If over 100 people died each day on public transit, we'd have banned it by now. But we accept it in our automotive culture, while simultaneously handwringing over every incident that happens on public transit.
I've never had any issues myself, but have absolutely been exposed to those issues while taking transit. I've also witnessed those issues increase during/post lockdown.
I have no solutions, just pointing out a different angle on the "unsafe" issue mentioned above. I'd love to hear if anyone has any experience or ideas to reduce this perception of a lack of safety.
A big problem on this honestly is that news media focuses disproportionately on interpersonal crime compared to almost all other kinds of harm that can be done. Combined with generally decreased newsroom budgets, this has led to firmer reliance on, and less questioning of, direct police releases. We basically just let the cops tell us what to worry about, and they predictably tell us to worry about the things that get more funding for police.
We've mostly decided that, while these things aren't good per se, they are downstream of other incentives and requirements that are good, or at least inevitable. I don't agree, but I also don't think there's much value in a "what could be different" conversation without having a "why is it like this at all" conversation first.
I will admit that, by American standards, SF has pretty good public transit though.
I am not coming from a perspective of pro-law & order, just a commentary on drug law & enforcement here.
Spending for homeless is 61,000 per person
I've been in areas of Manhattan that would rival SF's dirtiest areas, but I wouldn't claim that NYC is a "dirty city".
I'm more worried about the threat of violence from mentally-unstable people on SF's streets, though that's something that's also concentrated in a relatively small number of places (unsurprisingly often coinciding with the dirtiness).
I've lived here my entire life, and I would :-)
As much as I'm a booster for NYC (and immensely proud of our public transit), we're also a very dirty city (partially for historical planning reasons, resulting in no alleyways or trash disposal consideration).
It's also gotten worse during the pandemic, in no small part thanks to drivers: people have stopped moving their cars for street cleaning, resulting in accumulations of trash and dirt that then clog the drains, worsening our floods (and damaging the subways further).
NYC is a filthy city. I think most people that live here and love it would agree.
Take the money and incentives away from building roads, cars, parking lots, traffic safety etc. and stick them into systems which are safer by default, incentives for people to keep things clean and not cause a fuss.
You mean by enforcing a racially homogenous society which does not allow poor (or anyone really) people from other parts of the world?
> enforcing a racially homogenous society
Are you implying that criminality is genetic...?
Unless I'm in a hurry I rather have a comfortable private ride, than a less comfortable quick ride packed around strangers.
1. In nearly all of the US (maybe everywhere except parts of NYC?) it is a worse experience than driving (requires planning, takes longer, can't carry more than one or two bags with you).
2. It is déclassé.
I think #2 is at least partly a result of #1. Also note that #1 is true even for most cities in the US, because cities in the US are unbelievably car friendly compared to cities in e.g. western Europe. I don't see any public-transit solution that doesn't involve intentionally making the car experience worse, and that's going to be a tough sell to voters.
And vice versa. As I said in a thread yesterday[1]: we justify our continuing neglect of public transit by claiming that "polite society" avoids it, which in turn fulfills the prophecy.
It’s not like we’re ever going to regress into a nation without interstates. But there will be a significant reckoning over the next 50 years over the increasing burden of our overdeveloped road network.
“A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation” – Gustavo Petro
I leave the actual wealthy out of this because they just pay someone else to drive.
I will not deny that you'll find all kinds of antisocial behavior on public transit. What I'll say is this: that it's fundamentally a civic issue and not a public transit issue, and that even with all that behavior we still see nowhere near the amount of death and disfigurement that people experience on America's roads on a daily basis.
To make it pithy: we incorrectly prioritize the feeling of environmental safety over statistical safety. The reality is that the inebriated homeless guy on the subway is much less likely to harm you or take your life than the inebriated driver in the next lane.
While a careful, attentive driver in a well-maintained vehicle certainly isn’t immune, their risk is much lower than someone who drives tired, drunk, or high in a car with bald tires and bad brakes.
My gut is public transit is still safer than even the most attentive and sober driver. So it’s the feeling of control that determines perception rather than an actual materially different risk profile.
