"Traffic Violence": The Grifters Go After Cars | Hacker News Reader

"Traffic Violence": The Grifters Go After Cars

albertcory50.substack.com

14 pointsAlbertCory17 comments

Not a comment on the term being discussed but i do have a problem with the charts used in the article: “vehicle deaths per million residents …” and “US death rate from motor vehicles per hundred million miles traveled”. Both graphs show a declining trend. But of course that’s how an unscrupulous writer could hide rising data, by charting against an even faster trend and not just showing data in the raw. i don’t know if that was a deliberate ploy here but it did annoy me that i had to go and find out whether deaths by cars are actually increasing or not. So i googled and discovered:

“Drivers Hit and Killed More Than 7,500 Pedestrians Last Year, Most Since 1981, New Projection Shows” [1]

And by that point i was just as bothered by the questionable use of data as i was by the questionable use of language.

[1] https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/Pedestrian...

> Some street safety advocates have adopted the term "traffic violence"

As the author found, the term most people use is "crash" instead of "accident".

This change started decades ago. I think the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration made the change in the 1990s.

Part of the point of Vision Zero and similar projects is to point out the importance of good road planning and design. If there is a crash between two cars you shouldn't place the blame on one party and/or the other, but also on the people who designed a roadway and driver education system.

If a driver crashes a car into a pedestrian walking along the side of the road because there is no sidewalk, the increased risk of the crash is entirely predictable. Calling it an "accident" absolves the road designers of any responsibility.

This holds even if the driver of a car ends up in the ditch - was the road designed to encourage people to drive too fast? Were the wrong safety barriers used?

This analysis has nothing to do with violence.

Maybe I'm the weird one, but it seems odd NOT to consider ~40,000 deaths in the US each year to be "violent" (often they are gruesome blunt force or crushing injuries involving objects traveling 40+ mph coming to a stop nearly instantaneously). Not to mention the debilitating injuries like TBIs or mobility impairments that leave countless many more people harmed for years later if not the rest of their lives.

Nonetheless, the article doesn't provide evidence to back up the claimed "grift" (doing so would require quantifying the efficacy of the activism against the dollars collected), but appears to primarily be an inflamed rant about terminology they don't like.

I don't feel too strongly about the terminology either way, but I'd hope we can agree that the fact that motor vehicles are the #2 cause of death for most ages of children in the US is something we should fix (especially since other countries have shown that it's a solvable problem - e.g. "stop de kindermoord"), regardless of the name we give that problem.

Exactly. This.

About 3000 people died from a terrorist attack in 2001. The response was a rapid and dramatic overhaul of national security. Not to even mention an entire unnecessary war that killed even more people.

40,000 people die from cars every year in just one country, and the response is to carry on like that's just fine.

All I ask is for the resources allocated solving problems to be allocated reasonably proportionally to the size of the problem.

> All I ask is for the resources allocated solving problems to be allocated reasonably proportionally to the size of the problem.

Sure, I can agree to this. However it requires you to admit grandma getting run over by Santa’s Ford F-150 isn’t as pressing of a matter as drug overdoses (~110,000/yr), or obesity (~300,000/yr), let alone smoking (~500,000/yr), and that the amount of money required to reduce car fatalities, particularly in already developed cities, makes it prohibitively difficult of a sell. It’s not as simple as selling smaller cars, it requires vast reworking of road infrastructure and understanding of safety.

According to the CDC these are the leading causes of death in the US.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm

Heart disease is number one. Cancer is 2. Accidents 3. Stroke 5. Four of the top 5 have some link to cars.

How much heart disease, stroke, or obesity, is caused by people driving everywhere instead of walking or biking?

How many deaths from slow ambulance response times? Cars allow suburbs to exist where people live far away from hospitals. People in cities have traffic. If people lived in densely populated places without cars and traffic, faster emergency response times would save many.

How much heart disease and cancer is caused by the air pollution from fossil fuel burning cars? How many deaths are caused by the natural disasters resulting from the climate impact of cars? Even electric cars are polluting the air with their tires, even moreso than fossil fuel cars do.

How much heart disease or strokes are caused by the noise pollution from cars?

How much heart disease or strokes are caused by the stress people experience while they drive and/or sit in traffic?

Cars are a major root cause of a lot of our public health problems. Not only do they violently kill people directly in vast numbers, they don’t get credit for all the deaths they contribute to indirectly.

We should dramatically redesign our transportation infrastructure so that people do not need cars. Reduce car usage to the point where they are only used when absolutely necessary. This will solve not just one, but several public health problems.

You are genuinely unwell, I suggest seeking professional help if you believe cars are the single root cause of problems in the world. 5 of the top 5 are also related to cellphones (obesity is increased by spending all day on technology, RF is possibly carcinogenic according to the IARC, accidents in tech happen daily that kill people, lights can induce stroke, and Big Tech demand WFH positions come into contact with COVID-19 via forced in-office days) and yet I don’t hear you complaining, despite the objective reality that cellphones are related to more death than even cars, and are even the root cause of most “violent” auto accidents.

> You are genuinely unwell

I'm pretty sure that's not helpful.

Lots of resources are allocated to car safety, and have been since the first cars were built. Some deaths are inevitable. Cars are safer than ever. This whole issue is a manufactured crisis. As a society we have considered cars necessary and relatively safe for like a hundred years. You are more likely to die from diabetes or some other chronic illness than a car accident.

As for comparing car accidents to 9/11, you ought to know better. I don't even think it's worth my time to shred that argument.

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