You must log in or # to comment.
Excuse me–i think they’re called car accidents and you just hate freedom.
I mean, they are pretty rarely on purpose.
The data for accidental transit deaths is probably even lower.
I don’t know, they did write the song “Dumb Ways To Die” to prevent transit accidents.
Ah yes, what a masterpiece of a campaign. Although other Canadians I’ve shown it to seem horrified.
I don’t know what order of magnitude they’re on exactly - they do clearly happen. But, it takes relatively more effort to get run over by a train than a car whizzing by a sidewalk driven by literally whoever.
It’s the homeless outside the trains I worry about. The only train fatality I have direct experience with was a homeless person “taking a shortcut” across a railroad bridge
It depends on what you mean by “on purpose.” You didn’t mean to hit that light pole, but there was a lot of intentionality around the decision to drive and the decision to build a car-based society that is very much “on purpose” and the effect of that is deaths due to cars.
I mean with malice aforethought by a particular person. Foreseeable or unnecessary accidents are still accidents.
Car oopsy daisies
Right! I just had a little oopsie while looking at my phone wondering if I should text that cutie who gave me their number at the bar–don’t get too upset about all the blood and body parts. I’ll clean those off my car tomorrow.
Wait till they find out about traffic collisions
Am I missing something, or was that the point of this post?
The graph shows deaths. I’m sure there are quite a few more collisions that don’t end in death, but possibly severe and lasting disabilities. You don’t see a lot of subway cars colliding with other subway cars. I’m sure plenty of people run into buses though.
Nope.
Yeah, bus collisions tend to have a pretty low fatality rate as well. It seems more like OP just didn’t read the graph.
No, he’s just saying deaths are big, but even bigger disparity is seen if you include non-fatal incidents.
Not disagreeing, but it would be a more honest comparison accounting for volume of people using either transit method.
I agree but I imagine it wouldn’t change the data that severely. Public transit, when well made, is designed to carry a ton of people compared to highways. I should look into the data in places like Germany or Switzerland or something.
It doesn’t matter what they’re designed for, it matters what they’re materially like right now.
Your argument that you shouldn’t worry about public transport homicides because way more people die in another mode of transportation begs the question. Way more people die while in transit on foot than car, let’s not worry about car deaths.
What are you talking about man? The whole point of this post is that American politicians are freaking out about a material situation that is barely relevant to the majority of Americans. The chart above shows that if all public transport deaths were brought down to zero it would be less than a 0.01% difference to the sum annual deaths of just these two categories.
So should we try to lower them? Sure, yes, of course. Is this the highest priority or most impactful thing to be worrying about? No, absolutely not, it’s not even in the top 1000.
My main point is the vast majority of American politicians are people not interested in improving the material reality of their constituents. My point is they could fix everything up in the US, make well designed systems and infrastructure and changes that could fix nearly any problem society faces, if they were legitimately worried about something. But they’re not. This is just another distraction, like Tylenol or immigrants or aliens, while they rob Americans.
So your comment is unhelpful and missing the point. Yes, we should improve all aspects of society. No, this worry is not well meaning or well placed and nothing will change because of it until the system is fixed.
That doesn’t change the fact that the graph isn’t being as honest as it could. I could plot out a graph comparing any two methods of deaths, and say the one with the higher number is the one we should focus on more, so why care about the smaller number? These are two different statistics, that’s aren’t comparable. To be clear, I do not like the fear mongering of public transit because the billionaires need that automotive and gas money, but we can be accurate with our data representation.
Some more accurate comparisons would be:
- Public transit deaths vs automotive deaths by percentage in relation to total people for each transport method
- Public transit homicides vs vehicular manslaughter and homicides
Again, sure, I’m not disagreeing with that. I’m just saying focus on the bigger picture here instead of the pedantry of the minutia.
The chart could be better, true. Public transit deaths are not a high ranking issue within the category of “things to improve with public transit in the US”, let alone “things to improve with mass transit in the US” or “things to improve in the US”.
It’s just not an important thing for politicians to be worried about and that’s exactly why they’re talking about it right now.
It would also be more honest if it only counted intentional deaths in vehicles.
So what they’re quietly hinting at is: “ban all public transport! It is hostile to cars”…?
Shouldn’t this be represented on some sort of normalized basis like per 1000 trips or something?
Of course not, we’re optimizing for scandal!
According to the bureau of transportation statistics there were ~145x as many passenger miles for highway vs transit. There are also about 10x as many transit fatalities as represented in the graph (shockingly, most transit deaths happen to people getting hit by the bus and not a guy with a knife).
Looking at it from that perspective, transit averages higher deaths/passenger-mile in some years (in 2023: 0.0095 vs 0.0080). But of course you could slice it by passenger trips and might get a different result.
There’s a lot of legitimate complaints to be made about car dependance and safety but instead we get stupid stuff like this…
But if more people were on the bus, then they would be less likely to get hit by said bus because they would not be in front of it 🤯
Uh sure… and if we put everyone in a car we would eliminate 100% of pedestrian deaths the same way
But think about the car stabbings…
So this is trying to compare car crash related deaths to murders on a train/bus?
~40,000/year? Wow. That’s like wiping out a small town every year. Also, odd comparison to choose homicides. Might be better to see how many people are killed by buses and trains such as at crossings or by accident in cities.
If only 1% of car crash deaths were intentional homicides (99% true accidents), they’d still eclipse public transit.
Cool statement, very valid, now please normalize it by any type of ridership or trip numbers for that to mean anything
Yeah, that would be good
Stop trying to derail their narrative with facts! How can they possibly retain power if they don’t scare the population into voting for them?
What would it look like with a fair comparison of intentional murders? Or at the very least normalize it by vehicle miles traveled? As is, it’s not a very helpful comparison to support your specific conclusion
Are deaths from malicious inattentivenes less of a concern than intentionally murder in your mind? In mine, they’re worse.
Fair point. In that case, the graphic should ideally include any deaths from accidents in public transit too, not that it would be many. By bigger issue is the chart doesn’t factor the baseline use of each system.
