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While the methods in this post may not be a super accurate depiction of reality.. I did find it entertaining. Additionally I agree generally with the point the

While the methods in this post may not be a super accurate depiction of reality.. I did find it entertaining. Additionally I agree generally with the point the post is making. It is shocking to me that we accept so whole heartedly the risk associated with driving when, comparatively, it is shockingly unsafe relative to other modes of transportation. In the US somewhere around 41,000 people die per year from traffic accidents. If we compare that to train travel (especially in Europe where safety standards are significantly better) it’s somewhere in the ballpark of 32x safer. Additionally we accept the liability of a car shockingly easily. Yes we all should have insurance, but that insurance only goes so far. If you accidentally kill somebody on a bike you’re likely to serve prison time for manslaughter. There are several other downsides we accept that I won’t get into, but it’s pretty interesting to me that especially US society has accepted these facts so seemingly easily.

kragen 3y ago
i just spent three hours on the bus today and i would much rather have spent an hour in a car instead, though my risk of dying would surely be higher there are a lot of places within 100 km of my house that i'd enjoy visiting but where public transport doesn't go. if i had a car, i could go there easily. if that means shortening my life expectancy by 20 minutes, that seems like a worthwhile tradeoff. the risk i'd be imposing on innocent people around me by driving a car is ethically trickier
- jethro_tell 3y ago
  I'd you shorten your life expectancy by 20 min but get 2 hours back today it seems like a fair trade. And that's why public transit in the us is such a mess, if you want people to use it, you have to make it fast and frequent before people need it, so when you do use it, you thin, huh, that's not too bad.
  - kragen 3y ago
    well, i wasn't actually dead on the public transit, although on the bus whose air conditioner was broken it felt like it part of the time
  - alexwhb 3y ago
    This I definitely agree with. A bus is the worst mode. Most of the downsides of a car with very few if any of rail especially in places with significant traffic. If you replaced that bus experience with light rail, almost certainly you’d be at your destination several times faster
    - kragen 3y ago
      well no, because light rail would necessarily involve walking farther from my house, and it has to wait for car traffic too, albeit less often than buses do. the bus i took actually had a reserved bus lane for a lot of the route, avoiding the traffic thing, but it still only averaged 14 km/hour
- antiquark 3y ago
  I've instructed my kids to avoid public transit, and drive as much as possible, for totally different reasons.... https://nypost.com/2022/10/11/nyc-subway-murders-jump-to-highest-levels-in-25-years-data/ https://nypost.com/2022/10/11/nyc-subway-murders-jump-to-hig...
  - glial 3y ago
    There were 255 traffic deaths in NYC 2022[0], so according to the statistic on the site you link to, driving is 36x more dangerous. [0] https://www.silive.com/news/2023/01/nyc-traffic-deaths-drop-in-2022-but-remain-higher-than-the-low-seen-in-2018-data-shows.html#:~:text=On%20Friday%2C%20the%20Department%20of,of%20Vision%20Zero%20in%202014 https://www.silive.com/news/2023/01/nyc-traffic-deaths-drop-....
- mcmoor 3y ago
  Bus, specifically, has the worst UX of both worlds. You still get the unreliability of being on road (so still getting/contributing traffic jams) and the suffocation of train (due to being crowded public transportation). I mostly avoid it in favor of trains or cars, or even motorbikes since it's ubiquitous in my country, unless that's literally the only option I can get.
  - alexwhb 3y ago
    Totally agree. The only exception to this is buses with dedicated lanes. Not say they are as good as trains, but at least don’t have the traffic issues.
bloomingeek 3y ago
Back in the late 90's I began teaching my kids how to drive a car after they tested for their learner's permit. I drilled them that a car can be a weapon if used irresponsibility. We talked about the manslaughter issue you mentioned and the terribleness of living with the fact of killing someone because of speeding or distraction. Today, with cell phones and infotainment screens in our cars, I still see people "flying" down the highway with no apparent thought for other people's safety. Both my vehicles have dash cams for the reason of video proof of what happened if one of these morons crashes into me and takes my life.
- mysterydip 3y ago
  Literally almost happened to me on a trip last week. Driving on I95 and two people were headed to change to the same lane, one slow from the left and one flying up on the right (across three lanes). They see each other and react at the same time, the one on the left going back to their lane but the one on the right, with their angle and excess speed, overcorrects and starts to fishtail. Their car is then pointing directly at mine and barely misses t-boning me, instead hitting the barrier head-on to my left. Always practice defensive driving and have a dashcam.
