Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes

There’s an audio version of the same point here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcast.strongtowns.org&#x2F;e&#x2F;the-drip-drip-drip-of-traffic-deaths&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcast.strongtowns.org&#x2F;e&#x2F;the-drip-drip-drip-of-traf...</a><p>A ”best effort” summary of this article: if thousands of people die in once place, it’s one of the great tragedies in American history. However if thousands of people die in thousands different places, it is ignored and considered a fact of life.<p>When a plane or train crashes, we stop everything and redesign the entire network to prevent this from happening again. But each individual death from car accidents is not enough to trigger the same response in cities, planners, and civil engineers.

&gt; It is widely recognized that there is an epidemic of suicides among current and former military personnel, especially those who have been on active duty in a combat theater... There were 3,481 combat deaths in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Since 9&#x2F;11, there have been over 30,000 military suicides. Over 20 soldiers a day take their own lives.<p>Pet peeve: while I really like the general point of the article, I wish the author had actually provided statistics that support the claim they are making here. 30k suicides sounds like a lot, but what&#x27;s the base rate in the general population? The numbers provided don&#x27;t actually tell you whether the rate of military suicides is higher than civilian ones, and that kind of undermines the point. To be concrete I&#x27;m looking for something like &quot;the base rate of suicide is X% chance per year, whereas amongst soldiers it&#x27;s Y% chance per year, suggesting a risk factor of (Y-X)% caused by military service.&quot;<p>A quick search finds some research (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;United_States_military_veteran_suicide#:~:text=In%202019%2C%20the%20VA%20released,year%20from%202008%20to%202017" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;United_States_military_veteran...</a>.) that suggests the rate of suicide among veterans is 1.5x the base rate, which is substantial. Using those numbers suggests that 10k of those suicides quoted above were specifically attributable to military service (and 20k would be &quot;baseline civilian risk of suicide&quot;).

Never owned a car of my own until two years ago. Our car has been hit three times in the last two years. Once totaled on the high way (another drivers fault) and twice while parked. Roughly 50K in damages across the two cars and 3 months in the shop doing repairs. We spent 20K on a new car after the old one was totaled and insurance paid out a fraction of what a similar car would cost. We&#x27;ve paid close to 2K in deductibles, way too much for car insurance from a company that doesnt give a shit about us, and close to 1k on car cameras and backup batteries.<p>Thankfully we havnt been hurt but we got lucky. When the car was totaled it was in heavy traffic going 40+ mph and caused a 4 car pile up. I know people who have died in accidents or had their kids die. My immediate family was incredible lucky to not be killed by a drunk driver in a very bad accident early on in my life.<p>Driving sucks.

My kid sister died in a car accident two weeks ago. Now I find the numbers unfathomable. How can 40,000 families be suffering like this, every year?

&quot;We&quot; don&#x27;t ignore them. Every major government has a body dedicated entirely to automobile safety.<p>In the USA, this is NHSTA - National Highway Safety &amp; Transportation Administration. They maintain an information system of traffic fatality statistics in the USA, called FARS (fatality analysis reporting system). This system is used to determine new safety devices and standards for vehicles and to test their effectiveness.<p>And they are a powerful organization. A car cannot be sold in the USA without NHSTA approval. At the tap of a keyboard, they can cost a company billions of dollars. They power reaches far beyond the USA as well. Not too long ago, the NHSTA issued a recall that bankrupted the largest producer of airbags in the world.<p>I&#x27;d say the USA focuses a lot on reducing automotive fatalities.

I was a cop for several years. I worked hundreds of crashes, and a few fatalities.<p>If cars had a max speed limit of 85 mph, and required the seatbelt to be engaged to work, we&#x27;d cut our fatality rate in half.<p>Most nations&#x27; DUI laws consider a 0.05 BAC as illegal. In most US states 0.08 is presumed under the influence, 0.06 - 0.079 is considered no presumption either way, and under .06 is considered not under the influence. My alcohol tolerance is fairly average, but after some off the cuff experiments with whiskey and a preliminary breathalyzer, I shouldn&#x27;t drive at a .055. My wife shouldn&#x27;t drive at a .03<p>Something like 80% of fatal crashes involve either alcohol, no seatbelt, or excessive speed, but not wearing a seatbelt is like a 50 dollar ticket, and a secondary offense, in many jurisdictions.

