You're being unnecessarily judgemental.
The things you do for fun almost certainly has an externality as well.
I feel that, these days, it isalmost fashionable to be anticar to a ludicrous degree.
The things you do for fun almost certainly has an externality as well.
I feel that, these days, it isalmost fashionable to be anticar to a ludicrous degree.
About 45k people died in car accidents in the US in 2022, which if treated as it’s own category outside of accidents would be just outside the top 10 in causes of death. 2x more death than firearms.
Lots of things have externalities, very few things have as severe externalities as cars.
Said differently, go to a sporting event of 30k people. Statistically, five of them will die in a car accident this year (45k/300mn =0.015% or about 1 in 6500).
Edit: I guess it’s not fashionable to cite statistics on here. I get it, the drivers won the debate a long time ago, but at least articulate why your disagreement with words.
> Lots of things have externalities, very few things have as severe externalities as cars.
> Said differently, go to a sporting event of 30k people. Statistically, five of them will die in a car accident this year (45k/300mn =0.015% or about 1 in 6500).
> Edit: I guess it’s not fashionable to cite statistics on here. I get it, the drivers won the debate a long time ago, but at least articulate why your disagreement with words.
You're being downvoted because you are attempting to mislead with statistics.
The numbers for 2017 (prior to the pandemic, which skews the numbers) are from https://www.healthline.com/health/leading-causes-of-death#he.... They don't separate out vehicle accidents, so I'll use your 45k number.
1. The leading cause of deaths is heart disease, more common amongst people who smoke (very few) and obese people (very many) = 635k people, or about 14x more people die due to heart disease than motor vehicle accidents.
2. Accidental deaths = 161k. IOW, you're 3.5x more likely to die from a non-vehicle accident than from a vehicle accident.
You know which type of deaths match the numbers for auto accidents? Suicides!
All-in-all, that 45k number you give is almost statistical noise: vehicles account for a mere 1.8% of deaths in the US.
How?[0]
Your implication is that 100% of deaths are preventable and the 2% of those deaths that are car accidents are therefore unimportant? It's inherently misleading to look at deaths as a % vs. absolute figures (since we all die eventually).
People have to die from disease, it's the human condition. People do not have to die in car accidents (or suicides, we should prevent those too, but that's not really a hobby/activity).
The other way in which equating heart disease death with car accident death (or suicide death!) is extremely misleading is that the heart disease victim age chart does not look like this [1] even remotely. People lose a lot of years of life to car crashes.
[0]https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/traffic-crash-death-est....
[1] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit...
Of course, copying these countries will take time, especially because half the problem is the terrible drivers education and lax enforcement which precludes quite a few measures.
Things that could be done right now are:
* designing roads to calm traffic (bends and such): highly effective at reducing pedestrian/cyclist accidents
* building proper separated bike paths
* mandatory inspections in all states. a non-negligible % of accidents are caused by defective vehicles
* mandating and actually enforcing minimum following distance on highways
* banning modifications like steel plate grills (basically a human-crushing ram)
* scrapping the entire tax and regulation scheme that lead to the size wars in trucks and SUVs
Then there are things like replacing more STOP signs with YIELD, roundabouts, giving bike paths green lights together with turning traffic (requires drivers to look in their blindspot and yield) and lane discipline. Those broadly reduce frustration and fatigue which helps people stay calm.
We live in an interesting time where it's an instinct to say 'Sure 45k people die each year from this, but how does that benchmark?'
Even if Germany had a 40x higher/lower rate than the US, why does it matter when people are still needlessly dying?
That leads me to the heart of your comment. Sure you could institute some kind of dystopian dictatorship that makes sure nobody dies of the causes we deem preventable now. But it would be a cure that kills the patient (free society).
So, there are always trade offs. What I was saying is that looking at other countries and what they've done you can see the trade offs in advance and decide if they're worth it.
>So, there are always trade offs. What I was saying is that looking at other countries and what they've done you can see the trade offs in advance and decide if they're worth it.
I'm struggling to follow your point here. Your argument is any country should only try things other countries have already tried?
Doesn't that get us into a loop of sorts? How did those countries get to the better/worse point without doing things on their own?
The US death rate is 1.04% per year. So in that sporting event example, statistically 313 of them will die within a year's time.
Also if the sporting event was today then only around 2.5 people would die in a car accident "this year" as currently we are already in July ;)
Anyway that is my bunch of nonsense statistics :)
Yeah but only some of those deaths are randomly distributed across the population and not correlated with age. Car accidents being a major example of that (unless there's a bunch of 70+ year olds at Yankees games that I'm not seeing).
I'm willing to hand-wave over a lot of this stuff as otherwise it gets way too overcome with pedantry which likely doesn't matter...