  - jcgrillo 3y ago
    The "flying by on the right" thing feels like a recent (within the last ~decade?) phenomenon. Am I imagining it?
    - giantg2 3y ago
      I've seen it longer than that. Although the frequency might be increasing as the other trend I've noticed is that overall driver quality appears to have decreased. It could just be in my area or I could be wrong, but that's what I've noticed.
    - lsllc 3y ago
      There's a total lack of "lane discipline" (as Clarkson would say) in the US. In fact I'd argue that it's not a lack of discipline, but just a lack of understanding of how you should drive on a highway. People tend to migrate to the "fast" lanes (the left), so you naturally end up with people either passing on the right or tailgating them. Of course, you should always be in the right lanes except for passing. I do wonder if let's say there's someone in lane 3 of 4 going slower than the limit and you can pass them safely on the right in lane 1 that it's probably safer to just do that (assuming you're not flying along!) than moving over 3 lanes to the left, passing then moving 3 over back to the right.
giantg2 3y ago
"I did find it entertaining." I found it a bit disgusting due to how shotty the logic/ application was, even if the methods were sound. "If you accidentally kill somebody on a bike you’re likely to serve prison time for manslaughter." I wouldn't find this "likely". You have to be involved in some reckless or negligent action that directly resulted in their death. It is possible of course, and does occasionally happen. It's even less likely that it results in prison time, rather fines, probation, and diversionary programs. "It is shocking to me that we accept so whole heartedly the risk associated with driving" This shouldn't be shocking. Yes, there is a lot of risk. But people who understand the risks know that it's not as bad as what it's being made out as. About 45% of occupant fatalities are related to not being buckled in. Just buckling makes your stats look almost twice as safe. So buckle up (45%), don't drink (35%), and don't speed excessively (30%) and you've just reduced the largest risks significantly (not these are not additive due to overlap and other party risk). Edit: why disagree?
- konschubert 3y ago
  I you commute by bike you know that the risks are significant. I stopped cycling because I have a family to come home to. This has negatively impacted my quality of life.
  - giantg2 3y ago
    This article and comment chain scope was on speeding risks to the speeders or personal vehicle occupants in general. The changes needed to reduce pedestrian and cyclist fatalities are fairly different.
    - konschubert 3y ago
      Okay, on this narrow point, you are of course right.
  - LorenPechtel 3y ago
    Yup. I used to bike a lot in a small town. Move to the big city and quit--the first place we lived there was no safe bike route, period. Second place, likewise. Where we live now there is a safe path to one store. I haven't actually eyeballed it but now I think there's an acceptable route to one other.
xxpor 3y ago
Do you have data to back up that trains in Europe are safer than the US (for passengers, pedestrians get hit a lot. Getting hit by a train is bad regardless)? The FRA refuses to let us use European light trainsets because they're "unsafe", because they're too light. They're worried about collisions with freight trains.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  There is e.g. [1], which puts the EU-27 at about 4 times safer than the US. As for European light trainsets not surviving collisions with freight trains: trains generally don't fare well in high speed collisions. And at low speed collisions European commuter trains (something like [2]) would be doing fine, meanwhile light rail (like [3]) isn't designed to collide with anything heavier than a truck. I don't think anybody in Europe runs freight trains on shared tracks with light rail. 1: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2011/06/02/comparative-rail-safety/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2011/06/02/comparative-ra... 2: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DB-Baureihe_430#/media/Datei:120923-Innotrans-BR_430_Stuttgart.JPG https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DB-Baureihe_430#/media/Datei:1... 3: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/K4500_VB_Presentation.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/K4500_VB...
- psychlops 3y ago
  Why are we comparing US cars versus European trains again?
ttymck 3y ago
Are you comparing nominal mortality instead of rates (per hour of travel or per mile)?
wongarsu 3y ago
> it’s pretty interesting to me that especially US society has accepted these facts so seemingly easily Because in the 1960s and 70s the US was rebuilt to be entirely car-dependent. And most Americans today accept that as the norm, because the only places they know that are different are New York and those quaint European and Asian cities rich people travel to.
- alexwhb 3y ago
  Very true. Actually fun fact… historically LA had the biggest rail network in the U.S. i believe it was over 1000 miles. The ripped it all out for lots of reasons, but arguably one was that the car companies bought many of the rail lines and scrapped them. What a shame.
