're usually alone or with a non-pilot so if this happens they're probably dead. - The private pilot's skills are poor, they're subject to minimal day-to-day oversight and few of them seek real development of their skills once qualified. This means when things go wrong the pilot is less likely to successfully recover from a situation which was salvageable. - "Mission mindset" easily creeps in for private pilots. Particularly for weather, but also for loss of daylight, private pilots often have a purpose (e.g. "Get back in time for Sarah's wedding on Saturday" or "Fit in one more trip to the lake before winter") which causes them to make unwise decisions to press on into poor weather, deteriorating daylight, etc.
rufus_foreman 4y ago
>> When a plane or train crashes, we stop everything and redesign the entire network to prevent this from happening again There was a train crash less than a month ago that killed 4 people and injured 150, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Missouri_train_derailment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Missouri_train_derailment. It was at a crossing that didn't have warning lights or crossing gates. Which is a known issue and has been for many decades. We are not going to stop everything and redesign the entire rail network to prevent this from happening again, because it would cost too much. Even if saving lives and preventing injuries was the only priority, there are better ways to spend money than improving railroad crossings in rural areas. The current mileage death rate for motor vehicles is around 1.5 deaths per 100,000,000 miles driven. Marginal improvements in that have to be cheap to be cost-effective, there are many ways to save lives and prevent injuries in America if you have money to spend.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  >We are not going to stop everything and redesign the entire rail network to prevent this from happening again, because it would cost too much. The fact that we as a society have raised a few generations that cannot have adult discussions about "how much is too much" except in small groups, behind closed doors and off the record (and when such discussions leak the conclusions are always vilified no matter what they were) is going to hamper us for at least the next 70yr at least.
leetcrew 4y ago
> 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. I used to think this was very dumb and irrational. but eventually I came to think that the statistical death toll doesn't capture the full impact of a problem. how people feel about it is just as important, if not moreso. yes, driving is pretty high on list of dangerous things we do. but in my whole life I've only known two people that died in crashes and one who was lucky to survive. I take appropriate precautions, of course, but it isn't something that I think about every time I get in a car. on the other hand, if a few guys flew another plane into a skyscraper, I'd be thinking about that every time I got on a plane for a while, even though I'd still be way more likely to die on my way to the airport. doesn't really make sense, but that's how humans are. the things that make us happy, sad, or fearful are pretty arbitrary in the grand scheme of things. it's not unreasonable to optimize for the things people actually care about. or at least it's not less reasonable than a more "scientific" approach. either way, your goal is to improve the lives of a bunch of intelligent apes.
- owl57 4y ago
  Really strange. You've known two people who died in crashes. You've probably drove by multiple bad crash sites. And yet you perceive a danger you have only seen on TV or Internet as more important. Nothing here about you in particular, of course — all of this is just "normal". Makes one think, is it just how humans are or is it actually an example of how powerful is professional media?
Fomite 4y ago
This is one of the reasons that the things I work on most of the time (healthcare-associated infections) are so insidious. At any given institution rates are usually quite low, and infections a rarity. But when you project that up to every ICU or hospital in the country, you suddenly get something that causes more deaths than drunk driving.
onos 4y ago
Personally find the premise of the article odd. I don’t dislike public transit cause I’m worried I’ll die taking it. I am worried I’ll be mugged, and I know it will be unpleasantly crowded and take a long time. As for why we find the crashes surprising it’s probably because they’re rare, ie we think of these as safe in this respect, so are surprised when a death occurs. If anything a feather in the cap of public transit.
- robswc 4y ago
  I try so hard to _not_ dislike public transit but its generally been an awful experience for me.
bjelkeman-again 4y ago
I think it is all about committing to long term policy, allocating budgets, and sticking to it. > In Sweden, we have made a fantastic sustainability journey; in the 70's over 1000 people died in traffic every year, now there are a few hundred, but still far too many. https://www.saferresearch.com/index.php/news/210-people-were-killed-swedish-roads-2021-when-zero-vision-turns-25-years-old https://www.saferresearch.com/index.php/news/210-people-were... And this is with a very large increase in car use. In Sweden in the ‘30s-40s we had 200-300 deaths/year/100k cars. Today it is 5 deaths/year/100k cars. Cars are safer, newer, better road infrastructure, etc. In the US there where 42k deaths in road accidents in 2020, with 290 M vehicles. So about 15 deaths/year/vehicle. 200% more. [1] [1] https://www.nsc.org/newsroom/motor-vehicle-deaths-2020-estimated-to-be-highest https://www.nsc.org/newsroom/motor-vehicle-deaths-2020-estim... Going back to the beginning, a long term policy is needed. The question in my mind is if such a thing can be implemented without it getting talked about like some conspiracy against the right wing voter who loves their car? Here is at least a plan for it. https://www.nsc.org/road/resources/road-to-zero/call-on-president-biden-to-end-traffic-fatalities https://www.nsc.org/road/resources/road-to-zero/call-on-pres...
emarsden 4y ago
> 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. In economics, this is called catastrophe aversion: as a society, do we prefer accidental deaths to be "clumped together" or not (the total number of people killed being equal). Though the question is very important in regulating certain industries that can produce major accidents, we don't really know much about social preferences in this regard (the limited studies undertaken so far suggest that Americans and Europeans do not want regulators to adopt catastrophe-averse policies for safety risks). For an approachable introduction to this question, see [1]. [1] https://www.foncsi.org/en/publications/collections/industrial-safety-cahiers/catastrophe-aversion/ https://www.foncsi.org/en/publications/collections/industria...
achenatx 4y ago
the media treats it that way, but the government and many non profits work to reduce total deaths. You just dont hear about it because the media gate keeps the news. seatbelts, car seats, antilock brakes, medians in dangerous intersections, speedbumps, drunk driving laws etc. Are all to reduce one off deaths.
chrismcb 4y ago
Are you sure? We've been redesigning everything for years because is car wrecks. Cars are safer today because of it. For both passengers and pedestrians. Roads have been rebuilt. Deaths, pretty million, has been decreasing for the last fifty years thanks to changes being made. You are right in that car accidents don't elicit quite the same reaction as a single mass death, but they aren't being ignored and aren't quite considered a fact of life.

