4 ms·

Author obviously has a service to sell but the illustrative comparisons here bother me. Amtrak runs 300 trains a day, very rarely has accidents because the env

Author obviously has a service to sell but the illustrative comparisons here bother me. Amtrak runs 300 trains a day, very rarely has accidents because the environment is so controlled. The US runs 120 million cars and trucks a day. 93 fatal accidents a day, many through driver fault. The risk profile is entirely different. We expect people to crash cars. It's why cars have seatbelts and airbags, and why Amtrak doesn't. We don't ignore car crashes, we just pay a lot more attention to rail failures because it shouldn't ever happen. They're preventable. Automotive accidents aren't, yet.

scoofy 4y ago
Again... if you don't compare the US to any other countries, this line of reasoning might seem plausible. It's not. The US outpaces comparative countries significantly, exactly because our infrastructure and culture of driving is inherently more unsafe.
- oliwarner 4y ago
  Even in the safest road-user countries[1], train incidents make the news, while most car accidents don't. We know trains (and planes) are outstandingly safe by design, and we know cars are driven by idiots and lawbreakers. Just as we intuitively expect that going to war, seeing and doing what needs to be done will have an enduring effect on people's mental health. We expect that from all higher-stress jobs. It's the deviation from our expectations that makes it "newsworthy" or not. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do stuff about it, or that we should be happy with our expectations, but they're big fish outside the scope of the point I'm trying to lean on here. [1]: I'm British. Not the safest, but up there and relatively high density.
  - scoofy 4y ago
    The point is that any sensible society wouldn’t continue with a transportation infrastructure that costs more and is vastly more deadly. The drip drip is deaths with no one doing anything to make it safer.
    - oliwarner 4y ago
      As many die at the barrel of a gun in the US, with countless more injured and intimidated. Perhaps it's not a sensible society.
zip1234 4y ago
Automotive crashes are very much preventable. We in fact know how to prevent them. It is partly why the roads in the US are so dangerous.

scoofy 4y ago

Again... if you don't compare the US to any other countries, this line of reasoning might seem plausible. It's not. The US outpaces comparative countries significantly, exactly because our infrastructure and culture of driving is inherently more unsafe.

oliwarner 4y ago
Even in the safest road-user countries[1], train incidents make the news, while most car accidents don't. We know trains (and planes) are outstandingly safe by design, and we know cars are driven by idiots and lawbreakers. Just as we intuitively expect that going to war, seeing and doing what needs to be done will have an enduring effect on people's mental health. We expect that from all higher-stress jobs. It's the deviation from our expectations that makes it "newsworthy" or not. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do stuff about it, or that we should be happy with our expectations, but they're big fish outside the scope of the point I'm trying to lean on here. [1]: I'm British. Not the safest, but up there and relatively high density.
- scoofy 4y ago
  The point is that any sensible society wouldn’t continue with a transportation infrastructure that costs more and is vastly more deadly. The drip drip is deaths with no one doing anything to make it safer.
  - oliwarner 4y ago
    As many die at the barrel of a gun in the US, with countless more injured and intimidated. Perhaps it's not a sensible society.

zip1234 4y ago

Automotive crashes are very much preventable. We in fact know how to prevent them. It is partly why the roads in the US are so dangerous.