screye 3y ago
> ballpark of 32x safer That number (edit: rail deaths) feels too high. Other than major train collisions/derailments, is it even possible to die because of trains ? > In 2022, more than two-thirds (69 %) of these fatalities in the EU were caused by 'accidents to persons by rolling stock in motion', typically involving persons who are unauthorised on the railway tracks and are hit by a running train. Together with level-crossing accidents, which caused 29 % of fatalities, these accidents were responsible for almost 98 % of all deaths occurring in railway accidents in the EU. [1] So rail accidents where a train was at fault, constituted only 2% of deaths assigned to railways. Unlike train accidents, a car is always to blame (some car) in a car accident. Even if I double the risk of railways to 4% of their total number, railways are still 640x safer than cars. [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/2/28/Persons_killed_in_railway_accidents_by_type_of_accident%2C_2022_%28number%29.png https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/2/... [2] Note: All numbers exclude (alleged) suicides
- marcandre 3y ago
  You meant "That number feels too low"
  - screye 3y ago
    Yep, I have phrased it badly. Meant that the rail death number feels too high. clarified. thanks
- toast0 3y ago
  > That number (edit: rail deaths) feels too high. Other than major train collisions/derailments, is it even possible to die because of trains ? Pedestrians and others are struck by rail vehicles regularly. Additionally, where rails come into contact with other pathways, they are a hazard to pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists and sometimes even cars when railway is poorly designed or implemented.
  - screye 3y ago
    Genuine question. How ? A train is something you can see coming from a mile away. It doesn't blindside you. 'Deer in headlights' events occur, but it not like the person couldn't have foreseen it coming. It's like blaming parkour deaths on walls. A pedestrian crossing a street can be 'struck' by a car, because a car can actually come out of nowhere. There is a reason that most car deaths in cities occur on a 'unchecked turn right on red'. It is an accident that occurs because of occlusion. Trams have a risk profile that borrows some of the risks of cars. But, grade separated rail requires active fault form the pedestrian/cyclist to be in fatal accident.
konschubert 3y ago
> If you accidentally kill somebody on a bike you’re likely to serve prison time for manslaughter. The sad reality is that people recklessly kill cyclists and barely get a slap on the wrist.
- tasty_freeze 3y ago
  Yes, it is amazing when the driver says, "I just didn't see him!" and that is accepted as a reasonable explanation. I think it is because the overwhelming number of drivers (in the US) haven't ridden a bike since they were children. A judge and most of the jurors fall into that category, and they empathize with the driver, as they could imagine themselves doing the exact same thing that the driver did.
  - giantg2 3y ago
    I do agree that empathy plays a big part. However, just like with drivers, often times the cyclists have negligent (or reckless) factors against them as well, which is often used to downplay the contribution of any reckless or negligent actions of the driver. For example, about 20% of cyclist-vehicle fatalities involve cyclist DUI. About 60% of cyclist fatalities are not wearing a helmet despite recommendations and applicaible laws. That's why most cycling-vehicle deaths are handled in civil cases - a lower burden of proof and you can still get a payout even if the cyclist had some level of contributory negligence depending on the state.
    - konschubert 3y ago
      I am sure you don't mean it this way, but this suggests a false equivalency. If a cyclist does not wear a helmet and gets killed by a driver running a red light, it is still 100% the driver's fault. A kill is still a kill even if the victim didn't wear a bulletproof vest.
      - giantg2 3y ago
        You may want to look into what I said about contributory negligence instead of strawmanning in this comment thread. It seems this is a pattern with you as you strawmanned in another thread here too.
konschubert 3y ago
I am excited for self-driving cars. Public transport is great but it won't convince reckless drivers to stop driving. Self-driving cars will finally open up a realistic political path to eliminate traffic deaths. And ironically, if all cars were self-driving, I would choose to bike much more often than today. Because I can trust that the computer will follow the rules and I will be able to return home to my kids. In the meantime, we should make gps-based speed governors and automatic breaking systems mandatory.
- giantg2 3y ago
  "realistic political path to eliminate traffic deaths" Just a note, they may be able to greatly reduce fatalities (guessing since the tech is not fully rhere yet), but no system will entirely eliminate them.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    Even a reduction by a factor 10 means thousands of fathers every year who do not have to explain to their children that mommy won't come home tonight.
    - giantg2 3y ago