by flaque 4y ago

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
  My guess is just because self driving cars are new and rare. Once there are millions on the road, we will stop getting reports about each individual accident involving them.
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  It's because self-driving cars have alternatives, like automated trains or streetcars, that are safer and less resource intensive. Self-driving cars aren't just competing against human-driven cars. Unless you think cars are the only form of allowed infrastructure.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    If a train or streetcar isn’t an effective alternative to a human-driven car (as is the case in the overwhelming majority of car trips in the US), how are they an effective alternative to a self-driving car?
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  If a careless driver crashes into me, I've been wronged by an individual who made some bad decisions. If a self-driving car hits me, I've been wronged by a corporation that probably cut corners and sold a shitty product for profit. I have some sliver of sympathy for the culprit in the first case, but zero sympathy in the second.
  - robswc 4y ago
    How do you figure the self-driving car was built by cutting corners? Just to be devil's advocate... usually its a small team of people that genuinely care about making self driving better. What prevents it from simply being an accident?
  - bostonpete 4y ago
    10-15% of car accidents are cause by mechanical failure. Some of those could certainly be blamed on large corporations cutting corners, so my question still stands.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      > Some of those could certainly be blamed on large corporations cutting corners I think most of them are probably caused by deferred maintenance, which may either be the result of the owner making poor decisions, or a circumstance forced on them by poverty. In cases where the car is defective as manufactured, I have no sympathy for the company that made it. If that happens, I want the car company to pay for it. Which I believe generally happens. Car airbags blow up in your face because of a detective design? The car company has to pay to fix that. So your question has a false premise; we don't ignore deaths caused by faulty manufacturing. Usually anyway, some car companies seem to get away with more than others..
bcrosby95 4y ago
It doesn't though. We accept unsafe intersection in America that could be made a lot safer. I've also lived in 6 different car dependent places in my life, and all of them are amenable to biking, its just a scary proposition with the current infrastructure. I think a lot of the deaths are put in the realm of "personal responsibility" - we don't pursue safer options, even for cars, because it's always someone's fault something bad happened, rather than intrinsic to the design of the road. We create roads where people would feel safe going 65mph down them, then slap a 35-45mph speed limit on it, and call it a day.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  > We accept unsafe intersection in America that could be made a lot safer. Related, Americans encountering a traffic circle, presumably for the first time and with their brains turned off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDaQZUzJCNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDaQZUzJCNM
kjksf 4y ago
Tilting at windmills here but: US is not some unique country designed for cars and other countries are not some car-free utopias. Per: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_... US is 7th country on cars / people metric, below New Zealand and just above Poland. Yet this is upteenth time I read that US is "designed" around cars as if dependance on cars was some unique property of US.
- Findeton 4y ago
  Because you can walk in all cities and towns in Poland.
- googlryas 4y ago
  Saying the US was designed around cars doesn't mean it is unique in that it is designed around cars. And the relevant metrics would probably be something like miles driven and average speed, not the number of cars per capita. Jay Leno or Jerry Seinfeld may have 1,000 cars each but they can only die in a car accident once. Every in San Marino owning a car doesn't mean anything if they only drive it 15 mph through their city streets which were mostly all designed before the advent of cars.
- WesternWind 4y ago
  You have to look at kilometers driven per person, not just ownership. Americans drive far far more than most other industrialized nations. https://frontiergroup.org/blogs/blog/fg/fact-file-americans-drive-most https://frontiergroup.org/blogs/blog/fg/fact-file-americans-...
  - windows2020 4y ago
    America is huge and lots of it isn't densely populated.
    - nostrebored 4y ago
      Hence the claim it’s designed for cars
Akronymus 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. I disagree on "possibilities cars open up". If it is optional to use a car basically everywhere, then sure, those are freedom. In the majority of the US you are locked to HAVING to have a car.
- googlryas 4y ago
  I think we might agree - don't miss the earlier part of that quote - "to be heavily dependent on the possibilities cars open up" They are both a blessing and a curse. Cars let us commute 25 miles to work in any random direction easily, but a lot of times, that also means we are required to commute 25 miles to work in a random direction.