I think there&#x27;s another reason too we &quot;ignore&quot; car crashes: loose coupling with politics.<p>Say a DUI driver kills a random family of 5. Is that going to make national headlines? Probably not. Very little to be gained politically. It doesn&#x27;t really enrage us because we love and celebrate alcohol too much to be capable of villainizing it like guns. So as a result, it doesn&#x27;t spread very far on social media.<p>Now say a raging incel shoots 5 people at a mall (2 die, 3 are injured). Is that going to make national headlines? You bet. It easily enrages at least half of us since guns are a wedge issue. Hence, it spreads like wildfire on social media. As it&#x27;s spreading, it is further coupled to politics whenever people use the story to further political goals like mobilizing peers to go out and protest, drum up support for a preferred candidate, and more.<p>You won&#x27;t see a public reaction to car accidents similar to guns until the media decides either alcohol or cars are villains that need to be eradicated from society.

Human response is never in actual proportion to reality. For example, veterans have a suicide rate lower than farmers, fisherman, construction workers, maintenance workers, and engineers.

The NTSB actually does investigate car crashes. Typically police do the actual footwork but if the cause is unknown NTSB agents will put boots on the ground. Unfortunately most of the causes are shared across many cases (speeding, distracted driving, drunk driving), so the cases end up getting lumped together into reports which can include tens of thousands of cases.<p>However, they are performing root cause analysis. For distracted driving, for example, they break it down into distractions by other occupants, distractions by moving object inside vehicle (such as a fly), cell phone use (with hands), cell phone use (no hands), using component integral to vehicle (climate or audio), using component integral to vehicle (other), smoking, and many more.<p>The problem is that decision makers don&#x27;t do anything about it.

I think it&#x27;s just because car crashes aren&#x27;t a wedge issue, so they don&#x27;t politically matter. We certainly don&#x27;t ignore car crashes on local news, where they make a great space filler.<p>Amtrak (and train travel in general) certainly is a wedge issue (&quot;Amtrak Joe&quot;), so we fixate on the only thing interesting that ever happens with it (crashes.) We can then discuss the state of it, whether we should shut it down or expand it, whether flying is safer, etc.

This is a really excellent read, and neatly summarizes a thought that flashes through the back of my mind whenever someone tells me that public transit is unsafe.<p>If over 100 people died each day on public transit, we&#x27;d have banned it by now. But we accept it in our automotive culture, <i>while simultaneously</i> handwringing over every incident that happens on public transit.

Cars are glorified and incredibly ingrained in culture<p>Some people can&#x27;t even imagine walking anymore and are blind to even how much road furniture and infrastructure they litter everywhere<p>Some of the biggest structures we have are roads created in the last 100 years<p>Absolutely crazy

Another factor is that people are more afraid of scary things when they feel like they can’t control them. Driving makes people feel like they are in control, which makes drivers underestimate their chances of crashing. This is the same reason that airplane crashes and autonomous vehicle crashes are also huge news events: if people feel like crashes are being caused by something they can’t control, that scares them.

It reminds me of how here in the US we often overuse signage and other markings on roads to &#x27;prevent&#x27; accidents but roads with less markings that are obvious and direct tend to have less accidents by comparison. I wonder if part of the problem with American roads is the fact we assume people need information they don&#x27;t need or use. I know that roads here aren&#x27;t actively calmed by changing the quality of the road (roughness, width) and that often people ignore or outright get confused by whatever signage and markings are put up.

The engineering side is good to look at. We should also be looking at the education&#x2F;credentialing side too. Many incidents are drivers making poor choices, not knowing the laws, or not understanding vehicle dynamics. Stricter licensing would be a good way to reduce incidents regardless of the redesigns. Arguably, that would be the fastest and cheapest route to effective change.

What&#x27;s required are actually very significant structural changes. Veterans suicides are the result of war, which is mass killing normalized by false mythology. And it not enough to just say that&#x27;s a bad idea, the problem is deeply rooted in the core global paradigm which is fundamentally uncivilized. You can&#x27;t just say that hegemony is bad, you need an alternative, which is a very difficult task.<p>The problem with traffic deaths is again, structural. You are mixing 3000 pound vehicles, most of which contain only one passenger, with pedestrians in the same space. You have humans driving them.<p>The solution is small autonomous vehicles completely separated from pedestrians. This is very hard, but possible, and the materials wasted on oversized vehicles that are underutilized, office buildings that are mostly empty, incredibly poor density, etc. can also be used for that purpose.<p>Cities should actually be entirely redesigned.