      Ok...? I'm seeing a lot of emotional comments that are not following the comment chains on this post. Are you meaningfully engaging in the conversation or trying to hijack them?
      - konschubert 3y ago
        I am fairly emotional about this but I don't think my comments are off-topic or unfair. I find it incredibly frustrating how we as a society have accepted the high number of traffic deaths as a fact of nature. Imagine we had the technology to reduce childhood cancer rates by 50%, but chose not to use it. Traffic accidents kill more children than cancer. And we have the technology to reduce them: GPS-based speed limiters, automatic breaking system, speed bumps, red light cameras. Yet we choose not to act because ... people think that would be too uptight?
theamk 3y ago
I think that analysis captures why people drive very well actually. Let's assume trains are 32x safer in US as well: Car: 2 hour 32 minutes driving door to door + 37 minutes of death = 3 hour 9 minutes Train: 2 hour 37 minutes on train + 1 minute of death + 30 minute early arrive buffer + 30 minutes public transport to departure + 30 minutes public transport to destination = 4 hours 8 minutes Trains already lose, unless both your source and destination are right next to the train stations. And once you factor possibility of other things, like having multiple stops or how you have to adjust the schedule around the trains, the car gets even better.
- afiori 3y ago
  for any random trip it is far more likely that the car will be a better choice, but likely trip choice is a power law with most trips focusing on few routes. This to say that the purpose of trains is not to be better than cars at what car do, but rather to allow as many people as possible not to need a car for most trips. Depending on how trips are distributed this can be anywhere from easy to impossible.
  - alexwhb 3y ago
    I think this is true in the US where everything is designed around the car, but not as true in Europe. Somewhere like Amsterdam it’s actually generally faster to ride a bike than anything else. Also for longer trips high speed rail can be significantly faster and cheaper. So I think it really depends on the city context.
- tim333 3y ago
  I guess it depends on the details. I do a journey regularly that is about the same time, an hour, by car or by train + tube + walk. I tend to do the train because I can sit and work on something whereas in the car you can't. It's changed with time - I used to like driving but find it a bit tedious now.
- alexwhb 3y ago
  I think it depends on what type of rail you’re referring to here. If you’re in a city like LA where more or less no matter what your car drive will take hours… I think a dedicated rail would actually save people time. Obviously there would need to be huge investment in new infrastructure for that to happen. When I lived in NYC same dynamics… it would have actually taken significantly longer in most cases to drive than take the subway. So I think it depends on how a city is laid out and planned. If public transportation was not a priority and kinda shimmed in then totally, but in cities where they prioritize public transportation generally it’s a better experience than driving.
toast0 3y ago
It's hard to compare the risks of personal vehicles and door to door trips with the risks of rails and planes and maybe even city busses. I'm pretty sure door to door personal planes would be a lot more risky than door to door personal cars. As a cyclist, I've personally been injured by rail infrastructure and never by cars. So I'm more worried about street car projects with rails in the road than I am about cars. (Although, I certainly check for unexpected cars more than I check for unexpected rails.)
sokoloff 3y ago
> If you accidentally kill somebody on a bike you’re likely to serve prison time for manslaughter. In the US, I’d bet heavily against this outcome (provided you were sober).
xp84 3y ago
> we accept…. We accept… I’d like to point out that as individuals, our ‘acceptance’ is not required nor even checked for. As Americans (speaking for my own countrymen only) we accept it the same way we accept our air quality. We, in broad strokes, may choose only to drive, or to remain stationary - just as we can breathe the air, or just stop breathing. Other practical options only even exist in very specific exceptional places or situations (most of them require you to commit to stay in an urban core 100% of the time, and that space physically cannot contain all Americans at once, due to space constraints, which we perceive via cost signals). Of course, if the entire country were built out when NYC was built out, without cars even being hypothesized, things may have been very different today. But we shouldn’t pretend that most car-dependent people are choosing to be so, except maybe those who made an unforced decision to move from say, Manhattan to Phoenix. And even they may have accepted it only grudgingly in exchange for some other benefit such as weather, lower taxes, proximity to family, etc. Note: I personally would like to not be car dependent, so please don’t try to explain to me why cars are bad. I cringe every time i see 327 SUVs idling in the street waiting to drop off each student in a school, on a warm, dry morning in the ‘burbs.

