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Great article. I agree a lot with the safety culture in commercial aviation and the commitment to investigate and fix root causes. Now can we please apply the

• rpmisms 3y ago
  r/fuckcars has members who deflate and slash car tires that belong to vehicles they deem "too big". Do you support that methodology?
  • Orangeair 3y ago
    I've seen hundreds of posts on that sub, but never anything approaching what you're describing. Do you have an example?
    • rpmisms 3y ago
      https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/xr64d8/deflating_suvs_tires_is_poor_behavior/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/xr64d8/deflating_... https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/xo6uqu/my_option_on_tyre_deflators/ https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/xo6uqu/my_option_... Cursory search turned these up.
      • Orangeair 3y ago
        I don't necessarily know that you can conclude from a few memes that people are actually out there doing this, I see it more as venting frustration. They're certainly advocating for it, though.
        • rpmisms 3y ago
          I have seen it IRL.
    • josephcsible 3y ago
      The vandals in question call themselves "Tyre Extinguishers". Search for that phrase in that subreddit, and you'll see it's full of people defending them.
      • Orangeair 3y ago
        Just looked into this, so there is actually a growing movement of people doing that, interesting.
  • nayuki 3y ago
    The driving majority has members who support buying tall heavy SUVs and pickup trucks "for their family's safety", running over pedestrians, speeding wherever they please, and protesting any kind of traffic calming or enforcement. And then there are the teens who run over cyclists for fun, such as in the case of Andreas Probst. Do you support that methodology?
    • rpmisms 3y ago
      [flagged]
  • MBlume 3y ago
    I would never recommend this methodology to a friend or a family member. Drivers are vindictive, violent people and the risk is too high to be worth it. Still, I appreciate the people who do it.
    • rpmisms 3y ago
      And I hope they all go to prison. Used to be you'd be hanged for stealing a horse. Taking a person's means of transport is evil. I am, indeed, a vindictive and violent driver, apparently.
      • maxcoder4 3y ago
        You just wished prison and positively mentioned hanging people in response for relatively harmless activism (tyres can be inflated again, you know). So yes, I think you are violent, at least when cars are mentioned. To be clear, deflating tyres is illegal, but most successful activism campaigns are. I support the cause they're fighting for, unnecessarily huge cars hurt our environment and neighborhoods.
        • rpmisms 3y ago
          Wishing prison is morally correct. If you read what I was saying as "we should hang people for deflating tires", there may be another issue here. I think my reaction highlights the clear issue in their thinking. I will never support anything these people want, because they hate me personally. Taking away people's transportation is a bad thing to do, period. If I go kick a bunch of puppies to campaign against people dying, I'm still a bad person.
          • nayuki 3y ago
            > Taking away people's transportation is a bad thing to do Drivers have been taking away transportation from non-drivers for decades. Look at suburbs without sidewalks. Look at winding suburban culs-de-sac that massively increase travel distance and make walking and cycling impractical. Look at the drivers who shout down any attempt to install bike lanes, or those who refuse to fund public transit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqQw05Mr63E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqQw05Mr63E > they hate me personally Sounds similar to drivers who want to run cyclists off the road. "Get off the road!" "You don't even pay insurance and road tax!" Also sounds similar to drivers who deny pedestrians the right to exist. Overall, rpmisms, I don't think you appreciate your privileged position as a driver. Society has spent the last century bending over backwards to serve motorists like you. I hope you can develop a sense of compassion for those who are not in a car and are continually subjected to verbal and physical aggression from motorists.
• ylhert 3y ago
  The cognitive dissonance people have around this issue is astonishing. We are willing to ground the 737MAX fleet when a few people get a (surely terrifying) open air flying experience; but 44,000 people are killed on the road in the US _every_ year (and rising!) and very few people seem to care. In most age cohorts, death by car is the largest killer. In the US you have a 1 in 107 chance of dying in a car crash in your lifetime. Even simple and completely reasonable measures to reduce these insane numbers are seen as some kind of tyrannical affront to ones freedom (see the current CA measure to add speed limiters). The car industry, car culture, and car centric thinking in the US and much of the world is totally out of control.