&gt; In fact, if we ask safety officials, as a group they officially blame driver error and reckless driving for fatal car crashes. In other words, don’t look at them.<p>My understanding changed radically when I read about Sweden&#x27;s &quot;Vision Zero&quot;. Quoting Wikipedia:<p>] In most road transport systems, road users bear complete responsibility for safety. Vision Zero changes this relationship by emphasizing that responsibility is shared by transportation system designers and road users

Here&#x27;s an interesting factoid:<p>The annualized mortality rate of a US soldier is ~100 per 100,000.<p>The annualized mortality rate of the average US man between the age of 25-34 is 177 per 100,000. (It&#x27;s 199 per 100k for ages 18-24).

If cars were invented today, they would be illegal.<p>We give 16-year-olds minimal training, then entrust them with the control of a 3,000 lb. weapon for the rest of their lives. You can be an awful driver, but even if you get into multiple accidents, your license will rarely be taken away.<p>If cars had not been invented, we would have designed 20th century cities around people, rather than the automobile. We&#x27;d have a robust public transportation network that would all but eliminate the need for cars, at least in cities and suburbs (see Japan).<p>Between the death toll and the alienation from living in places designed for cars, I&#x27;m not sure if the car has been a net positive for society.

I had two friends that were killed in a car crash inside city limits. One guy was turning left, and the other guy going 90 miles an hour in a 40 mile zone. Happened around midnight. Hit them perpendicular, and killed two friends and critically injured driver who survived and is recovering.<p>Have become much more sensitive about car crashes and speeding as a result obviously. Forces you to re-assess your life.<p>Realistic solution - Install speeding cameras everywhere, and most intersections. And levy heavy fines if a person is speeding 20 miles above speed limit, possibly even revoking driver&#x27;s license in that case.

Title should be “why we ignore hundreds of thousands of deaths in our war analogies before we even get to an analysis”. Unless I’ve missed it, neither the article nor any comments at time I’m reading acknowledge that a war of aggression led to orders of magnitude more Iraqi deaths than the scale of death the author is registering as large. I’m not going to dismiss the 3000ish US military fatalities either, but <i>someone</i> should mention the half a million or more deaths that were suffered by people who <i>didn’t</i> invade a country or start a war.

This article presents one facet of automobile risk that is interesting. Essentially there is no governing body tasked to analyze and mitigates these risks to the same degree as with public transport. Rather, general consensus (maybe not majority but still some level of consensus) must be reached before safety measures begin to see widespread adoption in a very distributed system.<p>&gt; For auto crashes, we’re talking about block level interventions, the kind of fine-grained design details that transportation departments are not able to perform.<p>To point out an alternative, transportation departments, if endowed with the authority, could mandate centralized control of all motor vehicles. There is no technical (nor practical) reason you couldn&#x27;t turn over the whole thing to properly engineered centralized computer control. It would be incredibly expensive but it could certainly be done in such way to reduce the risk by orders of magnitude. And that is exactly the kind of top down intervention transportation departments are capable of implementing, at least structurally, if not with their current budget levels.<p>And I think the question of <i>why</i> we haven&#x27;t done this, and probably won&#x27;t any time in the foreseeable future, is a fascinating way to explore our approach to risk.

&gt; No NTSB team is going to mobilize to investigate those tragedies. Nobody is going to seek the underlying causes or ponder the multiple contributing factors. In fact, if we ask safety officials, as a group they officially blame driver error and reckless driving for fatal car crashes. In other words, don’t look at them.<p>Perhaps a touch too hyperbolic? Here&#x27;s what the NTSB has to say about the matter:<p>&gt; The National Transportation Safety Board, an independent federal agency, has the authority to promote motor vehicle safety, determine the probable cause of motor vehicle-related crashes, and make safety recommendations aimed at preventing crashes. Over the years, NTSB has made recommendations to NHTSA.... Below is a list of open recommendations.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nhtsa.gov&#x2F;ntsb-open-recommendations-nhtsa" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nhtsa.gov&#x2F;ntsb-open-recommendations-nhtsa</a>

The article focuses on trains, but the same thing could be said for autonomous vehicles. When one crashes it is national news because they are so rare. People who say autonomous vehicles won&#x27;t be viable until the crash rate is zero are setting the bar far too high. The threshold should be fewer accidents and&#x2F;or fewer fatalities per million miles driven than human drivers. In theory system improvements on the autonomous cars could further reduce those figures, while reducing the accidents involving human factors is very difficult. You can&#x27;t change people that much. Most of the foreseeable improvements are basically the same ones you would need for autonomous vehicles anyway, like better sensors around the car to detect obstacles.