kragen 3y ago

i just spent three hours on the bus today and i would much rather have spent an hour in a car instead, though my risk of dying would surely be higher there are a lot of places within 100 km of my house that i'd enjoy visiting but where public transport doesn't go. if i had a car, i could go there easily. if that means shortening my life expectancy by 20 minutes, that seems like a worthwhile tradeoff. the risk i'd be imposing on innocent people around me by driving a car is ethically trickier

jethro_tell 3y ago
I'd you shorten your life expectancy by 20 min but get 2 hours back today it seems like a fair trade. And that's why public transit in the us is such a mess, if you want people to use it, you have to make it fast and frequent before people need it, so when you do use it, you thin, huh, that's not too bad.
- kragen 3y ago
  well, i wasn't actually dead on the public transit, although on the bus whose air conditioner was broken it felt like it part of the time
- alexwhb 3y ago
  This I definitely agree with. A bus is the worst mode. Most of the downsides of a car with very few if any of rail especially in places with significant traffic. If you replaced that bus experience with light rail, almost certainly you’d be at your destination several times faster
  - kragen 3y ago
    well no, because light rail would necessarily involve walking farther from my house, and it has to wait for car traffic too, albeit less often than buses do. the bus i took actually had a reserved bus lane for a lot of the route, avoiding the traffic thing, but it still only averaged 14 km/hour
antiquark 3y ago
I've instructed my kids to avoid public transit, and drive as much as possible, for totally different reasons.... https://nypost.com/2022/10/11/nyc-subway-murders-jump-to-highest-levels-in-25-years-data/ https://nypost.com/2022/10/11/nyc-subway-murders-jump-to-hig...
- glial 3y ago
  There were 255 traffic deaths in NYC 2022[0], so according to the statistic on the site you link to, driving is 36x more dangerous. [0] https://www.silive.com/news/2023/01/nyc-traffic-deaths-drop-in-2022-but-remain-higher-than-the-low-seen-in-2018-data-shows.html#:~:text=On%20Friday%2C%20the%20Department%20of,of%20Vision%20Zero%20in%202014 https://www.silive.com/news/2023/01/nyc-traffic-deaths-drop-....
mcmoor 3y ago
Bus, specifically, has the worst UX of both worlds. You still get the unreliability of being on road (so still getting/contributing traffic jams) and the suffocation of train (due to being crowded public transportation). I mostly avoid it in favor of trains or cars, or even motorbikes since it's ubiquitous in my country, unless that's literally the only option I can get.
- alexwhb 3y ago
  Totally agree. The only exception to this is buses with dedicated lanes. Not say they are as good as trains, but at least don’t have the traffic issues.

bloomingeek 3y ago

Back in the late 90's I began teaching my kids how to drive a car after they tested for their learner's permit. I drilled them that a car can be a weapon if used irresponsibility. We talked about the manslaughter issue you mentioned and the terribleness of living with the fact of killing someone because of speeding or distraction. Today, with cell phones and infotainment screens in our cars, I still see people "flying" down the highway with no apparent thought for other people's safety. Both my vehicles have dash cams for the reason of video proof of what happened if one of these morons crashes into me and takes my life.

