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Comment by paledot | Hacker News Reader

Comparing the safety of x to driving should be an official fallacy on par with Godwin's Law at this point (which in turn is no longer as firm as it once was). Driving is by far the most dangerous activity that most of us undertake on a regular basis, and is the leading cause of death in Canada among people aged 5-25, and remains in the top three until age 40 (after self-harm and drug use).[1] Switching your commute from a car to a bike or public transit will extend your lifespan, not because it's healthier, but because you're less likely to be killed by another car.

1: https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/mortality-and-globa...

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I’m pretty skeptical that switching a car commute to a bike commute increases safety.

Anecdotally I have seen a lot more bad bike accidents than car accidents, despite the number of bikes being much, much lower. This makes sense, since you are much more exposed when on a bicycle and while you are moving slower the cars aren’t.

If the stats do say this (I assume you have indeed read that somewhere), I suspect there is some large selection bias at play. Like, people with a safe bike route available are more likely to bike, which skews the numbers towards safe even though I imagine switching any random car commute to biking on the road would make it more dangerous on average.

Public transit of course makes sense, and I do wish biking in urban areas was safer since I don’t do it now because it’s dangerous and it would be great to be able to do it safely.

I think the proper way to compare bike and car fatalities is to compare deaths per mile traveled or, as this article does in a charming way, deaths per hour.

https://chessintheair.com/the-risk-of-dying-doing-what-we-lo...

No definitely not, when we are talking about “Switching your commute from a car to a bike or public transit will extend your lifespan”.

If bike vs car choice is confounded by route safety, deaths per distance or time does not tell you anything useful about whether switching will make you safer.

The issue with that table is that it's comparing apples to oranges. It compares general travel to the most dangerous part of a dangerous activity, like the final push for the summit of mount Everest. It compares activities that take a few minutes and are done for fun to activities that take hours every day and people to do get to work. It's not like I'm going to hang-glide to work.

It's of cause worth noting in comparing cars to bicycles that cars are the number one cause of bicyclist and pedestrian fatalities, so fewer cars will lead to fever cyclist dying.

Railways and busses are a lot closer to airplanes in statistics then cars https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics... so going car less is probably the single biggest improvement we can make to transportation safety.

What makes it a fallacy? Statistically speaking, being ok with driving but being scared of going on an airplane, any airplane, makes absolutely no sense

But it makes perfect sense, because in many car fatalities there were numerous things the dead person could have done better like not drink, brake sooner, not speed, etc that would have spared them.

In almost all plane fatalities the only dead people who had a chance of doing something better were the pilots. The passengers were doomed from the start.

Even good drivers die in cars

Sure, but you can tell yourself that it won't happen to you, and you might be somewhat right, even.

The fallacy is contending that something is safe by comparing it favourably to an extremely unsafe activity. The takeaway of "you are more likely to die on the drive to the airport" should be "cars are dangerous" not "planes are safe". Planes are ~safe (save evidently for those made by Boeing post-2000), but why not say that the annual global death toll due to plane crashes (~500/yr) is comparable to that of hippopotamuses? Automobiles kill 1.2 million people per year.

Statistically speaking, being comfortable with driving makes no sense.

I mean that kind of makes it the opposite of a fallacy.

I guess I don't see the comparison the same way you do.

You frame it as comparing something dangerous to something safe.

I see it as something you would be willing to do without fear, to something even safer than that.

I don't disagree that driving is dangerous, but most people are willing to accept that danger.

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