My theory of why we ignore car crashes as a source of deaths boils down to a basic reality of American politics: old people vote.<p>I&#x27;m a volunteer firefighter in a rural town in the Northeast. We handle a fairly large area and go to about 80 motor vehicle accident calls a year, of which about 20-25 require patient extrication and about 5-8 involve one or more fatalities.<p>More of these MVAs involve a non-intoxicated elderly person who made a driving error than involve an intoxicated driver (that&#x27;s including people who nod off on heroin, not just drunks).<p>If we had a clear-eyed view of risk mitigation, we&#x27;d make people over, say, 75 take a comprehensive vision and neuromotor exam to keep their drivers licenses current but we don&#x27;t, because old people vote.

No need to overcomplicate it: we ignore it because it&#x27;s not <i>that</i> common.<p>I mean, for every one person that dies in a car accident in the U.S., 16 die from heart disease and look at how good we are (collectively) at not really tackling that as a source of deaths!

A potentially larger reason is that we&#x27;ve decided car deaths are <i>acceptable</i> -- perhaps because the alternative implicitly might be some kind of impingement upon personal-car-culture, and that is pre-decided as unacceptable.

I _highly_ recommend consuming more of the content put out by Strong Towns [1]. If I were to summarize their message, it&#x27;s that in the past 100 years, we&#x27;ve engaged in a large-scale experiment to design our places around cars. This is bad for safety, bad for the economy, and (most importantly!) bad for us people that live in these places! Content and education-wise, they are my favorite non-profit :)<p>If you&#x27;re looking for audio: their podcast [2] is great (this article came out yesterday as a podcast, and I listened to it while I was biking... and then got angry at all the cars driving around me, lol).<p>If you&#x27;re looking for something longer-form, I&#x27;d recommend reading Confessions of a Recovering Engineer [3]. It&#x27;s literally fantastic, and changed the entire way I think about the suburbs and cities. I grew up in a suburb and recently moved to the city, and had this deep, under-thought feeling that the walking&#x2F;biking (and the livability that came from it) was why I loved cities so much. This book helped me understand why I felt that way, what specifically is wrong with how we build place currently - and also practical things I could do about it!<p>Not to be dramatic, but that book took me from pretty much _never_ thinking about place to: volunteering for a local bike advocacy group, biking twice as much, and literally being a more friendly neighbor. Effects not guaranteed, but I can&#x27;t recommend this book highly enough if you&#x27;re interested in this sort of thing.<p>P.S. I am totally unaffiliated with Strong Towns. I just really like them :)<p>P.P.S. If you&#x27;re looking for some interesting drama, check out the lawsuit they are currently engaged in [4] with the Minnesota Board of Licensure. IANAL, but it kinda just seems like the engineering licenses boards are trying to shut down his speech because he points out that maybe letting only-technical engineers totally design our spaces isn&#x27;t really the best idea!<p>P.P.P.S. Donate here [5]!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.strongtowns.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.strongtowns.org&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.strongtowns.org&#x2F;podcast" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.strongtowns.org&#x2F;podcast</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.strongtowns.org&#x2F;book" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.strongtowns.org&#x2F;book</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.strongtowns.org&#x2F;journal&#x2F;2022&#x2F;2&#x2F;21&#x2F;the-latest-update-on-the-strong-towns-lawsuit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.strongtowns.org&#x2F;journal&#x2F;2022&#x2F;2&#x2F;21&#x2F;the-latest-upd...</a><p>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.strongtowns.org&#x2F;membership" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.strongtowns.org&#x2F;membership</a>

On a related note, a few years ago, I went through an entire year of top headlines in the New York Times (top few pages), and mapped them against actual death rates:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nemil.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;part3-horror-films.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nemil.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;part3-horror-films.html</a><p>It&#x27;s obvious that these would be different, but it was especially glaring just how much we focused on intentional deaths in our media coverage. It also makes sense that this is newsworthy (aka profitable), but it leads to some terrible inferences and decisions if that&#x27;s all we see.