rtkwe 4y ago

The same pattern plays out all over the place. Diffuse deaths are just background noise to life where singular events breakthrough. Happens all the time with gun/heart attack/car/pollution/etc. deaths. The last 2 years of COVID proved that to me pretty definitively.

ccn0p 4y ago
Covid deaths: Simple solution, lockdown, virtual learning, 6-feet apart, cancel sports and after-school activities, miss graduations, etc. All the mental fallout from this: Too complex, just a way of life. Drip drip drip.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  Well, those solutions don't really work because of the contagiousness, so they are going out of favor. What is needed is effective prophylactics (beyond mRNA vaccines) and effective treatment. But the effort spent on that is, sadly, minimal.
  - bsder 4y ago
    Exactly. For example, how many buildings have UV sterilized return air, now? A tiny, tiny fraction. And this would benefit us for way more than just Covid.
    - Enginerrrd 4y ago
      Honestly, I don't think UV return air would work as well as you think. The real solution is increased ventilation rates. UV bulbs are expensive (and invisible unless you get to poke around a buildings mechanical room.), they need to be replaced typically ~annually (they won't be). If they get dust on them, they don't work as well. Etc. etc. And here's the issue: To actually deal with high concentration infectious aerosols you need to get that air out of the room ASAP. (i.e. negative pressure rooms) If you can sterilize the return air that's great, but frankly I suspect dilution and air movement is going to be the dominant effect in reducing infection chains.

colpabar 4y ago

This is totally off topic, but aside from the numbers being lower, we do the exact same thing with gun deaths.

jvm___ 4y ago
Which baffles the rest of the world as we see the aggregate number and are dumbfounded that nothing is done.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  The question under dispute is what is to be done. Removing guns from law abiding citizens is preferred by one vocal faction, rather than imprisoning criminals who use them in committing crimes (and who usually don't possess their guns legally). The other faction says that removing guns from law abiding citizens actually increases crime[0]. [0] https://twitter.com/AnneMarieWTHR/status/1549484122497843200?s=20&t=nQU-aG3Cy25NNJUqt2xPXg https://twitter.com/AnneMarieWTHR/status/1549484122497843200...
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    > Removing guns from law abiding citizens …who will later be law not abiding when they shoot someone. People want to prevent violence not punish it more. I’ve never seen any real claim that people aren’t getting arrested for hurting people, but I’ve seen a lot of people that want to stop the violence before it happens.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    As the OP said, other countries look on with bemusement at people arguing with a straight face that an anecdote involving one gun owner shooting another gun owner after he'd killed three people with an assault weapon widely and legally available locally proves that a policy of encouraging universal gun ownership is better than alternatives. Not least because some of said countries have four orders of magnitude fewer per capita gun deaths Sure, we get that changing US gun culture might be a bit more challenging than, say, the UK, where there weren't that many people with handguns to start off with when they were banned, and so it was particularly easy to convince even most criminals carrying wasn't worth the additional penalties. What we find bizarre is that someone buys an assault weapon in the sort of store that's ubiquitous in the US and nonexistent in other countries, walks into a mall with it because local regulations say there's no reason to apprehend somebody entering a mall with assault rifles until they've killed someone, and that event gets chalked up as a win for local gun policy because the casualties were in the single digits this time due to the rare use of a civilian gun against a mass shooter

mbostleman 4y ago

COVID must be an exception then as 1000s died in different places but the public was obsessed. Or the media was at least.

icedistilled 4y ago
*1,020,000 died in the US and counting.

jscipione 4y ago

The same goes for the vaccines and the FDA.

icedistilled 4y ago
Example of the "the brave maverick comment" like the "the brave maverick doctor" mentioned in this npr article https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/07/19/1111794832/doubting-mainstream-medicine-covid-patients-find-dangerous-advice-and-pills-onli https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/07/19/1111794...

