Hacker News Reader

Comment by A_D_E_P_T | Hacker News Reader

Travel is still risky. Automobile accidents are, by a substantial margin, the leading cause of death in young people.

It may have been somewhat more risky back then -- in terms of fatalities per mile traveled, if not fatalities per hour traveled -- but I don't think that's perfectly clear. A fall from a horse, which has happened to me more than once, is a lot less injurious than an automobile accident. It would be interesting to see a comparison table.

Besides, the risks didn't stop every enterprising English and Protestant German youth from embarking upon the Grand Tour: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour

View on HN

I don't have a dog in this fight, honest! /s

but I got curious, so as a fun math exercise: go crazy!

             HORSES:

https://horsesonly.com/horse-riding-accidents/

> According to the research (2002) on horseback riding danger statistics, the rate of hospital admissions for equestrians is 11.8/1000 riders or, assuming one hour per day riding on average, 0.49/1000 hours of riding. (1)

> 7. 81% of equestrians get injured at some point in their riding career.

         CARS:

https://www.valuepenguin.com/car-accident-statistics#injurie...

we have some numbers that don't quite compare:

>In 2020, Americans had a 1 in 63 chance of getting in a car accident.

> At least one driver or passenger is injured in 43% of car crashes. There were 2,282,015 injuries reported in 2020 — that's 6,252 per day, or four per minute.

So cars are roughly 10 times safer than riding horses? And that's without accounting for the difference in distance travelled. The number of injuries for the car are staggeringly high because of how common they are. I bet if we enacted policies that made owning a horse as likely as owning a car, we would also find that every minutes a several horse riders get injured.

I would also make a guess that cars operated at the same speed (with current safety equipment) that cars would be closer to 100 times safer than horses. The entire velocity squared multiples quickly.

I think so too. Motorcycles are the closest thing we have to a very fast horse and according to [1] they are 35 times more likely to result in a fatal crash than a car.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorcycle_safety

It's complicated the other way because we design our environment to be safe for cars; horses on the other hand tend to go everywhere, including jumping over stuff.

> So cars are roughly 10 times safer than riding horses?

Well, all of that refers to injury -- which may be serious, but may also be very mild. A sprained ankle is an injury. Horseback riding is a lot like a contact sport; it's very easy to pick up musculoskeletal injuries from getting pulled or thrown (or kicked, which has also happened to me once,) but only a very small proportion of those lead to serious and lasting disability.

If we look solely at fatalities, a different picture might emerge. Automobile injuries are, I surmise, more likely to be very serious or fatal. And, of course, motorcycles are in a different plane of existence entirely.

The problem with horses is that you tend to fall on your back from a moderate height, which makes them very good at causing paralysis.

Also, even the sketchiest car is far more predictable than a cranky or barn sour horse.

I had a brake failure once (which did not caused damage due to luck and reaction). It was a old car, but it was checked before.

That’s pretty hard to do. Out of curiosity - how old, and how did the brakes fail?

20 years old and the break strings(?) just snapped. I suppose the mechanic did a sloppy job before (never went there again).

It was flat where it happened, but we have mamy quite steep roads here as well. So could have ended badly. (So it was just a allmost crash)

By contrast, the sketchiest horse will avoid collisions with other horses.

For the record, the sketchiest horse will suddenly kick out hard at the head height of a 12 year old if they approach it 'wrong' (that's a dice roll).

Horses are more dangerous than you might credit them to be.

Granted. The claim was only about other-horse collisions.

Yes and no. If my 70 year old mother is thrown from a horse, she’s in real trouble, probably worse than most accidents in modern cars.

the denominator is clearly the big question. Is it "miles traveled" or "time spent doing it"?

or in practical terms: "what's the likelihood you'll be injured if you do it every day"?

Much, much higher for the horse. Horses are far less predictable, temperamental, harder to manage and keep healthy, etc.

And more than powerful enough to kick someone in the head and end them in an instant if they really wanted to.

although they will avoid colliding with other horses, AFAIK

Cars will also avoid eating random things and pooping in public, thankfully!

I see a YouTube video here! $$$$$$

We can also look at which is the most dangerous to pedestrians (probably the car by a wide margin), or even which is the most dangerous when not ridden/in use. For that last point I would expect the horse to be the most dangerous, while you have the occasional death due to being crushed by a car I bet stable accidents are more frequent.

Good point on pedestrians. Cars can roll down hills, although that's probably infrequent. They can also catch fire.

I'm not even horse-experienced, so my knowledge is mainly from TV.