What other engineering field has acceptable death rates? We design roads EXPECTING people to die on them. Insane.

British Columbia has the Insurance Corporation of BC, a publicly-owned company that used to be the sole provider of automobile insurance in the province.<p>Back in the good old days, they funded improvements to high accident rate intersections, corners, roads, etc. Because as a public company, they were mandated to reduce insurance costs.<p>That’s all by the wayside now, of course, because we elected a government that turned the company into a general revenue cash cow, leaving little funding for safety improvements.

We don&#x27;t ignore them - we just accept that risk<p>Data: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Aviation_safety#Statistics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Aviation_safety#Statistics</a><p>0.00000003% chance of dying if you drive a kilometer to the yoga studio.<p>Want to make it less risky personally? Drive less, or drive a safer car.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iihs.org&#x2F;ratings&#x2F;top-safety-picks" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iihs.org&#x2F;ratings&#x2F;top-safety-picks</a>

On a personal level, this reminds me of a concept called normalization of deviance. [1]<p>Every time we do something which we know may be risky, but we do not have a catastrophic result, we further reduce the perceived risk that the catastrophic result will occur to us.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Normalization_of_deviance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Normalization_of_deviance</a>

&gt; For auto crashes, we’re talking about block level interventions, the kind of fine-grained design details that transportation departments are not able to perform.<p>An assumption that&#x27;s nowhere even stated, let alone supported: that auto crashes are amenable to highway engineering changes. Why is &quot;reckless driving&quot; dismissed as obviously wrong?<p>&gt; They need to recognize that the growing crash fatality rates are a direct challenge—even a rebuke—to their theory of traffic safety,<p>excuse me: <i>growing crash fatality rates</i>?? Shouldn&#x27;t he at least demonstrate that they ARE growing?<p>As maerF0x0 demonstrates below, they are NOT growing, and roads and cars are certainly WAY safer than they were 50 years ago.

I came across a 1940s Edmonton Journal a while ago and one of the most remarkable differences from a modern newspaper was at the bottom centre of the front page was a number detailing the number of traffic deaths that year similar to a sort of &quot;x days since this factory has had an accident&quot; sign.<p>What a remarkable thing to track in such a prime location. Clearly at some point someone cared quite a bit about traffic deaths. Not sure if this was some hyper local Edmonton issue for a while or there was broader concern around car deaths during this part of the 20th century.<p>At some point though this concern about the startling amount of traffic deaths clearly ended.

Roadside bombs were Iran-sourced, and played into political actors desires to 1) stay in Iraq 2) invade Iran. Well and 3) actors who want us out of Iraq.<p>Suicides of soldiers work as a deterrent to military action. No political actor wants that tool to be removed from their toolbelt. They want their &quot;Defense Department&quot; to be deployable at will with no hesitation from the American Public.<p>Traffic deaths are a necessary evil of transportation, economic activity, and the profits of the oil industry.

Talk to any racing driver and they will spell out the importance of seatbelts for safety and to maintain control position. For many years there were TV spots explaining why you wouldn&#x27;t be disfigured if you wore one. In modern cars those films could play repeatedly on the dashboard if you failed to buckle up or sat on top of the buckled belt.<p>Once people understand why something is essential they will do it, but we have to keep fresh generations of drivers informed and involved imo.

So how much of this increase is because of increase in car weight and how much is it &quot;road rage&quot; or whatever you want to call it?<p>I definitely have noticed more aggressive drinking post covid and I hear about it more. Even a gas station worker mentioned randomly to me how people in our city are crazy drivers. This is anecdotal but I&#x27;ve become more worried about driving with the family.