KptMarchewa 4y ago

The same happened to nuclear energy, despite the fact that coal kills 100x people yearly than total nuclear energy deaths.

jiggawatts 4y ago
Try 10,000 times more and you’d be closer, but that’s probably still an underestimate.
nightfly 4y ago
The disasters that happen when nuclear energy fails are amazingly bad though. Even discounting immediate human deaths, 80 square miles around Fukushima and 1,000 square miles around Chernobyl are effectively ruined forever.
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  Coal is (probably) permamently destroying 510 million square kilometers of Earth. Few square miles is amazingly small price for a carbon free energy.
  - andrepd 4y ago
    Even if it were true, the Chernobyl exclusion zone is mostly habitable now.
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      It's also the worlds largest nature reserve. There is something poignant that nuclear apocalypse is better for the environment than human civilization as it normally functions.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  > The disasters that happen when nuclear energy fails are amazingly bad though. Even discounting immediate human deaths, Are you sure you're not discounting that figure because it's contrary to your conclusion? Very few people have ever died as the indirect long-term result (let alone by direct immediate result) of nuclear energy accidents, even according the highest estimates from histrionic ideologues like Greenpeace.

LeifCarrotson 4y ago

I think that's a little uncharitable: If even a handful of people (regardless of location) are harmed by causes that we don't accept as normal, those are tragedies and we'll broadcast news about that tragedy 24/7 and use enormous institutions to move heaven and earth to eliminate that harm. If thousands of people are harmed by causes that we do accept, that's life as usual. That might be obvious, but it bears some thinking about. About 19 people in the US have been killed by Takata airbags in the years since 2008, and we've spent $24 billion recalling vehicles for repair, because that's a risk that we don't tolerate. 100 people will die today in cars - probably more than 19 people in the next hour, it's going on rush hour and people will be tired and in a hurry - and it's just another Thursday. Also, close to 19 veterans will commit suicide today. We accept that as normal, and I feel strongly that we shouldn't; consideration of that outcome should enter into the public consciousness as we consider the ethics and justifications of military recruitment and our involvement in conflicts across the globe. Where the deaths happen doesn't really matter. I think it's more about a human ability to name and blame an antagonist: Takata. 9-11. Firestone. Putin. Covid-19. Katrina. Comparatively, 'car culture', senelescence, social and cultural reintegration, and other issues are diffuse to the point of being pervasive and and human brains have a hard time running the numbers on the risk analysis.

WalterBright 4y ago
> ethics and justifications of military recruitment Putin's War shows what happens when you don't have a strong military.
- scrumbledober 4y ago
  it shows what happens when you don't have a strong military and try to invade a neighbor...
  - vel0city 4y ago
    The invasion of Ukraine started in 2014, back when Ukraine had practically no military. Putin escalated this invasion due to the fact Ukraine had been building up its army in response to key parts of its country being occupied by a foreign invader. If Ukraine had a large military in 2014, I very much doubt Putin would have invaded Crimea nor would there be Russian troops in the Donbas.

paulpauper 4y ago

Like covid. THoussands of deaths daily became background noise

coding123 4y ago
Well, 2 years ago it did not. it was more of an "event". Now that it's something we have decided we can't stop (in the sense that we've done as much as we can without forcing more things - the public has reach a hard limit) it's a lot like car crashes.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  We also realized (IMO realized is more accurate than decided) we can’t stop all deaths from influenza.

chris_va 4y ago

To play devil's advocate, we already employ hundreds of thousands of "cities, planners, and civil engineers" continuously to battle these distributed deaths.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
masterj 4y ago
This is addressed at length by StrongTowns in this book: https://www.confessions.engineer/ https://www.confessions.engineer/
akira2501 4y ago
This person just missed the agency that _actually does this already_. It's not the NTSB, it's NHTSA. There's a database of every fatility that happens in a vehicle on American roadways. You can download it. It's amazing. https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-reporting-system-fars https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-report... Every fatal accident is documented. Often in incredible detail. I'm annoyed that this is often overlooked. Particularly in this case. And yes, drivers get blamed a lot, because drivers are most often at fault. Drugs or alcohol and/or speeding are factors in the majority of fatal accidents. This is already known. For an article that's attempting to so strenuously walk the high road, the omission of these facts is bizarre to me. How serious can they be?
TheCoelacanth 4y ago
Those people are generally more focused on making sure that cars can go fast than on preventing deaths.
notatoad 4y ago
that assumes that city planners and civil engineers have a goal of battling these distributed deaths. it's obviously a biased source, but "the war on cars" podcast has an interesting episode with Jessie Singer where she recounts her interviews with traffic engineers. A municipal traffic engineer's only goal is to shield the jurisdiction they work from from liability. as long as the industry standard best practices are implemented faithfully, you probably can't be sued. any attempt to do something different from the status quo opens you up to liability.