It's merely thought provoking: every HN thread on transit will have the same half-dozen comments about violence and danger on public transit, when the reality is that two orders of magnitude more deaths occur each year on our highways.
No but we do have a strong, though admittedly weakening, tradition of restricting the fun of others when the danger posed is not solely to themselves. For example building and setting off bombs is fun as hell but we're not allowed to do it because it's pretty unhealthy for the neighbors.
Driving cars is pretty dangerous not just for the driver but also for other people around who have not necessarily consented to being put in danger. When pedestrians and children are routinely getting killed (as they have been in my city this summer) we should shift the danger assessment a little away from the skydiving end of the spectrum and a little more to the backyard bombs zone.
However, many people haven't really consented to driving. They drive out of necessity. Where they live and work is only marginally in their control and there are no other transport options. When I was poor, I would have loved to not have to pay for insurance, gas, maintenance, and the vehicle itself. I couldn't really afford it. But without it, I couldn't get to work to eat. There weren't other options. When I made a little more money I could finally afford to live close to work and public transport was an option. The trip was 5 minutes by car, over an hour by bus.
I'm on board for heavily regulating driving and shifting that danger assessment as you suggest. But first I think there is a moral obligation to provide alternative modes of transportation. (This should not be interpreted as excusing drivers from their obligation to be skilled and safe.)
Both ends need to be addressed and it will make for a lot of changes in the middle too. But there's no solution that doesn't involve completely rewriting transportation.
Being confronted by a knife-wielding drug addict on public transit is just a scarier proposition all around even if the numbers suggest it shouldn't be. And it feels random where death in a car doesn't, even though for the victim it often is.
What is the throughput of highways vs public transit? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was two orders of magnitude greater person hours on roads in non public transit.
The highway mileage includes 306 billion passenger-miles on non-transit buses.
Amtrak (6 billion passenger miles) isn't considered transit.
Regardless of what the US does, throughput is much higher on public transit than it is on highways. You can fit so many more people on buses and trains than in automobiles.
For the actual numbers, compare deaths-per-passenger-mile in-city and deaths-per-passenger-mile between cities (highways vs buses, trains, etc), and you will see huge difference in fatality rate.
I can be actually assured that no drunk driver will smash into my seat in a subway (the chance might not be zero but it's astronomically low). You may say it's not "control" because I didn't personally force all those drunk drivers out of railroads, but then again, I can't force them out of public roads either.
You can’t assure your bus driver didn’t pop a few pills before they came on shift.
I ride a motorbike. As part of training I was repeatedly told to wear protection not because of my riding skills, but because of everyone else's lack of skills.
Another example: On the highway I get myself into a position where I have plenty of stopping distance for the car in front of me, but also behind me in case I need to stop rapidly myself.
You also don't have any control over how far behind other cars are. The only thing you can do is to drive faster or to let them by by stopping or changing lanes. The latter is highly dangerous in fast flowing traffic on single lane roads while the first will almost never help as the other car actively wants to go faster.
Being in absolute control is you can drive as defensively as you want, in the end a distracted idiot can take you out and the only thing you can do is minimize the risk.
While I sympathize with your overall sentiment (and indeed, as a fellow motorcyclists, I know a lot about defensive driving/riding), I have never seen people consistently drive the way you describe, ever. For many intersections in the cities (probably most), you simply cannot see if someone is actually going from a side road until you're so deep in the intersection that you have no chance of stopping before it if you notice someone.
Imagine you're driving here:
https://www.google.com/maps/@47.5703087,-122.3952816,3a,75y,...
There's a side road on in front of you. Imagine there is a car going same speed as you, on a crash trajectory (i.e. it is exactly as far from the intersection as you are). Where's the first moment you see it?
Most likely, around here:
https://www.google.com/maps/@47.5703156,-122.3959313,3a,75y,...
where you're around 20 feet from the intersection of your routes. If you begin braking immediately as you notice the other car, you need to be going slower 15 mph if you want to avoid a crash. If you add any amount of time to actually judge the speed of the other car and its intention of stopping, you need to be going less than 10 mph. Needless to say, nobody actually does that, people don't slow down to 10 mph in locations like above.