As more people do a thing, and do it more, it&#x27;s natural consequences happen more. Funny how that happens? Using my eyes to approximate the changes from this graph[1]<p>* Death rate per mile driven is down like 95% or nonetheless drastically since 1925.<p>* Current deaths per year is less than 1975, despite driving like 50% more miles<p>Now, safety likely could be much greater if people gave the same care to driving as in the past. Two phenomenon are likely happening :<p>1. Driving is more familiar, so its approached with less care, and<p>2. People have become accustomed to the safety technologies aiding them such that they increase the riskiness of their behavior to match their base risk tolerance. Eg: as brakes get better people drive faster and closer. As cruise radar gets better people use their phones more and rely on it braking.<p>Alas, this may fall to the same issue with greenhouse gasses &#x2F; climate change -- Technological change is simply not fast enough for the goals of society, and a net reduction must occur. We cannot make our economy green enough soon enough such that we must simply reduce our consumption, and it seems our safety standards cannot keep up with increasing consumption<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File:US_traffic_deaths_per_VMT,_VMT,_per_capita,_and_total_annual_deaths.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Transportation_safety_in_the_U...</a>

I think J.G. Ballard said everything that could be said about this in his 2004 Academy Award winning film &quot;Crash&quot;

People use cars far more than they use guns, there&#x27;s far more cars owned than guns, and and cars are far more regulated. However, the US is unique in the amount of gun deaths in the world... far higher than other countries, with regulation far lower.

My favorite: Number of people die from cancer each year is same as number of people died in World War II each year. How much resources did we allocated to each? As former chimps, our ability grasp probability and statistics is astonishingly limited.

In 2020, there were around 173,000 highway vehicle fires reported in the United States.<p>These are generally totally ignored as well unless they are one of the exceptionally rare Electric Vehicle cars. Then they are all over the news ZOMG TESLA CAUGHT ON FIRE!?!

Control.<p>If 1000s of people die in ways we deem them able to control (be it car crashes or obesity) that&#x27;s on them. If they die in ways deemed beyond their control (plane crashes) then that&#x27;s something you have to stop.

It&#x27;s insane to me that we don&#x27;t at least:<p>1) Require regular re-certification of people&#x27;s driver licenses, and have much more stringent tests.<p>2) Mandatory speed limiters in all vehicles, using GPS to limit speed based on location.

July 18, 2022: 196 Covid deaths in the USA<p>2020: 1909 deaths daily from heart disease in the USA

This fails to note an important factor in both suicides and car crashes, which is (in the US especially) strong popular preference for personal freedom over personal safety. People would rather be able to freely own guns (even if they are routinely used for suicide) or drive their own cars at fast speeds (even if it causes deadly accidents).<p>Trains and planes get such strong safety assurances because they are typically commercially operated, so they are subject to another popular feature, which is commercial operators&#x27; permanent fear of liability lawsuits.<p>It&#x27;s much harder for people to accept to trade off personal freedom for safety than it is for people to demand safety guarantees in commercial transportation services.

I have a simpler explanation: people collectively are quite willing to let thousands of people they don&#x27;t know when the alternative is any form of even mild inconvenience to themselves.<p>Sensible gun regulations like red flag laws for those with mental issues or convictions for domestic violence or even just background checks? Well that might make it slightly more difficult to buy a gun so that&#x27;s a &quot;no&quot;.<p>More than a million Americans died of Covid, at a peak of over 3,000 a day. For reference, that&#x27;s basically a 9&#x2F;11 every day. Mask mandates to reduce transmission rate? Getting vaccinated to hopefully reach herd immunity? Nope.<p>American corporations routinely outsource activity to other countries that frequently use effective if not actual slave labor or otherwise horrible working conditions? Nope, we&#x27;re OK with that too.<p>How easily we trade convenience for the lives of people we don&#x27;t know says a lot about human nature.

well, because we can. I mean, we have some mental buffer to accept the conseuqences.. check deep inside!<p>I think reacting to amtrak crash makes sense since it moves on rails! how on earth something moving on rails could possibly crashes? doesn&#x27;t make sense... but cars are different.. if you be honest with yourself you should always wonder how on earth we can get to a point without an accident with cars! think about that.. sorry this is just harsh reality.

While in retrospect The Dark Knight was almost comically heavy handed and clumsy, the Joker&#x27;s speech about &quot;the plan&quot; was pretty solid and holds up.

For the same reason the obituaries, listing perhaps 5-10 dead people, is nowhere near the front page of the newspaper, while a murder of just 1 or 2 often is.

It&#x27;s because we feel we can control the circumstances of the car crash. We cannot feel in control of airliners. We&#x27;re hapless baggage.