pdonis 4y ago

> 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. My summary is different: if thousands of people die because the government specifically puts them in harm's way but doesn't give them the best available protection against harm, particularly when, in retrospect, the government's reasons for putting them in harm's way were, to say the least, somewhat contrived, we take it very seriously and we demand that the government do better. But if thousands of people die because they individually made serious enough errors of judgment that it ended up killing them, we consider it a fact of life--because it is. No amount of social engineering is going to be able to always protect people from the consequences of their own poor choices. You can't design perfect roads that will magically prevent all accidents. What we can do as a society is to at least give people the proper incentives. Many people routinely ignore traffic laws (the most common is probably speed limits). Why? Because they can plainly see that many traffic laws are not there to actually improve traffic safety, they are there to give governments additional revenue sources (again speed limits are the most common example). And that means people lose respect for all laws, including those that actually are there to improve safety (such as seat belt laws). The way to fix all that is, first, to stop penalizing people that haven't caused harm. If I'm speeding, but I don't cause an accident, a cop should not be able to give me a ticket and force me to either pay a fine or go to court. (Not to mention that, during the time the cop has me pulled over just for being X mph over the speed limit, event though I haven't caused harm or even been driving outside the normal flow of traffic, how many other drivers that were doing the same thing have gone whizzing by? Obviously enforcement of such laws is going to be random, which just makes the incentive problem worse.) Even if I'm driving recklessly, or under the influence, but I don't cause an accident, a cop should not be able to give me a ticket and force me to either pay a fine or go to court. A cop should be able to stop someone who, in their judgment, is driving in a way that endangers other drivers. "Stop" here means pull them over, just as they would now, and, if in the cop's judgment that person is, at that time, not capable of driving safely (for example, if they fail a breathalyzer), don't allow them to drive. Ask them if there is someone they know who can come pick them up. If necessary, lock their car and take them to the police station and let them contact someone from there. But don't force them to pay a fine or go to court if they haven't caused harm. Second, many of the proper incentives can be better enforced by private entities. For example, I mentioned seat belt laws (and another poster, a former cop, mentioned them also). What if, instead of having seat belt laws, your car insurance policy had a rider that, if you were in an accident and were found to not be wearing your seat belt, either your deductible becomes much higher (say $10,000 instead of $1,000), or your coverage is denied altogether? What if, instead of DUI laws, there were a similar rider for having an accident if you were found to be under the influence? That would give exactly the right incentive, for people to not cause harm due to those kinds of errors of judgment. Even the law itself could be written the same way: no penalty for simply not wearing a seat belt or driving under the influence, but if you cause an accident and you are found to not be wearing a seat belt or driving under the influence, you are presumed to be at fault and you can suffer increased penalties. In short: put the responsibility for individual accidents where it belongs: on the individuals that actually cause harm.

ErikVandeWater 4y ago

In addition, the extra expense associated with regulation to make planes ultra-safe makes it unaffordable for some people. Those people then go on to use a vastly less safe form of transportation.

toss1 4y ago
This is confusing. You seem to be suggesting that we should let the kind of barely-competent people who typically operate & maintain automobiles with a minimum of attention also operate aircraft systems with a similarly casual approach in order to make it more affordable? The nature of aviation, where unplanned problems result in unplanned non-optional landings in random locations (instead of just pulling off the side of the road), would rapidly turn aviation into the most dangerous transport mode. Aviation would soon become unsustainable, and available to no one. How does making it less safe help anything? (note that I'm not discussing the FAA's massive inefficiencies, many of which I'm sure could be improved without compromising safety)
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  > You seem to be suggesting that we should let the kind of barely-competent people who typically operate & maintain automobiles with a minimum of attention also operate aircraft systems with a similarly casual approach in order to make it more affordable? We do though. In America you can build/buy and fly your own airplane with no license, regulation or certification at all. The catch is that it must be a very small airplane; single seat, under 115kg empty, max 5 gallons of fuel, etc, etc. You can buy or build many of them for about the price of a motorcycle or used car. They're fairly dangerous to the pilot, but are so small and light they probably don't pose much risk to others. Of course if one crashed straight into you, you'd probably die, but that doesn't happen very often.
  - toss1 4y ago
    True, but not particularly relevant. You're referring to the Ultralight or Light Sport Aircraft categories. These are almost entirely for recreation and not for transportation. The basic rules limit use to VFR (Visual Flight Rules), so daytime only on nice days, limited range, etc. Wonderful for getting up and enjoying the sky, but highly impractical for transportation. We don't see grocery stores ir office/industrial parks installing short airstrip fields for the shoppers or commuters arriving in Ultralights, but they do install bicycle racks. I'd say a bicycle is far more useful in any practical sense. So yes, in using aircraft for transportation, we're almost entirely in the regime of high regulation and expense.

m463 4y ago

there's one exception: some technologies have unusual publicity. a gasoline car fire? not a peep. an electric car fire? the media goes crazy. also nuclear power. Fukushima got a lot of attention, but radiation deaths linked to burning coal are significantly higher but not touched by the media.

