Comment by Chevalier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Chevalier | Hacker News Reader

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...dude. No, you don't have to be a drunk going 100mph before you kill someone with your car. That you "don't drink very much" doesn't mean that your "car is incredibly safe and will almost certainly never kill anyone."

Your car is an extremely heavy, extremely fast machine that will crush anyone unlucky enough to be in its path. That includes not only incompetent/incapacitated/elderly drivers, but also dumb accidents and unaware pedestrians. You will easily kill a child who tries to play in her suburban street even if you go 10mph -- not because you're a drunk, but because American structural design forces everyone to drive two-ton bullets to go anywhere, which inevitably results in lethal wrecks. Compare Denmark's road fatality rate of 3.0 per 100,000 inhabitants versus the US ratio of 11.6 per 100,000. [1]

The question is not whether you enjoy driving. The question is why cars are entitled to the vast majority of public space -- not only for parking (often for free or nominal fees), but also for individual transportation that endangers the lives of pedestrians and cyclists. Please take a look at this illustration to get an idea of how much land your car takes from everyone else. [2]

Do you really think a kid trying to bike to school should have to risk his life every day... because you feel entitled to barrel through his home town?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

[2] http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/18/7236471/cars-pedestrian...

"because American structural design forces everyone to drive two-ton bullets to go anywhere, which inevitably results in lethal wrecks. Compare Denmark's road fatality rate of 3.0 per 100,000 inhabitants versus the US ratio of 11.6 per 100,000."

Check the per-vehicle-km rate. Denmark isn't safer because they drive less.

Unless I'm reading the table wrong, US is still at 7.6 deaths per billion km, while Denmark is at 3.4. That's more than a 1:2 ratio. I'd certainly say that's safer (even if the difference is smaller than GP indicates).

Scbrg beat me to it, but Denmark is still twice as safe as the US when you consider kilometers driven. Keep in mind that this means cars-vs-cars.

And more to the point, take a second to think about what you just said. Denmark is nearly four times as safe as the US because they gave people lovely cities like Copenhagen where kids can safely bike to school and adults can walk to work or to a local restaurant. This means...

...yup, that they don't risk their lives every day in cars and thus the per-vehicle-kilometer rate isn't terribly useful in assessing a walkable lifestyle. The kids that bike to school in Copenhagen don't die in automobile wrecks and aren't exposed to risk on a per-vehicle-kilometer rate. Those dangers are for American kids.

Even when you disregard the safety/quality of daily life for urban Danes and use the car-vs-car per capita per-vehicle-kilometer rate, it's astonishing that Denmark's excellent urban planning has even influenced Danish drivers, in that it's more than twice as safe to drive in Denmark as it is to drive in the US. Contrary to your last statement, Denmark is RADICALLY safer because they drive less. Even drivers are safer because of the superior design of Danish cities and streets.

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