mysterydip 3y ago
Literally almost happened to me on a trip last week. Driving on I95 and two people were headed to change to the same lane, one slow from the left and one flying up on the right (across three lanes). They see each other and react at the same time, the one on the left going back to their lane but the one on the right, with their angle and excess speed, overcorrects and starts to fishtail. Their car is then pointing directly at mine and barely misses t-boning me, instead hitting the barrier head-on to my left. Always practice defensive driving and have a dashcam.
- jcgrillo 3y ago
  The "flying by on the right" thing feels like a recent (within the last ~decade?) phenomenon. Am I imagining it?
  - giantg2 3y ago
    I've seen it longer than that. Although the frequency might be increasing as the other trend I've noticed is that overall driver quality appears to have decreased. It could just be in my area or I could be wrong, but that's what I've noticed.
  - lsllc 3y ago
    There's a total lack of "lane discipline" (as Clarkson would say) in the US. In fact I'd argue that it's not a lack of discipline, but just a lack of understanding of how you should drive on a highway. People tend to migrate to the "fast" lanes (the left), so you naturally end up with people either passing on the right or tailgating them. Of course, you should always be in the right lanes except for passing. I do wonder if let's say there's someone in lane 3 of 4 going slower than the limit and you can pass them safely on the right in lane 1 that it's probably safer to just do that (assuming you're not flying along!) than moving over 3 lanes to the left, passing then moving 3 over back to the right.

giantg2 3y ago

"I did find it entertaining." I found it a bit disgusting due to how shotty the logic/ application was, even if the methods were sound. "If you accidentally kill somebody on a bike you’re likely to serve prison time for manslaughter." I wouldn't find this "likely". You have to be involved in some reckless or negligent action that directly resulted in their death. It is possible of course, and does occasionally happen. It's even less likely that it results in prison time, rather fines, probation, and diversionary programs. "It is shocking to me that we accept so whole heartedly the risk associated with driving" This shouldn't be shocking. Yes, there is a lot of risk. But people who understand the risks know that it's not as bad as what it's being made out as. About 45% of occupant fatalities are related to not being buckled in. Just buckling makes your stats look almost twice as safe. So buckle up (45%), don't drink (35%), and don't speed excessively (30%) and you've just reduced the largest risks significantly (not these are not additive due to overlap and other party risk). Edit: why disagree?

konschubert 3y ago
I you commute by bike you know that the risks are significant. I stopped cycling because I have a family to come home to. This has negatively impacted my quality of life.
- giantg2 3y ago
  This article and comment chain scope was on speeding risks to the speeders or personal vehicle occupants in general. The changes needed to reduce pedestrian and cyclist fatalities are fairly different.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    Okay, on this narrow point, you are of course right.
- LorenPechtel 3y ago
  Yup. I used to bike a lot in a small town. Move to the big city and quit--the first place we lived there was no safe bike route, period. Second place, likewise. Where we live now there is a safe path to one store. I haven't actually eyeballed it but now I think there's an acceptable route to one other.

xxpor 3y ago

Do you have data to back up that trains in Europe are safer than the US (for passengers, pedestrians get hit a lot. Getting hit by a train is bad regardless)? The FRA refuses to let us use European light trainsets because they're "unsafe", because they're too light. They're worried about collisions with freight trains.

wongarsu 3y ago
There is e.g. [1], which puts the EU-27 at about 4 times safer than the US. As for European light trainsets not surviving collisions with freight trains: trains generally don't fare well in high speed collisions. And at low speed collisions European commuter trains (something like [2]) would be doing fine, meanwhile light rail (like [3]) isn't designed to collide with anything heavier than a truck. I don't think anybody in Europe runs freight trains on shared tracks with light rail. 1: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2011/06/02/comparative-rail-safety/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2011/06/02/comparative-ra... 2: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DB-Baureihe_430#/media/Datei:120923-Innotrans-BR_430_Stuttgart.JPG https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/DB-Baureihe_430#/media/Datei:1... 3: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/K4500_VB_Presentation.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/K4500_VB...
psychlops 3y ago
Why are we comparing US cars versus European trains again?

ttymck 3y ago

Are you comparing nominal mortality instead of rates (per hour of travel or per mile)?

wongarsu 3y ago

> it’s pretty interesting to me that especially US society has accepted these facts so seemingly easily Because in the 1960s and 70s the US was rebuilt to be entirely car-dependent. And most Americans today accept that as the norm, because the only places they know that are different are New York and those quaint European and Asian cities rich people travel to.

alexwhb 3y ago
Very true. Actually fun fact… historically LA had the biggest rail network in the U.S. i believe it was over 1000 miles. The ripped it all out for lots of reasons, but arguably one was that the car companies bought many of the rail lines and scrapped them. What a shame.