"But he should have been using a reasonable following distance" makes for easy low effort internet points but internet points won't get you out of a hospital bed.
But in your example I'd have a good chance to prevent a collision. I'd already have my foot on the brake due to the crosswalk there. I will have brought my speed down that I will be able to stop should someone suddenly appear within it. A kid could pop out from between those two cars on the right chasing a ball, so you need to have a stopping distance of perhaps 2 - 3 feet maximum, depending what vehicle of mine I am driving that's probably 20 - 25 mph maximum. 25 mph is the speed limit there so I probably wouldn't even get tailgaters at that speed, but I don't care if I do. That intersection is a good place for a rolling stop, where you bring the car down to perhaps 5mph before you proceed, mostly because of the sidewalks on both sides and the risk of kids running around or riding bikes. That's a residential street, there should be no need to move quickly down it.
In addition to all that my car has a top of line collision avoidance system, side curtain airbags, a high crash rating, etc. I always wear my seatbelt and keep my kid strapped in with a age appropriate booster seat.
I'm not saying I'm perfect but being careful can reduce your personal risk considerably.
On the arterial street that I linked, intersections like this one are placed every 150 feet. I literally never seen anyone drive the way you describe, ever. Nobody does a rolling stop every 150 feet. Very few drivers even go speed limit there, maybe 1 in 20: most people do around 30 mph, a good fraction does 35 mph. In fact, if you drive the way you describe (which I doubt, because, again, I literally never, ever seen anyone drive like that), you're more likely to get into an accident (most likely getting rear ended), due to being extremely unpredictable.
> I'm not saying I'm perfect but being careful can reduce your personal risk considerably.
This is, of course, right, but my point was not to demand perfection, I just want to point out that what you describe is extremely unrealistic, and virtually never observed in real life driving.
You may object it's not perfect, but nothing is, and it does work. In fact, it works exactly the same way you can assure that your brake pad won't suddenly give way in front of a bus coming from your left.
Moreover, the route you drive most is your commute to work, so you can choose where you live to minimize travel time and intersections. There's one intersection on my way to work, so I guess theoretically what you describe could happen. But the accident statistics for that particular intersection show that practically no accidents have occurred there. Therefore most of the time I spend driving is going to be quite safe compared to the aggregate stats, and that's by choice.
Delivery driver routes are usually optimized for right turns for this reason. My dad was a UPS driver for 30 years and went without an accident the entire time, not even one that wasn't his fault. You'd think statistically he would have gotten into one over the million miles or so he drove on and off the job, but I think that just goes to show that defensive driving and route planning actually works.
No form of travel is absolutely safe. The best you can do is control what you can and hope for the best.
You might want to elaborate on your definition of control.
As you say, careful drivers are not immune. But as long as someone, anyone, involved in the accident can be condemned as sinful (in many cases the sin of being tired from overworking forced on them by societal pressures), it can be explained away.
"To the dumb question 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: 'Why not?'" - Christopher Hitchens, from Mortality.
And indeed if we look at railway safety this is exactly what we saw. Originally, railway companies would say well, yes two passenger trains collided, killing a hundred people, but conveniently for us both drivers died in the collision so we'll blame them. The problem wasn't us, the railway company, who are great, it's those awful drivers, who fortunately are now dead so no need to investigate further. In fact, since there's no body to examine we can confidently declare that one of the drivers was drunk. Which explains why we've told his widow that she won't be receiving one penny from the death-in-service fund.
Eventually (this kept happening, because of course it did) coroners weren't talking this bullshit, and they said it seems like the problem isn't these lone drivers who are conveniently dead, it's the company hiring them. If the drivers aren't good enough, the company should get better drivers. If instead the problem is elsewhere (e.g. maybe it'd be a good idea to invent signals so that you know if a train just around the corner has broken down so that your express doesn't hurtle into it at full speed...) that's something for the railway company too. This didn't magically fix things overnight, but it did push back against the useless "blame the driver" narrative.
