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Comment by multiplegeorges | Hacker News Reader

This happens in cars very often.

Surely you apply the same rigorous analysis to driving as you did to this, correct?

Talk about a false equivalence

People die horribly - including the specific example of "being burnt to death" - in both methods of getting places, in fairly low numbers per million passenger miles.

So we shouldn’t be concerned about random subway murders cause of car accidents? What?

We should weigh the usefulness and the relative frequencies of dying, not singular anecdotes.

It’s not as if there has never been a murder in a car.

If you’re gonna spend your time solving a problem, are you gonna try to solve:

1) the 10 murders a year using a mode of transportation that sees 2 million daily users

2) the 250 murders a year using a mode of transportation that sees 1 million daily users

???

Cars are dangerous and they cause crime.

Whereas I agree with the general thrust of your point, I am not sure cars cause crime. Perhaps their drivers do; perhaps the cars are accessories. But the cars are not causing the crime.

If the mode of travel inherently results in a high rate of death and injury, then what’s the difference?

We call it a crime if someone does it to another person, but it’s just an accident if cars keep doing it over and over again?

The justice system does not work on cars, no matter how guilty you allege they are. People, on the other hand...

There's almost certainly a case like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U... ("United States v. $124,700 in U.S. Currency") and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Article_Consi... ("United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls") for a car.

edit: Ah, here we go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_1958_Plymouth_Sedan_v._Pen...

Or even cats in cars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Fifteen_Impoun...

More seriously, though, I'd very much like to see civil liability for the car manufacturers for deliberately making cars bigger and more dangerous for pedestrians over the last few decades. (https://www.npr.org/2024/12/10/nx-s1-5222277/taller-vehicles...)

> It's the latest study to find that taller vehicles are more dangerous for pedestrians. The majority of vehicles sold in the U.S. are now SUVs and light trucks, which can have front ends that are often 40 inches or taller. Safety advocates say that's one reason why pedestrian fatalities are up more than 75% since reaching their lowest point in 2009.

The justice system is entirely our own creation and we have arbitrarily decided who and what is to blame when driving causes the significant amount of violence that it causes every day. If we didn’t place the blame on the XYZ for XYZ reasons, or if we didn’t have no-fault accidents, then driving would be functionally and practically illegal. So we make up methods of keeping it legal to the level that we’ve deemed necessary or desirable. Does it matter whether a person chops up another person vs a car decapitates another person? Functionally no. The person is still dead, their family is still grieving, and their contributions to their community are still gone. But we’ve decided that one of those is a crime while the other is an “accident.” Coincidentally, a group of highly influential and rich car manufacturers have also lobbied trillions of dollars to “encourage” that decision.

I agree that "accident" is an unfortunate term. However, these cars are not self driving. The person is at fault.

People are murdered by road rage-ing drivers relatively frequently. They rarely make national news though.

https://everytownresearch.org/road-rage-shootings-remain-ala...

(the link only counts shootings; there are surely more intentional homicides-by- and homicides-while driving)

It was murder, wasn’t it?

Murders happen on and off the subway. Some in cars! Some using cars! Most are horrible. Plenty include fire.

More people take the subway each day than total residents of some entire states. No one says “avoid Wyoming” over one murder, but it only has 500k people. The subway has millions.

I can think of way better reasons to avoid Wyoming.

But...but..but... J hole!

There's plenty of people that die because of cost cutting/saving a buck with vehicles/roads. Just those intentional... sorry, I mean, acceptable deaths are just fine with society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Murders_by_motor_vehi...

That seems to have been going around for, oh, the past 47 minutes or so.

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