_yoqn 4y ago
How often do gas cars catch on fire randomly (and not under the hood but under the passenger compartment as with EVs) compared with spontaneous electric car fires? This is reminiscent of the Galaxy Notes that were exploding in people's pockets some years ago.
- Ancapistani 4y ago
  I’ve had it happen once, in a 1988 Toyota pickup. The (OEM) radio wiring caught fire while driving at slow speed.
- vel0city 4y ago
  There are tons of ICE car fire recalls. My sister in law's car recently had a recall for the ABS system starting a fire. A neighbor of mine had their house burn down in the 90s from a car parked for several days in their garage from what would later be a recall. Ford had a massive recall of millions of cars because the steering column would catch fire. I've owned multiple cars which have had some kind of recall which resulted in a fire risk. Zero of them have been EVs. Sure, those aren't all starting in the passenger compartment, but a lot of these battery fires aren't always starting in the passenger compartment either.
  - hnick 4y ago
    Kia had a major recall fairly recently for this too. I think the fix was adding a single fuse but they recommended parking outside until then. > a lot of these battery fires aren't always starting in the passenger compartment either A lot of EVs have batteries under the car which I think was the point. Though I can't see it being a huge issue or I would've heard a lot of stories of people being cooked by now.

naasking 4y ago

> 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. But that makes sense statistically, because those are thousands of ostensibly independent events that don't necessarily have a single common cause, where the massacre of a thousand people in one place obviously has a single common cause. So of course the natural reaction is to shrug in the former case, because there's no obvious connection between them. Of course, if you can prove that those have a single common cause that can be tackled, then it makes sense to tie them all together.

porknubbins 4y ago
Yes the author seems to state that there are many more traffic deaths than commercial transport deaths as if the point is self evident but I do not see it. From my perspective its a minor miracle that there aren't more traffic deaths. We let any private individual drive up to a 20,000 something pound vehicle with pretty minimal licensing requirements (in most places in the US). The news story is that it mostly goes ok.
- throwaway6734 4y ago
  my personal theory is that people's overconfidence in their ability as drivers and underestimating the risk of driving ends up making the process much safer than if people were more grounded in reality
  - iforgotpassword 4y ago
    Now I'm really curious for the reasoning behind that.
    - throwaway6734 4y ago
      I think it's like the difference between balancing on a plank of wood a foot off the ground and one ten feet off the ground. The act is the same, but the perception of risk is way different and the performance would be as well

Graffur 4y ago

Thanks for the summary although it doesn't say _why_

zamfi 4y ago

Individual deaths can result in local change, perhaps mediated by liability concerns. It's become the cynic's take to point out how quickly an unprotected pedestrian crossing gets a traffic light after a fatal accident there. The media makes the thousand deaths at once -- and its response -- more salient than a thousand individual deaths. There is a decent bit of literature around the role of the human and his/her purported error in a plane or train crash, compared with the culpability of a negligent operator (i.e., driving drunk) of a motor vehicle. Also, the FAA and NTSB have a very broad mandate when it comes to regulating planes and trains, while the NHTSA has traditionally not been willing to impinge on individual rights, perceived or otherwise, in the name of safety.

byw 4y ago

I think Volvo is one of the few car makers that investigates every crash (involving a Volvo) in Sweden.

hibikir 4y ago

It doesn't have to be like this though: Other countries pay attention to crashes, especially with fatalities. One of my uncles was a civil engineer working in Spain's government, now retired. All crashes reported to the police would be marked in maps, with an extra layer for fatalities. Then they'd be grouped by the kilometer of road, to look for the sections of road that were the most dangerous. The worst locations would be considered "black spots", and you'd see them in reports that hit the media. Part of the process of prioritizing road upgrades involved sending engineers in, evaluating what made the stretch of road so dangerous, and look for mitigations: From just road markings and using police as a traffic calming measure, to complete rebuilds. The US has a whole lot more miles of road, and a lot more miles traveled, but I'd be extremely surprised if there weren't areas that prove to be far more dangerous than any other mile of road, and where some efforts couldn't minimize the problem. The way we look at traffic is so much different though: In Spain most roads where cars travel fast tend to be outside of cities. In the US, we have a wide variety of streets rated at 30-40mph, With width and sight lines like roads where you could do 60, but that are really suburban streets where people might actually attempt to cross the street. Who is going to want to track, and fix, the fact that there are a lot of accidents near a high school, in a place where people do 45mph, and teenagers are trying to cross the street to get to the only nearby convenience store? We build more dangerously, and organize our government in ways where it's far less likely accountability will happen.

