5 ms·
Honestly, the safety bar set by human drivers is on the floor (and being run over by a "light truck").
by ianlevesque 3y ago
Honestly, the safety bar set by human drivers is on the floor (and being run over by a "light truck").
- dekhn 3y agoIs it? """The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has released its latest projections for traffic fatalities in 2022, estimating that 42,795 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes. """ """The number of vehicle-miles traveled on all roads in the United States decreased by some 1.55 percent to approximately 3.17 trillion in 2022. " Ignoring some important details, that means americans drive 75 million miles before a person is killed. That seems .... awfully damn good to me.
- ALittleLight 3y agoPedestrian fatalities are significantly up in recent years.
- dekhn 3y agoI believe my reported numbers include pedestrian fatalities. I would love to have better sources that made that clearer, as these are markes as "traffic fatalities"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- davidgay 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... The US is #5 (of 26 countries for which the statistic is available) in fatalities / km. That's only "awfully damn good to me" if your goal is to kill more people.
- dekhn 3y agoWhat does our relative position amongst a group of countries matter to my argument? The best countries see 150M miles between traffic fatalities. If we roll out self-driving cars and they continue to work as well as they have so far, the US numbers will get better.
- refurb 3y agoAgreed. If a risk in super low, being worse than other countries doesn’t change the fact the risk is super low.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoWhy ignore the other columns? Is it just because that one statistic leaves out most undeveloped and developing countries? Having lived in China before, not one of the 26, I know traffic can be much more fatal than in the states.
- macintux 3y agoCars are dramatically safer for passengers than they used to be. Miles per death isn’t reflective of the skill/attentiveness levels of drivers. As the sibling comment points out, miles driven per death for pedestrians isn’t necessarily being improved by the mass and visibility and safety factors.
- dekhn 3y agoI believe my numbers include pedestrians, based on the definitions I can see.
- macintux 3y agoHere’s a detailed breakdown (although no deaths/mile figures). Proportional to population, pedestrian fatalities have risen significantly since 2010. https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedestrians https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...
- dekhn 3y agoIt has deaths/mile, in that they provide deaths, and we know the miles. I do not disagree the numbers are trending up (although, I believe rates/miles driven might show a different story, but I didn't grab the miles driven for years 1975-2021 to normalize). Americans drive 400 MILLION miles before a pedestrian death. Let that sink in. 400 million miles per ped death. That's just absolutely gob-smacking amazingly good for something involving direct human control of an enormous ton+ vehicle.
- keenmaster 3y agoIf a couple drives 10,000 miles each for 50 years, that’s 1 million miles. In a neighborhood with 75 houses, each inhabited by such a couple, 1 person will die from driving in those 50 years. And when they die, they usually had many more years to live otherwise. That’s to say nothing of injuries.
- refurb 3y agoThis isn’t accurate because the deaths include pedestrians (which could be someone outside of your neighborhood of 75)
- keenmaster 3y agoSure but the spirit of my comment stands and it’s a small adjustment to the math. Needless to say pedestrian safety is paramount.