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woodruffw

It resembles something like a public bus or subway.

More realistically, it's smaller cars on slower city streets.

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A bus is an even bigger and heavier vehicle that will obliterate pedestrians, smaller vehicles, and goats.

The distinction is professional drivers and safety standards.

Right: buses, despite their size, kill far fewer pedestrians and passengers. Size is a factor for personal automobiles because individuals lack the training (and restraint) that's key to bus driving. It's hard to see a world in which the US accepts that and increases the restrictions on obtaining a license, however.

> buses, despite their size, kill far fewer pedestrians and passengers.

Is that still true after you adjust for the number of buses on the road vs. the number of cars? If not, then this is like saying driving drunk is less dangerous than driving sober since only 30% of car crash fatalities involve drunk drivers.

Yes because of the driver itself is behaviorally different between the bus and the car. The bus drivers are profesionals who drive no higher than the speed limit, they heed all traffic laws, they generally keep to the right or otherwise drive predictably, and some times they even have dedicated bus lanes. Your average car driver is not all of those things at once, if they were there would be a lot fewer people going 5 or 15 over the speed limit and driving drunk.

Those are a lot of reasons to think it's plausible that it might still be true after the adjustment. Is there actual data that shows it is true, though? Also, I've seen buses break traffic laws before, so don't pretend they never do.

The data does show this, look at figure 1 here at the top of the article:

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/12/19/heres-how-much-safer-...

According to that figure, while transit buses are safer for "Users (passengers and employees in a vehicle)" than passenger cars and light trucks are, they're more dangerous for "Others (e.g., pedestrians and passengers in other vehicles)". And isn't that exactly the same thing going on with big vs. small cars? Buses are bigger than cars and SUVs, so they're safer for their own occupants at the expense of everyone else. (Note that the figure measures fatalities per passenger-mile, not per mile, so the advantage that fewer buses would be needed than cars to move the same number of people has already been factored in.)

The USA has very pedestrian hostile laws/infrastructure and buses definitionally stop and start where there are a lot of pedestrians (and many of them will be crossing the road in a rush because they saw a bus).

That data could be representitive of buses being big and heavy or it could be representitive of them sharing space with pedestrians.

Compare the same dataset for busses on a grade separated RBT with well paid/trained drivers and platform doors and you get a very different story.

> or it could be representitive of them sharing space with pedestrians.

But there's nowhere that buses share space with pedestrians and cars don't, so that can't account for why buses are more dangerous than cars.

Unlike large personal vehicles, modern buses/coaches are also designed with sight-lines that makes it easy to see pedestrians.

I'm highly disappointed that electric vehicles haven't taken advantage of the "no need for a engine in the front" and make vehicles that are different. Many trucks have the driver in FRONT of the front wheels, but very few passenger vehicles do that, even though without an engine there's really no reason not to.

Probably, high-speed trains that carry you from one slow car into another.

Not even pedestrians die at 30kmph.

Edit: you are right it's about 3% die at 30kpmh, vs ~35% at 50kpmh. My bad. Still lower speeds dramatically improve the safety of cars.

https://nacto.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/2011PedestrianR...

"Die" is a bad target. I don't want to be a quadriplegic if I don't have to be, and a car going 30 MPH (realistically 40, if the limit is 30) on a residential street is more than capable of doing that to me.

They absolutely can. People can and do die from falling over and hitting their head. A 30km/h impact is not trivial, it can be expected to break bones and cause internal bleeding that can be deadly. An impact to the spine or head can be very easily be life changing.

Also, residential roads in the US are usually 40km/h

I personally know someone who was hit at about 10-15hm/h and they were hospitalized and broke their spine.

My college girlfriend was hit by a car right next to me going those speeds during a turn. It seems slow, but meat on steel is pretty brutal at any travel speed. It was a four or five month recovery. Remember that the velocity of the vehicle is only a part of the picture — mass is the damage dealer here.

Mass is what contributes to inertia which allows the speed to be carried for longer... The acceleration, which is the difference in speeds, is the real damage dealer.

People regularly die by hitting their head on a hard surface when falling from a standstill.

kpmh ?= kilometers per millihour?

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