dcsommer 4y ago
The US has this concept of "black spots" too. However, they are ironically named "safety corridors." We get a nice sign [0] to mark the death zone and then traffic continues unabated. [0] https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2010/04/inflated_traffic_fines_in_unof.html https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2010/04/inflated_traffic...
- autoexec 4y ago
  I had assumed that every city I've ever lived in was doing the rest of the work too, sending out engineers to asses the reasons for the higher than average deaths and making changes like adding stop lights, clearing anything obstructing people's view, or adjusting speed limits. Seems defeatist (or more cynically, exploitative) to just throw up a sign and extract more money from speeders. I mean, I want to know when I'm on a road that's got problems, so it's useful for that much I guess, but we kind of have that already in form of the roadside memorial (Descansos) trend that crept north from Mexico and Texas, If a road merits a "safety corridor" sign changes should be being made, otherwise you risk an incentive to build dangerous roads or to do nothing more about them in order to make more money on traffic tickets.

Bolkan 4y ago

> When a plane or train crashes, we stop everything and redesign the entire network to prevent this from happening again. They do that because planes and trains are expensive and owned by big corps/government.

QuarterReptile 4y ago
I can't speak to the government part, but the cost part can't be right. There have been 20 commercial aviation incidents in the last 20 years in the US of any type and size that included any fatalities by any means. 7 of those included jets, with 1 being a 777, one a 767, and everything else 737 or smaller. A 767 costs about 100 million (list price 200, but the internet says you always get discounts..?) So we'll ridiculously overestimate the per year cost of airplanes at 100 million, assuming fallaciously that these airplanes are always totaled (they're not) and that they're always 767s (they're not). On the other hand, let's assume (optimistically) that fatal car crashes always total two people per car, and that they all occur in affordable $10,000 cars (the average new car last year cost almost 5x that at 47K). That gets you 10,000*20,000, or 200 million per year in auto costs.
- Bolkan 4y ago
  If your car crashes, you'll be the one who'll pay for it, either directly or indirectly through insurance.

tialaramex 4y ago

> When a plane or train crashes When a scheduled aviation passenger plane crashes. GA (General Aviation, "private pilots") flights crash all the time, people in them even die most days. If it happened in their catchment it'd probably make your local TV news, but it won't be their main story and it won't be a national headline unless somebody "important" died. A few hundred people die this way, in the US, in a normal year. The reasons are much the same as for private car ownership: - The private pilot cuts corners. They cut corners on maintenance and fuel, they cut corners on training, they cut corners on procedures. So their plane may fail more often than it should, or when one thing goes wrong there's less slack left than there should be. - The private pilot is subject to very relaxed medical requirements, especially in the US. So too often these pilots will become disabled in flight, and they're usually alone or with a non-pilot so if this happens they're probably dead. - The private pilot's skills are poor, they're subject to minimal day-to-day oversight and few of them seek real development of their skills once qualified. This means when things go wrong the pilot is less likely to successfully recover from a situation which was salvageable. - "Mission mindset" easily creeps in for private pilots. Particularly for weather, but also for loss of daylight, private pilots often have a purpose (e.g. "Get back in time for Sarah's wedding on Saturday" or "Fit in one more trip to the lake before winter") which causes them to make unwise decisions to press on into poor weather, deteriorating daylight, etc.

rufus_foreman 4y ago

>> When a plane or train crashes, we stop everything and redesign the entire network to prevent this from happening again There was a train crash less than a month ago that killed 4 people and injured 150, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Missouri_train_derailment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Missouri_train_derailment. It was at a crossing that didn't have warning lights or crossing gates. Which is a known issue and has been for many decades. We are not going to stop everything and redesign the entire rail network to prevent this from happening again, because it would cost too much. Even if saving lives and preventing injuries was the only priority, there are better ways to spend money than improving railroad crossings in rural areas. The current mileage death rate for motor vehicles is around 1.5 deaths per 100,000,000 miles driven. Marginal improvements in that have to be cheap to be cost-effective, there are many ways to save lives and prevent injuries in America if you have money to spend.

throwaway0a5e 4y ago
>We are not going to stop everything and redesign the entire rail network to prevent this from happening again, because it would cost too much. The fact that we as a society have raised a few generations that cannot have adult discussions about "how much is too much" except in small groups, behind closed doors and off the record (and when such discussions leak the conclusions are always vilified no matter what they were) is going to hamper us for at least the next 70yr at least.