A horse can also injure you when you're not riding it. A friend of mine was badly hurt by her horse when she tried to lead it into a trailer and it went nuts. Similar types of incidents can potentially happen with cars, but anecdotally seem quite rare. There probably aren't any good statistics on this, though.

I'm sure the modern equestrian statistics aren't comparable, as the people putting the most hours in tend to be doing sports, rather than daily work as in the past.

Modern horses are dramatically larger than what was available in the past, which means some injuries have more force involved.

Looking at pre-car city street scenes, not many people rode horses. Most horses pulled carts and coaches. Of course, a shying horse attached to one of those can still kill people.

Trains: 5 railway passengers killed in the EU in 2021, and around 20 seriously injured. 261 billion passenger-km travelled. 0.02 deaths per billion km.

Cars: the best EU country has 3.3 per billion-km, the worst 9.8.

(Not included: deaths from people not travelling, like trespassers on the railway, maintenance staff.)

A fall from a horse, with mild injury, was far more serious though.

No antibiotics, and geneally no operating for internal body cavity injuries.

One might argue that a fall from a horse in the 17th century is more injurious than an automobile accident in the 21st

we don't have much data for then, but we do have it for now. See my other comment.

s/enterprising/independently wealthy/

I’m pretty sure the opioid epidemic is the leading cause of death in the US. Enormous numbers of Americans are dying from fentanyl and other poisons, but the media doesn’t like to cover it and the Government doesn’t like to talk about it.

Among young people it is currently guns, until recently was cars, and drugs is about half of either, but rising. Drugs has recently risen to be about the same as cancer.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2201761#:~:text=T....

A lot has changed since 2016.

"Poisoning was the leading cause of preventable death for all ages, combined, for the ninth consecutive year and was the leading cause of preventable death for every age from 22 to 68. This is largely due to the opioid epidemic affecting millions of people in the United States."

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/deaths-by-demograph...

The data I used was up to 2020 (see the chart) and your link says that for people under 22 the leading cause was vehicle accidents in 2021.

But your point is made: drug poisonings are now the scourge of adults in the main years of life.

I find it curious that the age cut off for that study was under 20 years of age.

Why not 18 or under? That's what we've typically used as the cutoff between childhood and adulthood.

I think I know why.

They are comparing with a paper from four years earlier that used that age range.

If your implication of some skulduggery is about guns, the previous paper showed vehicle accidents as the leading cause.

The US has significantly higher rate of car fatalities than peer nations, which you're correct in this case shadows its (far more significantly higher than peer nations) rate of gun deaths.

The earlier paper they cite has the same authors.

The point stands, why are they using 20 years old as a cut off for adulthood, when generally it’s 18 and below?

And interesting she published a paper in 2010 that had a cutoff of 18.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20370746/

I can tell you why - the data looks significantly different and tells a different story than the authors want to tell.

If understand you correctly, you are unhappy to see attention drawn to the number of gun related deaths among young people.

Why hint rather than say what you mean?

No, you don't understand correctly.

I'm unhappy with a doctor playing games with statistics by manipulating the data, under the guise of actual science, in order to advance a political agenda.

Everyone should be unhappy with that.

But interesting you didn't comment on the other statements in my reply.

The leading cause of death among young people is not guns. It's not even firearm-related injury, which is what your link talks about. The thing at the link (it's not a study) you point to has gotten a lot of press. It is deliberately deceptive.

It uses an age range of 1-19, excluding children 0-1 years old and including adults who are in their 18th and 19th years. So sure, when you do this bullshit maybe you can produce the answer your audience wants to see / which will play well in the press / which will lead to clicks. But it's not honest. The honest statistic for the U.S. is 0-18(exclusive) years old, and when you do the honest thing you see that death by firearm-related injury is not the leading cause of death for minors in the U.S.

The deliberately deceptive statistic is driven by including as many 15-35 year old males as possible. This is the age range when males in gangs are extra killy.

I have no sense of its general coverage in the zeitgeist, but this month the White House announced Overdose Awareness Week "to focus the nation’s attention on the devastation caused by illicit fentanyl and other drugs" and also announced funding for a variety of things to attempt addressing it. Their recap links to media coverage in a variety of sources.

Of course, people and front pages quickly tire of 'boring' things like that and unfortunately get more excited about other events prone to popping up in a large country.

Over all age groups? Definitely not, cardiovascular diseases and cancer get ~everybody in the end: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-number-of-deaths-b...

You're right for 15-49 year olds, where drug overdoses only recently (around 2015) overtook cancer: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/causes-of-death-in-15-49-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com