screye 3y ago

> ballpark of 32x safer That number (edit: rail deaths) feels too high. Other than major train collisions/derailments, is it even possible to die because of trains ? > In 2022, more than two-thirds (69 %) of these fatalities in the EU were caused by 'accidents to persons by rolling stock in motion', typically involving persons who are unauthorised on the railway tracks and are hit by a running train. Together with level-crossing accidents, which caused 29 % of fatalities, these accidents were responsible for almost 98 % of all deaths occurring in railway accidents in the EU. [1] So rail accidents where a train was at fault, constituted only 2% of deaths assigned to railways. Unlike train accidents, a car is always to blame (some car) in a car accident. Even if I double the risk of railways to 4% of their total number, railways are still 640x safer than cars. [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/2/28/Persons_killed_in_railway_accidents_by_type_of_accident%2C_2022_%28number%29.png https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/2/... [2] Note: All numbers exclude (alleged) suicides

marcandre 3y ago
You meant "That number feels too low"
- screye 3y ago
  Yep, I have phrased it badly. Meant that the rail death number feels too high. clarified. thanks
toast0 3y ago
> That number (edit: rail deaths) feels too high. Other than major train collisions/derailments, is it even possible to die because of trains ? Pedestrians and others are struck by rail vehicles regularly. Additionally, where rails come into contact with other pathways, they are a hazard to pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists and sometimes even cars when railway is poorly designed or implemented.
- screye 3y ago
  Genuine question. How ? A train is something you can see coming from a mile away. It doesn't blindside you. 'Deer in headlights' events occur, but it not like the person couldn't have foreseen it coming. It's like blaming parkour deaths on walls. A pedestrian crossing a street can be 'struck' by a car, because a car can actually come out of nowhere. There is a reason that most car deaths in cities occur on a 'unchecked turn right on red'. It is an accident that occurs because of occlusion. Trams have a risk profile that borrows some of the risks of cars. But, grade separated rail requires active fault form the pedestrian/cyclist to be in fatal accident.

konschubert 3y ago

> If you accidentally kill somebody on a bike you’re likely to serve prison time for manslaughter. The sad reality is that people recklessly kill cyclists and barely get a slap on the wrist.

tasty_freeze 3y ago
Yes, it is amazing when the driver says, "I just didn't see him!" and that is accepted as a reasonable explanation. I think it is because the overwhelming number of drivers (in the US) haven't ridden a bike since they were children. A judge and most of the jurors fall into that category, and they empathize with the driver, as they could imagine themselves doing the exact same thing that the driver did.
- giantg2 3y ago
  I do agree that empathy plays a big part. However, just like with drivers, often times the cyclists have negligent (or reckless) factors against them as well, which is often used to downplay the contribution of any reckless or negligent actions of the driver. For example, about 20% of cyclist-vehicle fatalities involve cyclist DUI. About 60% of cyclist fatalities are not wearing a helmet despite recommendations and applicaible laws. That's why most cycling-vehicle deaths are handled in civil cases - a lower burden of proof and you can still get a payout even if the cyclist had some level of contributory negligence depending on the state.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    I am sure you don't mean it this way, but this suggests a false equivalency. If a cyclist does not wear a helmet and gets killed by a driver running a red light, it is still 100% the driver's fault. A kill is still a kill even if the victim didn't wear a bulletproof vest.
    - giantg2 3y ago
      You may want to look into what I said about contributory negligence instead of strawmanning in this comment thread. It seems this is a pattern with you as you strawmanned in another thread here too.

konschubert 3y ago

I am excited for self-driving cars. Public transport is great but it won't convince reckless drivers to stop driving. Self-driving cars will finally open up a realistic political path to eliminate traffic deaths. And ironically, if all cars were self-driving, I would choose to bike much more often than today. Because I can trust that the computer will follow the rules and I will be able to return home to my kids. In the meantime, we should make gps-based speed governors and automatic breaking systems mandatory.

