https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23257790
UPDATE: The other article states "14% jump in fatality rates PER DISTANCE DRIVEN." So the roads are more deadly per mile, but the number of drivers has decreased so much that the overall harm is down.
The roads are safer.
The roads are deadlier.
Both are true and both are false depending upon if you are looking at the total or the per driver (and perhaps even if you are looking at per driver per minute or per driver per mile).
The news is pretty bad in that it's mostly opinions pretending to be facts/information, with occasional data sprinkled in to support their conclusions.
It seems like heavy rush-hour traffic is prone to creating a large number of accidents with a low total number of fatalities. When I drive around now, I believe the risk of accident per mile is significantly lower (city dweller used to typically packed city roads), but due to higher speeds, I can’t make the same claim about lower fatality risk.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist...
oh no! why are you getting downvoted?!
ive been banging on about the subjective nature of "facts" on HN for a while now. perhaps a parable from the movie Charlie Wilson's War will help:
A boy is given a horse on his 14th birthday. Everyone in the village says, “Oh how wonderful.” But a Zen master who lives in the village says, “We'll see.” The boy falls off the horse and breaks his foot. Everyone in the village says, “Oh how awful.” The Zen master says, “We'll see.” The village is thrown into war and all the young men have to go to war. But, because of the broken foot, the boy stays behind. Everyone says, “Oh, how wonderful.” The Zen master says, “We'll see.”
Also, do not ignore the opinion, instead look for it specifically, and assume that the data has been curated to support that opinion. Then go find the gaps.
"Stay-at-Home Rules Reduce Fatal Collisions"
Fact. Not opinion. Correct. And important to know, because it's good that fewer people are dying.
"Emptier US roads more lethal"
Likewise a correct fact and not an opinion. And newsworthy because driving right now is more likely to get me killed, and that's something I'd like to know.
And the media got it right, in the headline even. It's posters here that are trying to conflate the two and make them seem like they say opposite things when they clearly did not.
So... which party is the one injecting opinion? It doesn't seem like the media to me. This seems like a bunch of HN commenters trying to spin up a controversy.
> Likewise a correct fact and not an opinion. And newsworthy because driving right now is more likely to get me killed, and that's something I'd like to know.
"lethal" here means more deaths per mile traveled. that might be because roads everywhere are less safe, or it might mean that a greater fraction of total miles are being driven on inherently unsafe stretches of road (with the same local fatality rates as before the crisis). fatalities include pedestrian deaths as well. maybe there is increased risk for pedestrians but not for drivers. the article doesn't say. there's certainly not enough information to say whether you personally are at greater risk driving.
And in any case... I don't understand your criticism at all. If there are more deaths per mile traveled, then every mile driven is on average "more lethal", by definition. So if I drive to the same place I (in the sense of an average "I" across all drivers) am more likely to die. QED.
Basically, you're just criticizing grammar by conflating my use of "I" with me personally and not the abstract reader I clearly intended. Do you make similar quibbles about the abstract use of "you" or "one", or the royal "we"?
> And in any case... I don't understand your criticism at all. If there are more deaths per mile traveled, then every mile driven is on average "more lethal", by definition. So if I drive to the same place I (in the sense of an average "I" across all drivers) am more likely to die. QED.
my criticism is that the average deaths per mile doesn't imply anything about your risk on a typical trip for you. for one thing, the excess deaths could all be pedestrians, and the deaths per mile for drivers could be the same. in particular "So if I drive to the same place I (in the sense of an average "I" across all drivers) am more likely to die." is not implied by the information in the article, because a very possible explanation for the increased rate is that people are not driving to the same places.
let me try to construct a counterexample from my life. in normal times I drive 20 miles each way on the interstate to commute to work. once or twice a week, I drive a mile to the grocery store through a dense urban area. for the sake of the example, let's just assume the interstate has much fewer deaths per mile than city streets do (pretty sure this is true, but don't want to bother looking up a source). I, like many other people, no longer commute to work, but I still buy groceries once or twice a week. so a far greater fraction of my miles are on high-risk stretches of road. the average risk I expose myself to per mile is indeed higher, but this doesn't imply that driving to the grocery store is any more dangerous than it was before. in other words, it is a fact, but not a particularly meaningful one. it shouldn't influence your behavior.
reporting averages without some context or explanation is not very useful and people who aren't familiar with statistics are going to draw all kinds of unsupported conclusions. another random example: I live in a Very Dangerous City if you go by the overall murder rate. but if you dig into where the murders happen, they are tightly clustered in certain areas. I'm no more likely to get shot in my neighborhood than I would be in williamsburg.
It doesn't mean it doesn't either. Someone would need to do the science to show it either way, and that hasn't happened.
