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Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

But that makes sense statistically, because those are thousands of ostensibly independent events that don't necessarily have a single common cause, where the massacre of a thousand people in one place obviously has a single common cause. So of course the natural reaction is to shrug in the former case, because there's no obvious connection between them. Of course, if you can prove that those have a single common cause that can be tackled, then it makes sense to tie them all together.

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> So of course the natural reaction is to shrug in the former case, because there's no obvious connection between them

I don't think a common cause is what makes the difference, and you see it with lung cancer due to smoking.

The shock factor of plane crashes is brought on by them being so rare, killing a lot of people at once, and almost guaranteeing those fatalities. This makes them shocking and unforgettable, they get a reputation.

On the other hand most people have been in a car crash of some sort (a fender bender) and not only survived but walked away without a scratch. Plus the stream of news about individual crashes just desensitizes people even further.

Similarly, probably the most dangerous thing most people do in their lives is eat (or overeat). It is far more dangerous than smoking or driving or flying.

However, overeating (and the consequences) are extremely common and utterly unshocking.

People engage in the risky behavior 3 or more times a day, and have normalized the deaths they see resulting from it.

I think it’s both.

Honestly it’s like a lot of problems where it’s easier to solve when it’s one big thing as opposed to 1000 little things. Imagine cutting one big expense out of your budget versus having to cut 1% out of 500 things. One of those is vastly easier.

But that's the misconception, that car accidents/fatalities are somehow all unique and with a unique solution to be applied individually. In the end almost all of them boil down to the same few root causes: alcohol, speed, no seatbelt, tiredness, bad car maintenance, and a handful of others. So why 1% from 500 things, do you just want to prevent just a few accidents caused by speeding?

You don't need to fix 500 individual incidents but just a bit. You should fix one root cause. If your car won't drive faster than the speed limit for the area or the weather, if it won't drive at all if the driver is inebriated, sleepy, doesn't wear the seat belt properly, etc. then you prevent most of the accidents and fatalities.

So you don't cut 1% from 500 things, you cut all payments for a certain something you don't want.

We know, though, that there are certain patterns and behaviors that contribute to car accidents. For example, we know that speeding was a factor in something like a third of all car deaths. And I’m pretty confident that’s an underestimate, because there are lots of roads where the speed limit almost certainly should be slower and speed would not be indicated in the accident report, even though it was a factor. (I also think it’s pretty easy to think of additional reasons speed might sometimes not be mentioned in the accident report, even when it was a factor, but I don’t have any numbers on that.)

If we regulated automobiles the same way we regulate aircraft, every single automobile would have a speed governor installed.

We also know that size is a significant factor. This is especially true anytime an accident involves a pedestrian or cyclist. And here again, despite clear, common sense evidence, cars are getting larger and heavier over time, not smaller and safer. (Cars have of course gotten safer, but mostly not through commonsense measures like, “make them smaller” or “make them go slower.” And so safety features inside the car are always fighting against our intransigence on those two fronts.)

Size and speed. This is really obvious stuff, if anybody cared.

The problem is also that generally, engineering takes what is best practice for an interstate with speeds in excess of 55 MPH, and then apply it to local roads with driveways where people are trying to cross the street.

Even a street dead ending in a cul-de-sac and no legal steeet parking is often in excess of 30 feet wide. All that width encourages speeding.

> If we regulated automobiles the same way we regulate aircraft, every single automobile would have a speed governor installed.

With regards to airplane speed limits in FAR 91.117, the responsibility is entirely on the pilot. There are no speed governors to prevent the pilot from busting this reg and it’s somewhat common for pilots to struggle with this in their first jet transition.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.117

The situation with cars is that there are posted limits on every public road, so it's not up to the driver, but drivers exceed these limits routinely, anyway, and doing so directly contributes to something like 12,000 deaths per year. The point here is that if anything that obvious and predictable were happening with air travel it would already have been addressed.

The parent comment is presenting a hypothetical of how a similar degree of regulation would look for cars, not saying that airplanes have that specific regulatory mechanism.

Yes the author seems to state that there are many more traffic deaths than commercial transport deaths as if the point is self evident but I do not see it. From my perspective its a minor miracle that there aren't more traffic deaths. We let any private individual drive up to a 20,000 something pound vehicle with pretty minimal licensing requirements (in most places in the US). The news story is that it mostly goes ok.

Not sure 40k deaths per year and countless more severe injuries, permanent disabilities, and financial destitutions count as it going mostly ok

It can be if you compare it to:

1. Total US population, and total deaths per year

2. Amount of miles traveled yearly.

Except that they are dramatically higher than in comparable countries. It's very obvious that the US is overwhelmingly worse off in traffic deaths.

Do americans travel more miles than is typical in those countries?

Measure in “trips” not miles. Measuring in miles rewards suburban culture. Highway driving isn’t where deaths happen. They happen most on urban roads.

Screw you both.

Measure butt-in-seat hours.

That doesn’t count people who don’t get in a car wreck, simply because they walked to buy groceries

Aren't we comparing drivers vs drivers here?

If we aren't then you're just measuring the fraction of the population that drives (which is largely a reflection of wealth and demographics) which isn't really a measurement of the safeness of the roads and driving.

We’re talking about people killed trying to move around the place they live. Butt-in-seat hours is a fine way to measure automobile vs automobile stats, but when we’re talking about deaths from transportation, counting only automobile hours is silly. There are various ways to get around a city, and the way you do that hardly matters if it suits the purposes of that trip.

Very mixed ages and completeness of the data in this list [1] but it seems USA is pretty high on death per kilometer (fifth) of those countries that has data on kilometer traveled.

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

> drive up to a 20,000 something pound vehicle

Specifically in the US the limit is 26,000 lbs GVWR without a CDL. That is the gross vehicle rating cannot be over 26,000 lbs, even if it actually weighs less when driven.