giantg2 3y ago
"realistic political path to eliminate traffic deaths" Just a note, they may be able to greatly reduce fatalities (guessing since the tech is not fully rhere yet), but no system will entirely eliminate them.
- konschubert 3y ago
  Even a reduction by a factor 10 means thousands of fathers every year who do not have to explain to their children that mommy won't come home tonight.
  - giantg2 3y ago
    Ok...? I'm seeing a lot of emotional comments that are not following the comment chains on this post. Are you meaningfully engaging in the conversation or trying to hijack them?
    - konschubert 3y ago
      I am fairly emotional about this but I don't think my comments are off-topic or unfair. I find it incredibly frustrating how we as a society have accepted the high number of traffic deaths as a fact of nature. Imagine we had the technology to reduce childhood cancer rates by 50%, but chose not to use it. Traffic accidents kill more children than cancer. And we have the technology to reduce them: GPS-based speed limiters, automatic breaking system, speed bumps, red light cameras. Yet we choose not to act because ... people think that would be too uptight?

theamk 3y ago

I think that analysis captures why people drive very well actually. Let's assume trains are 32x safer in US as well: Car: 2 hour 32 minutes driving door to door + 37 minutes of death = 3 hour 9 minutes Train: 2 hour 37 minutes on train + 1 minute of death + 30 minute early arrive buffer + 30 minutes public transport to departure + 30 minutes public transport to destination = 4 hours 8 minutes Trains already lose, unless both your source and destination are right next to the train stations. And once you factor possibility of other things, like having multiple stops or how you have to adjust the schedule around the trains, the car gets even better.

afiori 3y ago
for any random trip it is far more likely that the car will be a better choice, but likely trip choice is a power law with most trips focusing on few routes. This to say that the purpose of trains is not to be better than cars at what car do, but rather to allow as many people as possible not to need a car for most trips. Depending on how trips are distributed this can be anywhere from easy to impossible.
- alexwhb 3y ago
  I think this is true in the US where everything is designed around the car, but not as true in Europe. Somewhere like Amsterdam it’s actually generally faster to ride a bike than anything else. Also for longer trips high speed rail can be significantly faster and cheaper. So I think it really depends on the city context.
tim333 3y ago
I guess it depends on the details. I do a journey regularly that is about the same time, an hour, by car or by train + tube + walk. I tend to do the train because I can sit and work on something whereas in the car you can't. It's changed with time - I used to like driving but find it a bit tedious now.
alexwhb 3y ago
I think it depends on what type of rail you’re referring to here. If you’re in a city like LA where more or less no matter what your car drive will take hours… I think a dedicated rail would actually save people time. Obviously there would need to be huge investment in new infrastructure for that to happen. When I lived in NYC same dynamics… it would have actually taken significantly longer in most cases to drive than take the subway. So I think it depends on how a city is laid out and planned. If public transportation was not a priority and kinda shimmed in then totally, but in cities where they prioritize public transportation generally it’s a better experience than driving.

toast0 3y ago

It's hard to compare the risks of personal vehicles and door to door trips with the risks of rails and planes and maybe even city busses. I'm pretty sure door to door personal planes would be a lot more risky than door to door personal cars. As a cyclist, I've personally been injured by rail infrastructure and never by cars. So I'm more worried about street car projects with rails in the road than I am about cars. (Although, I certainly check for unexpected cars more than I check for unexpected rails.)

sokoloff 3y ago

> If you accidentally kill somebody on a bike you’re likely to serve prison time for manslaughter. In the US, I’d bet heavily against this outcome (provided you were sober).

xp84 3y ago

> we accept…. We accept… I’d like to point out that as individuals, our ‘acceptance’ is not required nor even checked for. As Americans (speaking for my own countrymen only) we accept it the same way we accept our air quality. We, in broad strokes, may choose only to drive, or to remain stationary - just as we can breathe the air, or just stop breathing. Other practical options only even exist in very specific exceptional places or situations (most of them require you to commit to stay in an urban core 100% of the time, and that space physically cannot contain all Americans at once, due to space constraints, which we perceive via cost signals). Of course, if the entire country were built out when NYC was built out, without cars even being hypothesized, things may have been very different today. But we shouldn’t pretend that most car-dependent people are choosing to be so, except maybe those who made an unforced decision to move from say, Manhattan to Phoenix. And even they may have accepted it only grudgingly in exchange for some other benefit such as weather, lower taxes, proximity to family, etc. Note: I personally would like to not be car dependent, so please don’t try to explain to me why cars are bad. I cringe every time i see 327 SUVs idling in the street waiting to drop off each student in a school, on a warm, dry morning in the ‘burbs.