  • npteljes 3y ago
    I too have thought a lot about this cognitive dissonance. I think that there are several differences to the two issues, and so, in people's attitude towards it too. One, I think, is that flying is something that is being done to us, and driving is something that we do ourselves. So the agency, the point of view is very different. Something bad happening while being passive is much more horrifying because of the powerlessness. The other is that cars and driving environments differ a lot, while planes are much more similar to each other. What I mean by this is that it's easier to dissociate the car deaths, because that happens to some other people over there, nothing like me, but plane badness happens to everyday folk in a big winged tube, like me. I think that if we drove the planes ourselves, the issues would be much more similar. And similarly, if everyone took the train, the bus, or a ship, and similar things would happen to a train, bus or ship, the freakout would be similar to what we see now with planes.
    • nayuki 3y ago
      > is that flying is something that is being done to us, and driving is something that we do ourselves. So the agency, the point of view is very different. Correct. An all-too-popular viewpoint is, "I'm a good driver, unlike everybody else on the road!". > if everyone took the train, the bus, or a ship, and similar things would happen to a train, bus or ship, the freakout would be similar to what we see now with planes I believe this is the case already. A train or bus kills a few hundred a year, it makes national news for a week. Don't get me wrong, it's a tragedy and needs to be fixed. But then, those 44k car-related deaths are continually brushed aside.
• chmod600 3y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_... TIL that car fatalities were declining until 2019, and then reversed and are getting worse. What happened in the last five years? Safety features of the cars themselves are improving (emergency braking). Alcohol may be a factor, but why in the last five years? Cars have been big for a while. WFH probably reduced commuting time. Other countries appear to be on the decline.
  • TheCoelacanth 3y ago
    The reaction to the pandemic normalized not caring if other people live or die as long as you aren't personally inconvenienced.
  • bostonpete 3y ago
    > TIL that car fatalities were declining until 2019, and then reversed and are getting worse. Per your link, fatalities per mile drive bottomed out in 2014 and barely dropped after 2010. There's been some speculation that this reversal in safety was tied to the rise of smartphones and a corresponding increase of distracted driving.
  • scoofy 3y ago
    One current theory is speed (citation below). Ironically, heavy traffic is one of the better "safety features" of our automobile transportation system. Since crowded roads are higher-conflict roads, there is a bit of luck in the fact that traffic slows down when it gets crowded. There may be more collisions, but they are less deadly. Suddenly there is a pandemic, and there are orders of magnitude fewer people on the roads. The number of collisions goes down, but the number of deaths goes up, because all of the collisions are at higher, deadlier speeds. --- Driving Went Down. Fatalities Went Up. Here's Why. by Charles Marohn https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/1/10/driving-went-down-fatalities-went-up-heres-why https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/1/10/driving-went-d...
  • SilasX 3y ago
    Note that deaths per vehicle mile traveled (VMT) went up during Covid. Reducing commuting time doesn't necessarily reduce deaths under that metric -- just the opposite! Commuter trips are probably the safest per VMT since they're the most familiar. There were stories about this effect, even as total collisions went down because of the bigger drop in VMT[1]. I speculated that this was a combination of a) the above effect (stripping out the safer commuter trips), plus b) the roads being dominated by people least willing to follow the advice to stay home, which correlates with being anti-social and reckless (mean though that sounds! [2]) My facebook friends suggested c) the immense stress of coping with the Covid world made the average person less able to concentrate. I also suspect: d) traffic enforcement was reduced and drivers gradually started branching out into more aggressive maneuvers as they became aware of this. Note that people saw their car insurance rates go down during covid because the typical personal policy only cares about accidents per unit time, and rarely adjusts for miles driven. But I don't know why it hasn't regressed to the pre-covid levels -- probably because WFH hasn't completely reversed. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/20/859829779/as-states-locked-down-in-march-motor-vehicle-fatality-rate-spiked-by-14 https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39179818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39179818
• P_I_Staker 3y ago
  Unpopular opinion, but the truth: We have to drive and it's a right. I agree about the infrastructure issues. Still the modern "safe driving" mentality that people want is at odds with that REALITY. This could change with public transit, however we don't do this. Even the best countries fall short, and most don't get close. It's actively discouraged in the USA. Actually, you could argue that people already have to deal with too much BS to drive. The paperwork, rules, and so forth clearly are challenging for people to adhere to. So we throw the majority of people into a situation they aren't equipped for on a daily basis. Then this becomes a major cause of legal efforts, that alienate perfectly good citizens from society and cause us to forfeit our civil rights. You can claim that people just need to be responsible, or we need to pass some safety law but it's delusional. The truth is we don't have a replacement for this. The average person can't afford to be carted around, and we would need to get to a place where driving was purely recreation. So we are going to need very good public mass transit options, and IMO some kind of vast network of professional drivers that are more affordable than Uber, for the occasional "cargo trips" or to go "the last mile" (more like 10-50).