I've always assumed that exceeding the GVWR is illegal but searches show conflicting results.

my personal theory is that people's overconfidence in their ability as drivers and underestimating the risk of driving ends up making the process much safer than if people were more grounded in reality

I could see that possibly being true. I mean, driving is kind of weird; it seems to be mostly done with a part of the brain that can operate automatically with little conscious effort. It's sort of like playing the piano: if I'm playing some piece that I know well I probably won't screw up unless I actually try to consciously think about what I'm doing, which is when things fall apart.

That said, I think people should be reasonably safety-conscious about vehicle maintenance, avoiding risky situations, and avoiding things that could sabotage the automatic-driving part of their brain, like doing other things at the same time that require their attention and their hands and eyes.

Agree!

Now I'm really curious for the reasoning behind that.

I think it's like the difference between balancing on a plank of wood a foot off the ground and one ten feet off the ground. The act is the same, but the perception of risk is way different and the performance would be as well

It's not even about confidence. It's a matter of being in control. When you drive you can do something about whether or not you crash. When you are a passenger in a plane or train you are completely helpless.

Apparently, such confidence is misplaced, and people "in control" crash a lot more often than helpless passengers.

Or everyone’s overconfidence and underestimation means there’s no appetite for people to accept regulation and change. because I’m not the problem and I’m in control, I shouldn’t expect change. Meanwhile when you fly, you know you’re at the hands of someone else, and you want to control them as much as possible.

You don't even have to use a plane as an example.

Be a passenger in a car with a driver you're unfamiliar with. Lots of people struggle with that and way overestimate the speeds the driver is going at.

>those are thousands of ostensibly independent events that don't necessarily have a single common cause

This is obviously incorrect reasoning for the United States. If countries around the world had statistically similar collision rates, then you would have a point, but this isn't some sort of power law or random distribution. The fact that our fatality rate are so significantly higher than other developed countries, means that there is a reason. It's not random, it's statistically showing us we're doing something very, very wrong

Is it possible the US just has more bigger vehicles? Speed is obviously a huge part, but adding all that extra mass of many super-size me trucks and SUVs with poor visibility seems like it would factor in.

If you’ve studied the subject, the obvious reason is that Americans allow anyone to drive with minimal training. Regardless of past behavior. We even subsidize insurance rates for people who are so bad at driving they are uninsurable.

It’s a recipe for people getting killed.

> But that makes sense statistically, because those are thousands of ostensibly independent events

Not only that, but in the case of a plane or train crash, the passengers were completely powerless to do anything about it. So it's a death that's imposed on them by the event.

In a car, the driver has nearly all the agency to do something about it and not be part of a crash. Car crashes don't just suddenly happen to people on a random distribution.

Many of them are directly the fault of the driver, so you can opt of those (don't drive drunk, sleepy, etc). Many are the fault of other drivers but you could often opt out by paying attention (go watch youtube dashcam car crash videos, it's astonishing the number of crashes where the victim could've avoided it but doesn't do anything). Many are also due to lack of skill (e.g. car slides on an oil slick and driver doesn't know how to control it) which you can opt out by taking car control training. Some are from equipment malfunction which you can also opt out (maintain your car).

I've never owned or driven a car, yet they're around me every day, putting my life at risk (both short-term, that they may crash into me; and long-term, since I'm forced to breathe their emissions)

Whilst pedestrians should avoid risky behaviour, we're still largely powerless; e.g. I recently had an encounter with a motorist reversing out of their driveway without looking, and I've twice had motorists drive down the pavement (sidewalk) towards me (once when the road was water-logged, the other time they were trying to bypass traffic).

At the same time, it's not possible to eliminate all risk from life. Even if all cars disappeared overnight, pedestrians are still getting killed by cyclists for example. And with cars gone there would be a huge increase in cycling, thus cycling-involved deaths.

In such a world (where cars disappeared) would we be having this thread about a need to now ban all bicycles?

To some extent there will always be some risk, just need to find ways to minimize it while balancing utility.

I was mostly responding to your point about agency and powerlessness; and the implicit assumption that 'car crash victim' ⊂ 'car driver'.

As for a hypothetical bicycle ban in a counterfactual universe, I find the premise too uninteresting to form an opinion about.

I'm far more interested in this world; and don't much care for vacuous syllogisms like 'killing is bad; X kills; therefore X is bad', when there's more to be gleaned from measurement, comparison and statistics. For example, off the top of my head:

- How many are killed by cars compared to bicycles (say, per person-km)?

- How likely is a car crash to kill someone compare to a bicycle crash?

- What is the impact on life-expectancy from driving versus cycling (e.g. sedentary activity versus exercise)?

- How does the throughput of bicycles compare to that of cars?

- How does the infrastructure cost of bicycles compare to that of cars?

- How does the environmental impact of bicycles compare to that of cars?

- etc.

I find these to be far more interesting questions than trivial binaries like 'do cars kill?' (yes; so what?), or 'do bicycles kill?' (yes; so what?).

Similarly, the statistics above can inform a whole spectrum of decisions and interventions that can be made; again, off the top of my head:

- The setting of speed limits

- The setting of road-worthiness criteria

- The setting of test and license requirements

- The layout and features of infrastructure (sight-lines, speed bumps, roundabouts, pedestrian crossings, traffic lights and their sequencing, etc.)

- The classification and permitted uses of roads (e.g. one-way systems, bus lanes, segregated or integrated cycle lanes, etc.)

- etc.

Again, these are seem far more interesting than strawman cliches like "should we ban X?" (which, as far as I can see, you're the one bringing up? I certainly never mentioned it)

But these have a common cause. Cars.

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