Modern safety agencies, focused on a blameless "Learn from the past, prevent future accidents" model have improved things considerably, but that did not happen automatically, somebody had to call the corporate entities on their bullshit. Maybe we should call individual private car owners on their bullshit too.
One trend I don't like is people who resist the word "accident". It's an accident unless you think it was done on purpose. Accident prevention is a thing. We can, and should, prevent accidents.
You could have just stopped at "control". That's the fundamental dynamic by which we can explain this differential public sentiment--a sense of control or lack thereof, independent of whether that control actually exists, or whether that control translates to reduced risk. You went off the rails trying to link it to some objective reality; it's unnecessary, and in any event even the best of drivers takes on more risk while on the road than riding passenger rail.
Control also figures into notions of ethics and justice. We're much more willing to accept losses when we attribute the proximate cause to "nature", "god", "chance", etc. But our moral calculus shifts dramatically when the decision of a particular person or group can be fingered (reasonably or not) as a primary factor. You already subtly did that by insinuating blame upon many traffic victims. (I'm not saying the insinuation was improper or impermissible... we all frequently do that; it's a staple of public discourse and even personal reflection. Just highlighting the extent to which notions of control color our views.)
The article covers suicide, and here too the veneer of control at the point of action hides the entire complex environment in which someone dies of suicide - the social, economic, and political landscape that creates the conditions in which a former service member takes their life is not strictly personal, but we insist on treating it as such, because at the point of action, it is indeed the individual who commits the act.
Strictly by design and active and reinforced choice. Not for any other reason. Period.
As a group the safest option would be smaller vehicles, but individually each person is better off (in terms of safety during a collision) with something larger.
And it would be even more obvious which form of transportation provides the most control if you had bike-first infrastructure.
But you’re also not accounting for lots of things completely out of your control, like where highways get built, potholes, funding, insurance rates, the price of rubber for new tires, oil changes, gas stations, etc. It’s the illusion of control.
We’ve designed cities specifically so that you can feel like you are in control driving a car. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Airplane > cruise ship > car > train > bike > feet
But I may just think about this stuff more than most people. I never feel as in control when I’m stuck in a traffic jam or behind a slow driver versus riding a bike. Even trains feel like I have more control because I’m on my feet to/from the train and I could get off at a stop and just walk away. It’s very liberating versus a car.
Mass shootings are terrifying because there’s no sense of control.
Animals are scary (spiders, snakes) because we can’t control them.
Disease is scary when we can’t control it (cancer); less scary when we can cure it, even something like appendicitis seems tame because most hospitals can get it under control. It’s also why COVID is less scary to the general public, as it gets more under control (via vaccines and treatments and prior infection immunity).
yeah, this is it. This is why people will drive through a blizzard in the middle of the night but will have a panic attack trying to board an airplane. In their car they feel in control but in an airplane they feel helpless and at completely dependent on the pilot/crew/airplane.
Part of the problem is that this control is much more of an illusion than most people realize. In any car crash where there's at least two vehicles involved, often one driver is at fault, and the other is (or others are) more or less an innocent bystander, who may have been exercising all the care and attentiveness in the world. That person was certainly not able to control their safety in that situation.
And even when not involved in a crash, I don't think it's reasonable to say that one's safe outcome was caused even mostly due to their control over their vehicle. Much of it can be attributable to luck, traffic conditions, and the imperfect, but often sufficient, control that others were exercising over their vehicles.
But I do agree with you that the perceived threat/seriousness of these various bad things does have a lot to do with the perception of individual control, whether or not individuals actually do have much control over them. I know a surprising number of people who get anxious flying on a plane, but don't think twice about getting in a car, despite there being a higher probability of injury or death from a car trip.
Something I just realized: I feel like passengers in a car are also similarly not that concerned about the possibility of crashes, even though they are not actually in control of the vehicle. My first thought would be that they presumably know and trust the person who is driving, but that doesn't explain why people feel safe in taxis. I guess maybe people do feel less safe in taxis, though.