  • nayuki 3y ago
    Mostly agreed, except for: > We have to drive and it's a right. WTF? Driving is by definition a privilege. You're maneuvering a 2-ton murder machine. We got into the current mess because people treat driving as a right - I have to have parking, I have to get there fast, I have to bend everything society to fit my car. And when someone gets caught for a DUI, judges go lenient because they know that taking away their license will obliterate their means to work and live. > So we are going to need very good public mass transit options, and IMO some kind of vast network of professional drivers that are more affordable than Uber Sort of. We need denser cities and mixed-use neighborhoods so that people can live close to the goods and services they need. Transit is a feasible problem as evidenced by Europe and Asia. No society has operated under the assumption of a vast network of professional private vehicle drivers (so, disregard bus drivers). > go "the last mile" (more like 10-50) That's the problem. We have to stop designing cities like that.
    • Terr_ 3y ago
• thomastjeffery 3y ago
  There are a lot of factors that really complicate this system. Enforcement focuses on the wrong parameters. Police love to remind us that, "Speed is always a factor." Well, it's certainly the most easily measured one. The trouble is, what speed is wrong? Is it the 5 cars who want to drive 90mph on the freeway, or the 2 cars who want to drive 65 in both lanes? By obsessively enforcing speed limits, police have managed to perversely incentivize the difference in speed between drivers who are willing to risk a ticket, and drivers who self-righteously bottleneck traffic. I have never even heard of the law, "keep right except to pass" being enforced, even though it seems pretty obvious that it would help. People don't want to drive. People have to drive. That reality perversely incentivizes drivers to minimize effort. There is very little motivating drivers to drive better than they need to. How could we possibly change this incentive? Fear tactics are not working. Threats are not working. This is an open question: what if it has no answer? Infrastructure demands backwards-compatibility. We can't just build a new part of a city without roads. Where would people put their cars? If people living there didn't have cars, then where could they go? Where could they work? Could anyone visit? Utopia must have a compatibility layer: somewhere that alternative transit can transition to highways. But where? If you have to park your car away from home, then you need to manage the risk of unattended property. If you have to get a ride in someone else's car, is that affordable? If you are going to take a bus, how long will you have to wait? How many busses will you have to transfer between? No matter what we do, the compatibility layer will always be inefficient. Infrastructure demands infrastructure. The only solution to more traffic is more road. The only solution to more road is longer driving distance. The only solution to longer driving distance is more time in traffic, which is identical to more traffic. The only way to stop growing this system is to stop growing the amount of drivers. How can that be done? In order to become a non-driver, you need a minimum viable alternative, otherwise you will have to drive just like everyone else. In order for alternative transit to be viable, there needs to be enough of it around that it feeds its own infrastructure demand. If alternative transit is built with a highway-compatibility layer, then that compatibility will effectively remove the need for alternative-transit growth. Realistically, alternative transit won't start demanding itself until its utility is equal to the highway system. We can't build that all at once, so how can we overcome the already-present highway infrastructure demand cycle? No matter how you look at it, the highway system is feeding the worst aspects of itself into its own growth. The only way to change this cycle is to build a lot of alternatives really fast, and make them dirt cheap. It's a political nightmare. Even so, I would much rather live in that nightmare than the one where rubber meets the road.
• justnotworthit 3y ago
  <whiney rant> After notjustbikes got big, he dropped any humility and started preaching to the choir, calling people who didn't agree with him racist idiots. I complained in the comments that I used to be able to recommend his videos sight-unseen to the people who needed to be convinced. He replied and insulted me as someone who just found his channel and couldn't take the truth. </whiney rant>
• fennecbutt 3y ago
  Cars? Hahaha. I feel like the difference is: Planes: sometimes pilot error, often mechanical/maintenance. Almost never because the pilot is flying like a wanker. Cars: sometimes driver error/inexperience, sometimes mechanical/maintenance, almost always because the driver is driving like a wanker.