The answer here is that the convenience of being able to jump in a car, and get to your destination quickly is worth the risk of occasionally being injured or dying on the way to most people. You also have to compare against what came before the car: horses and walking, both of which may have been perilous in comparison with DC Beltway traffic on the way home from work. Ah... never mind - braving the elements and bears might be better than the DC Beltway at rush hour.

(Un)friendly reminder that it&#x27;s tautologically impossible for the general public to be bad at a subjective task like risk assessment or a subjectively assessed task such as driving because the general public is what sets the baseline for the subjective assessment.

It&#x27;s hard to monetize politically.

The primary reason why I ignore car crashes is because I ensure that I do the following things, all of which greatly reduce my risk factor compared to the average:<p>1. I always drive attentively with both hands on the steering wheel.<p>2. I completed on-track driving instruction in a race car, multiple times, and also took training in evasive driving maneuvers.<p>3. I constantly maintain situational awareness of what&#x27;s going on around and with my vehicle.<p>4. All of my vehicles are relatively new (less than 10 years old) and impeccably maintained, and provided with the highest quality tires available replaced on a regular cadence based on service life.<p>5. I do not drive when I am overly tired, after having consumed any alcoholic substance, or in adverse weather conditions. In any of these situations, I either do not travel or I find an alternate way to travel that doesn&#x27;t incur the risks of driving.<p>A simple example of #5 is that I was on a road-trip headed North in the US, and we had a late-Spring snowstorm happen around mid-day. I had originally planned to get a further 150 miles down the road before stopping for the night, but I instead immediately pulled off and booked a hotel room, and left again the following morning after the roads had cleared and traffic had let up. Could I have made it? Almost certainly. Was my vehicle equipped for the weather? Yes, absolutely. Was it worth the risk? Not at all. A hotel room was $120 for the night, which was cheap insurance against possibly dying on vacation.<p>If I get onto a public bus, or into a ride share, or a taxi, I can&#x27;t guarantee any of the above. The driver might have personal issues causing them to have stayed up late the night before, and then they had a few martinis to help them sleep, and started the morning with heavy coffee drinking, constantly checking on the status of their personal issues on their phone while they&#x27;re driving. The bus due to it being a public service may be maintained at the margins of acceptable standards with tires and other consumable maintenance items being used to the full extent of their service life, rather than being replaced preventatively. We&#x27;ve all seen the &quot;gators&quot; on public roads of tire treads ripped off of truck and bus tires that were retreaded rather than replaced, or shredded rubber from large tire blowouts. The bus could be 17 years old with a spotty history and frame damage. All of these things are out of my control. But I can control myself, my driving, my vehicle, and ensure I always leave enough spare tire capability to evasively maneuver.<p>I&#x27;m nearing 40 years old and I&#x27;ve avoided HUNDREDS of accidents that could have happened due to other drivers. I have never once in my entire life been in an accident where I was at fault. In fact, I&#x27;ve been in multiple accidents, all of which involved my vehicle being entirely stopped and stationary and being rear-ended by an inattentive driver, sometimes with me not even being in the car when it happened. As long as I am actively moving down the roadway, I consider my risk to be massively below the national average, because I am a better driver than nearly anyone else I&#x27;ve ever met and I drive better quality vehicles that are maintained better than nearly any other vehicle on the public roads. It&#x27;s as simple as that.

if the government had any integrity they would ban human drivers and invest billions into self driving tech.

If USAians can ignore daily multi-death shootings, it can ignore any tragedy.

quality of life improvements make it so most people are okay with the risk. just like skiing, let people decide what risks they want to take. covid has emboldened the authoritarians. stop trying to tell other people how they should live.

Because it&#x27;s worth it. The question is why we don&#x27;t ignore other causes of death that are also worth it.

Author obviously has a service to sell but the illustrative comparisons here bother me.<p>Amtrak runs 300 trains a day, very rarely has accidents because the environment is so controlled.<p>The US runs 120 <i>million</i> cars and trucks a day. 93 fatal accidents a day, many through driver fault.<p>The risk profile is entirely different. We expect people to crash cars. It&#x27;s <i>why</i> cars have seatbelts and airbags, and why Amtrak doesn&#x27;t.<p>We don&#x27;t ignore car crashes, we just pay a lot more attention to rail failures because it shouldn&#x27;t ever happen. They&#x27;re preventable. Automotive accidents aren&#x27;t, yet.