For anyone here concerned about this, it doesn’t take very much money in HN-terms to become reasonably well trained. You can:
1) Carry your own weapon, following your state’s laws in all but a few. 2) Learn to use that weapon very well, but more importantly: 3) Learn to use cover and move defensively or offensively 4) Learn to administer basic medical attention to yourself and others 5) Learn to read people and know when something might be about to happen.
After enough training, you will at least probably not freeze in an active shooter scenario. Even if you’re not into carrying your own weapon, doing some training will teach you how insanely hard it is to hit any moving target (or anything at all when the adrenaline is going).
Re. 5), many people in my state carry and I never used to notice them. Now I can pick out who is and isn’t, and usually how long they’ve been doing it (newbies will subtly check their weapon is secure every time they move).
The Secret Service is trained the same way; someone not used to carrying who is about to do something bad will send off all kinds of weird body language signals.
——
No, you don’t need to learn this because shootings are exceedingly rare. But if you’re nervous, learning these things will give you a sense of understanding about the threat, and the basic tools to do something to keep your loved ones safe in that one-in-a-hundred-thousand-lifetimes event.
Your cited statistic is one reason open carry is a Bad Idea; it puts you first in line to be eliminated. Concealment, all the way.
my veteran friend who trains others on firearms and has a license to carry would say the same thing.
If you're worried about Mandalay Bay, you're right, you will not be returning fire from the ground into an nth floor hotel window with your sidearm.
The other things on the list still apply. Learn to move, learn to use cover, learn to provide basic medical attention. It's not a bad idea to carry a TQ if you're going somewhere with crazy-large groups of people (for reasons other than shootings, which statistically you will not be involved in).
This is an excellent example of biased thinking.
But there are two cars in many fatal wrecks. A family friend was killed going to the supermarket by a car running a red light and hitting him in an intersection. A few weeks ago a semitruck slammed into stopped traffic at full speed on 95-S at the Georgia/Florida border. Nothing can be done by a safe driver to prevent that.
This isn’t reasonable to expect everyone to do, but any individual can realistically minimize their risk in this regard.
Insurance cost (data is widely available) goes down with age and you can extrapolate from that to safety but it only falls fast initially and the rest is largely a reflection of how driving habits change with age.
Occasionally someone like Tesla or Volvo will trot out some cherry picked data that boils down to "yes the very safe demographics who buy our very safe cars die less than the peasants".
Other than those two there's not much.
Sure, that’s why it’s important to know how risky automobiles are if you discard the cases of drunk drivers injuring themselves. I suspect drunk drivers injuring themselves accounts for a very small portion of automobile injuries, but we need to see the data.
It’s not enough to say “I don’t drive drunk, and driving drunk is very dangerous, therefore automobile risk estimates don’t apply to me.” You could make the same argument about driving blindfolded.
If you’re in a bus instead of a car, you will be much more protected against that kind of thing.
To stick to the legal ones;
Tired. 40% of Americans report not getting 8 hours of sleep a night. An only partially intersecting group reports they are regularly tired during daily activities. Is a driver's self actualization of tired accurate?
Attentive; bad news, most drivers aren't attentive, hence we're still seeing deaths from texting while driving. Self actualization doesn't exist here either. Add in passengers (children, dogs, friend, partner) - deep thoughts on work, relationships - combined with doing something that is mostly mundane.
Poor Maintenance. Brakes, nails in tires, low air pressure in tires, tires not suited for climate, other cars leaving oils on the roads, poor road maintenance, unexpected or untrained weather, check engine light (25%), potholes impact tie rods and steering, worn shocks, uneven loading. Very few drivers do this or pre-drive check every drive.
Your list started off good and then quickly went straight to bad faith BS.
Nobody is getting in a crash because their worn out gas cap is causing the emissions system to pop a code.
Furthermore, it's pretty clear from the statistics available and the widely varying conditions across the US with regard to vehicle inspections, weather and road conditions that these factors pale compared to human judgement related causes.
and i’d argue attentiveness (anti-distractedness) is the most important mass mitigation we could make, but it’s also practically impossible to maintain over a driving lifetime and nearly as impossible to enforce (without significant rights violations).
you can’t really lower risk, which is what “control” implies. that’s simply a falsehood some folks choose to believe that’s unsupported by a basic application of stats & probability.
i'm all for narrowing lanes and adding trees to streets as traffic calming measures in urban neighborhoods, but that's because it increases attentiveness, rather than reduces speed per se. speed governors, on the other hand, are bad because they could prevent a driver from speeding up to evade a collision.