leetcrew 4y ago

> 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. I used to think this was very dumb and irrational. but eventually I came to think that the statistical death toll doesn't capture the full impact of a problem. how people feel about it is just as important, if not moreso. yes, driving is pretty high on list of dangerous things we do. but in my whole life I've only known two people that died in crashes and one who was lucky to survive. I take appropriate precautions, of course, but it isn't something that I think about every time I get in a car. on the other hand, if a few guys flew another plane into a skyscraper, I'd be thinking about that every time I got on a plane for a while, even though I'd still be way more likely to die on my way to the airport. doesn't really make sense, but that's how humans are. the things that make us happy, sad, or fearful are pretty arbitrary in the grand scheme of things. it's not unreasonable to optimize for the things people actually care about. or at least it's not less reasonable than a more "scientific" approach. either way, your goal is to improve the lives of a bunch of intelligent apes.

owl57 4y ago
Really strange. You've known two people who died in crashes. You've probably drove by multiple bad crash sites. And yet you perceive a danger you have only seen on TV or Internet as more important. Nothing here about you in particular, of course — all of this is just "normal". Makes one think, is it just how humans are or is it actually an example of how powerful is professional media?

Fomite 4y ago

This is one of the reasons that the things I work on most of the time (healthcare-associated infections) are so insidious. At any given institution rates are usually quite low, and infections a rarity. But when you project that up to every ICU or hospital in the country, you suddenly get something that causes more deaths than drunk driving.

onos 4y ago

Personally find the premise of the article odd. I don’t dislike public transit cause I’m worried I’ll die taking it. I am worried I’ll be mugged, and I know it will be unpleasantly crowded and take a long time. As for why we find the crashes surprising it’s probably because they’re rare, ie we think of these as safe in this respect, so are surprised when a death occurs. If anything a feather in the cap of public transit.

robswc 4y ago
I try so hard to _not_ dislike public transit but its generally been an awful experience for me.

bjelkeman-again 4y ago

I think it is all about committing to long term policy, allocating budgets, and sticking to it. > In Sweden, we have made a fantastic sustainability journey; in the 70's over 1000 people died in traffic every year, now there are a few hundred, but still far too many. https://www.saferresearch.com/index.php/news/210-people-were-killed-swedish-roads-2021-when-zero-vision-turns-25-years-old https://www.saferresearch.com/index.php/news/210-people-were... And this is with a very large increase in car use. In Sweden in the ‘30s-40s we had 200-300 deaths/year/100k cars. Today it is 5 deaths/year/100k cars. Cars are safer, newer, better road infrastructure, etc. In the US there where 42k deaths in road accidents in 2020, with 290 M vehicles. So about 15 deaths/year/vehicle. 200% more. [1] [1] https://www.nsc.org/newsroom/motor-vehicle-deaths-2020-estimated-to-be-highest https://www.nsc.org/newsroom/motor-vehicle-deaths-2020-estim... Going back to the beginning, a long term policy is needed. The question in my mind is if such a thing can be implemented without it getting talked about like some conspiracy against the right wing voter who loves their car? Here is at least a plan for it. https://www.nsc.org/road/resources/road-to-zero/call-on-president-biden-to-end-traffic-fatalities https://www.nsc.org/road/resources/road-to-zero/call-on-pres...

emarsden 4y ago

> 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. In economics, this is called catastrophe aversion: as a society, do we prefer accidental deaths to be "clumped together" or not (the total number of people killed being equal). Though the question is very important in regulating certain industries that can produce major accidents, we don't really know much about social preferences in this regard (the limited studies undertaken so far suggest that Americans and Europeans do not want regulators to adopt catastrophe-averse policies for safety risks). For an approachable introduction to this question, see [1]. [1] https://www.foncsi.org/en/publications/collections/industrial-safety-cahiers/catastrophe-aversion/ https://www.foncsi.org/en/publications/collections/industria...

achenatx 4y ago

the media treats it that way, but the government and many non profits work to reduce total deaths. You just dont hear about it because the media gate keeps the news. seatbelts, car seats, antilock brakes, medians in dangerous intersections, speedbumps, drunk driving laws etc. Are all to reduce one off deaths.

chrismcb 4y ago

Are you sure? We've been redesigning everything for years because is car wrecks. Cars are safer today because of it. For both passengers and pedestrians. Roads have been rebuilt. Deaths, pretty million, has been decreasing for the last fifty years thanks to changes being made. You are right in that car accidents don't elicit quite the same reaction as a single mass death, but they aren't being ignored and aren't quite considered a fact of life.