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Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

So the difference between killing someone accidentally vs deliberately? If you deliberately kill someone with a vehicle, then that would also be murder and you'd get the same sort of punishment as if you used anything else. If you accidentally killed someone without a vehicle, you'd also get far less of a reaction as with this case.

This case is a horrible tragedy and it's a farce that someone who kept breaking the law kept their license afterwards, but it's not evidence traffic violence is normalised. Just that people (rightly) treat accidental deaths as less of a big deal than deliberate ones.

If you mean that driving is too dangerous overall, then sorry, but I'd disagree with that. Not only do most people not get into accidents when driving or around cars, but there are plenty of things in life that are dangerous that kill a lot of people that we've accepted are tradeoffs for a more free society.

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Cars don't make a society more free. They've certainly become a cage in modern times. And driving is one of the most dangerous things most of us do.

No, they definitely make a society more free. The difference between being able to drive somewhere and having to walk or take public transport is huge. You can go places at your own pace rather than what's 'best for the majority', reach areas more quickly, go to areas that aren't worth connecting to the rest of the transport system, etc.

The issue is that some places (like the US) are designed around cars rather than just treating them like another form of transport. Having shops and businesses miles from homes is bad design regardless of whether cars are a thing or not. Designing on the assumption every person will drive and having thousands of parking spaces is bad design for similar reasons.

The difference between driving and not driving is between going where the government deems it worth going/getting there in a far longer timespan and getting to wherever you want at roughly your own pace. The issues come from the assumption it's the only way to travel and societies designed around that idea.

> The difference between being able to drive somewhere and having to walk or take public transport is huge. You can go places at your own pace rather than what's 'best for the majority', reach areas more quickly, go to areas that aren't worth connecting to the rest of the transport system, etc.

This is leaving out a lot: your own pace is heavily impacted by traffic, the system is enormously expensive (around where I live, it’s tied with food as the second greatest household expense), and in many cities that freedom was constructed by removing other people’s freedom to have healthy neighborhoods.

Driving can seem like freedom but that’s because it’s heavily subsidized: not just for things like road infrastructure but also the less obvious things like not having to compensate the millions of people whose health is seriously impacted by car pollution or being allowed to carry grossly inadequate levels of insurance which mathematically ensures that the hundreds of thousands of people injured by cars every year will not be adequately compensated. That freedom is the illusion caused by shifting the costs to other people’s health and quality of life!

this only applies if either you live in a bigger city which you never leave, or you live somewhere alone in the woods

It might be the most dangerous thing we do but that doesn’t mean it’s that dangerous, it may say more about how safe the other things we do are.

I’d probably wager that being a pedestrian is less safe than driving.

First of all, no, that's very unlikely: around 8 thousand pedestrians die in the US every year, out of around 40 thousand total deaths in traffic accidents.

But also, even if it is, this doesn't mean we should drive instead of walk to reduce our risk - it means everyone should drive less to reduce risk for everyone.

Everyone was very safe on foot, bikes and transit before there were so many cars. Cars made it dangerous to walk, so now everyone is in cars, which also makes driving more dangerous. Then people buy bigger cars that give them higher chances of survival in a crash at the great expense of everyone else involved, so everyone is buying bigger and bigger cars now.

Well of course it is, because of the drivers.

Depends on how you frame it. Yes, there might be many cases where it's the driver's fault, but there are cases where the pedestrians were jaywalking and behaving in erratic ways.

I remember hearing a statistic (I can't find the source yet so please treat it as unverified) that a non-trivial proportion of pedestrians that were run over were intoxicated (the pedestrians, not the drivers).

I'm not saying this to assign blame to one party or another, just to refute the simplistic statement that it's just the drivers' fault.

It’s almost always the driver’s fault for speeding or not paying attention – people say “they jumped in front of me” but almost any time the police look for camera footage or find witnesses, it turns out that the driver wasn’t paying attention.

The problem is that if someone is killed, they aren’t around to argue their side of the story and most cases simply aren’t investigated.

It doesn't matter if pedestrians are intoxicated. You should be driving slow enough to stop. Here in Japan, if a driver hits a pedestrian, they're always at fault, with almost no exceptions. It doesn't matter if some kid runs out in front of you: you're the one traveling faster, in a dangerous vehicle, so you should be able to stop. Because of this, vehicle speeds in residential or pedestrian-filled areas are generally quite slow; people only drive fast on the limited-access highways.

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