When people die in regular road accidents, it's just a few at a time. Not compelling enough for even a mention in national news coverage. When a plane or train crashes, it's hundreds simultaneously. Often with a good debris field too. Good enough to lead with.
People are of course famously bad at putting statistics into context.
We do need to get better at statistics and realizing that when we take on risk, we rarely are the only person impacted if something goes sideways. When I take the wheel of a car I become a risk myself and to others and I need to place as much value on their agency as my own.
I'm not arguing that self driving cars are solved but maybe they aren't quite as bad as people feel. We need proper statistics.
We can\t , current self driving is limited in many ways and Tesla is notorious for having the driver save the day multiple time in 30 minutes and Elon is not publishing this incidents. I can't stand the fanboys coming up with fake stats that only 5 people ddied this month in a Tesla where in fact you have video evidence of more people would have died if the driver would have not saved the AI,
A Tesla employee should leak the data and we should then talk about stats, do Tesla saves the driver more then the driver saves the car. (i know that in reality FSD does not mean what the words imply and OP probably had no idea that there are no real FSD cars around that drive with no limitation so we can do real statistics)
Currently "self driving cars" get in twice as many accidents as humans do per million miles driven.
In term of statistics, the error rates of human drivers are still lower than current self-driving technology. This is why the only certified fully self-driving mode is limited in Germany to operate at speed of less than 30 km/h, only on highways with congestion, and then outside any construction zones.
But driving on the highway and passing a sign that said how many people had died today doing precisely what I was doing at that moment was affecting.
Not all self driving car accidents make the news — self driving car accidents that any human diver could have easily avoided make the news. Statistically safer something something miles driven means nothing to the family of someone who died in a completely avoidable accident.
Until self driving cars reach the point of handing emergency situations — storms, ice, obstacles, children, other accidents, sudden lane changes, tire blowouts — better than humans and stop punting anything less than ideal conditions back to the driver it’s pointless to talk about safety.
All the real love for self-driving cars seems to be in the US, where they are basically competing with completely untrained drivers and a strong drink-driving culture.
No self-driving car on the road today would even come close to passing a UK driving test. They wouldn't last the first five minutes.
And 600 of them were trespassers walking on the tracks, then the vast majority of the remaining were people who tried to beat the train at a crossing. The number of dead passengers was 6 and the number of dead train workers was 11, if I'm reading this correctly: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
And then there's those Tesla accidents that must happen thousands of time a day, because they're always in the news.
"Trains are safer" is a fact, but it's not a common part of messaging around why we should all take trains more often. The messaging there usually boils down to convenience, economic, and ecological arguments.
[1] https://psychology.fandom.com/wiki/Northfield_experiments
We should ask how many more people would die each day without cars.
Somehow, this basic analysis is absent in all of the car-hate posts.
Not considering pros and cons fairly is a not an honest approach.
You can’t claim to be objective by just looking at negatives and proclaiming cars are bad overall. You need to sum up the negatives and positives (assuming an utilitarian view).
Otherwise, just accept all car hate is based on subjective emotions.
It is not like car users are cackling evil Captain Planet villains. Most of us are not rich enough to live near work and schools.
That brings me to a related issue car haters miss: Bike-friendly cities should be designed for everyone, not just for wealthy white cyclists
https://theconversation.com/amp/bike-friendly-cities-should-...
Most of those conclusions would not be in favor of cars, either. Especially not in light of environmental damage.
Cars shine in large, low density zones. For good reasons. Most anti-car people are not in favor of removing cars in these zones or removing cars altogether, so arguing here is moot.
Other places, whether removing a large amount of cars is beneficial or detrimental is decided either by culture, or by reinvestment options. And then, you're still stuck only comparing rationalities, with actual numbers being far harder to judge.
What in the ever-living fuck are you even talking about?