I don't see how you get from there (which you could have said in like 5% of the prose as "the variables aren't independent") to your point that the news media shouldn't ever report on scientific results if there is the possibility of a confounded variable.
The standard you want applied would effectively mean that the media can't report on experimental science at all. So I'm going to go back to my original supposition that what you really WANT is for the media not to report on inconvenient facts, and you're hiding behind scientific pedantry to make the case.
There are at least two reasonable readings of that sentence. One is that US roads have more fatal accident risk per mile driven. Another is that the set of US roads is the scene of more total fatalities.
The second one is a more natural reading to me, but presumably not to some others.
Then I don't know which dialect you speak, but that's an outrageously weird interpretation. It's certainly not the way the word "lethal" is defined or interpreted in common usage among the folks I've known.
It's both interesting that traffic deaths are down overall and that deaths are up per mile traveled. But I would argue that they are not anywhere near equally important news. The total lowering of traffic deaths is news. The increase in deaths per mile is an interesting bit of trivia relevant to few people and should be reported as such.
This has been especially bad with something as nuanced and data-driven as COVID. Any new number or stat gets a headline even if it has zero meaning in the grand scheme of things. I've seen news sites with two stories on the same page simultaneously proclaiming that there's no evidence that there is immunity to COVID while also proclaiming that a vaccine trial was successful.
Coincidentally, that's where oldschool print media was better, if only due to space being limited and budgeted. Computers, otoh, are only good at dealing with things that are all alike.
But also because articles were all laid out right there on the pages next to each other and could be compared in physical terms.
Something like "the roads are killing fewer drivers" would be true.
Drivers kill drivers. There are more dangerous drives on the streets with empty roads.
I think we can at least agree that the statement "the roads are safer" is false.
Plenty of places are increased traffic but not bumper to bumper
This is all rounding numbers that have been rounded already to smooth out uniqueness of a given locale
Water is wet level conclusion that using math correctly by math rules to debate a topic that’s locally unique and out of view for people in far flung regions.
My individual odds of dying in an accident haven’t changed much. Safer or worse in some aggregate measure isn’t that useful to me today or tomorrow. Still gonna do as I do.
You could express it in a way that would be correct to all the pedants out there, but it might be a long convoluted sentence.
You can't know which is a better explanation unless you have data with more granularity than is typically provided by the press.
In my experience, there are a lot more pedestrians blindly walking or running across the roads in the past couple months. The drop to nearly zero traffic lulled people into a false sense of security. People are treating every road like a giant sidewalk.
(Not advocating careless jaywalking, just pointing out the car-centric mentality makes me sad)
Genuinely don't think non-highway road crossing needs to be excessively regulated. Human beings will self-organize and the exceptions will not cause significant economic damage. More freedom and less regulation, please.
A better title would have been something like "Traffic fatalities in March drop to ####".
When I was in school, our statistics prof used to put up that daily chart on the bottom of the USA Today front page. He wouldn't start class until we found two or three things wrong with it. By the end of the semester, nobody in the class trusted anything from that newspaper. Great learning experience!
1. https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/05/19/18/28584104-8336989-...
People who do not get organs, die in hospitals, not in cars. With that logic person would be a murder, for refusing to "donate" their organs.
Media will publish "The roads are deadlier", or, if they're unusually responsible, nothing.
Remember this when "the news brings you down". They only publish those stories!
Not because they're evil, but because those are the one's we'll click on. Just don't think the news is a representative sample of what happens.
It is quite deadly. But more information is needed to asses risk, e.g. >90% of deaths are to those with preexisting conditions.
With proper data sets, all of this should just fall out.
It's signed 25mph. Normal speeds are about 30-35mph. Now, every morning starting about 5:30am, drivers are using it as their own personal drag strip trying to lay down their best 0-60 times.
Police don't really seem to care.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
the opposite--over-attributing to the situation--typically happens to deceive (e.g., shirk responsibility), rather than being an intrinsic bias of our social environment like the fundamental attribution error is.
So perhaps people are essentially less used to driving, and therefore, more prone to error or less comfortable (which may increase anxiety, or hesitation for in the moment decisions)
The few times I've been out recently, I've definitely noticed that the other drivers on the road do not appear nearly as confident or comfortable.
Just another point of anecdotal data for what it's worth.
You would expect freeways to have disproportionally less traffic than other routes due to CORVID precautions.
So really the question is if fatality rates for different road types have changed.
There is no / minimal gridlock right now.
However, there is a hidden fatality rate in slow traffic. The number of person-hours wasted waiting for the traffic to move. It can build up to a lifetime pretty easily with enough traffic, so cumulatively the traffic jams in a major metropolitan area can waste the 750,000 hours or so of people's lifetime and virtually kill a person.
In short, commuting sucks.