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Comment by bogantech | Hacker News Reader

And only one of them was a person being burnt to death

This is true unfortunately.

https://apnews.com/article/new-york-subway-woman-fire-c946bb...

If there is a “bright” side it’s that they caught the guy almost immediately because of cameras. It will take some time, but my hope is that eventually criminals will understand that cameras now make escaping from a crime impossible.

Solve rate goes up -> crime rate goes down -> solve rate goes up even more.

I'm not sure someone intent on burning a person to death in public is going to be very deterred by the knowledge that cameras are recording their acts.

In fact they may encourage him.

I don't have stats, but I strongly suspect the set of NYC people aiming to burn others to death in public (and ruin their own lives in the process) is quite small. The presence of cameras is almost certainly a net positive for reducing crime

Yes, and the presence of cameras would presumably mean that if the parent commenter's prediction comes true, the crime rate would go down even more as crimes of opportunity vanish and crimes from people who are disturbed enough to do things like that are still quite rare.

> eventually criminals will understand that cameras now make escaping from a crime impossible.

In NYC most of the time the cameras are such low resolution that when they post a photo of someone wanted for a crime it's impossible to make them out at all.

Hm I wonder if that had anything to do with the subway itself?

Is it possible that a crazy person could burn someone alive in any location?

Generally the NYC subway puts you into closer contact with crazy people than you would get normally. It’s like the bus here in Seattle and Link train, a lot of people don’t ride them because they don’t feel safe with all crazy people riding them…only a few people get killed by these people a year but it still discourages ridership. (Note that neither Seattle nor NYC are known for homicide, so murders like these are really notable)

And yet the subway is safer in NYC than any other mode of travel. So it turns out that everyone's fear of each other is not only stupid, but actively harmful

and, almost more importantly, NYC could not exist as it does without public transit. It would simply not function. The alternative to NYC having mass transit is not "everyone gets to drive to Manhattan in their cars."

Yes, but still a bit less crazies murdering people will always be nice and appreciated. Mobile homeless sheltering isn’t sustainable if you want other people to use transit.

We don't just have a bit less crazies when you compare with the 70s, 80s, or even the 90s. We flattened crime.

Oh for sure! But it only takes a 2 or 3 homicides/year on public transit to dissuade riders.

we have more crazies than singapore MRT, so that shows that crime could be lower with more aggressive enforcement

This is a common form of Gaslighting. The issue is clearly less about the rate than it is the agency. However true, when e.g. driving we feel a degree of agency, i.e. "If I drive defensively and pay attention my chances of an accident are small". Being in an enclosed space with somebody more physically powerful than you leaves you with very little (if any) ability to do anything about the situations that arise.

Sure but that sense of agency can also give you a false sense of security. It’s impossible to drive perfectly when you are for example tired, and it’s impossible to not be tired sometimes, if driving is your main form of transportation and you’re driving back from parties and events and your day job. You can also be defensive on the subway by avoiding cars with crazy people.

The issue is not about the agency. It's absolutely about the rate. More death = more problems for our entire society. I mean, you say "it's not about the rate," but how about you tell that to my friend who's husband was killed by a bad driver while he was just minding his business riding his bike? How about you tell that to their two kids?

We've defended ourselves with our own two hands for millennia and done just fine. Meanwhile how the hell are you gonna defend yourself when someone veers into your lane at the last second and insta-ganks you with a head on crash?

I'm sorry your friend went through that. I've gone through that as well (a sibling). However distraught we are it doesn't change our perceptions, actual and not, about driving and our agency in it. And it ignores that for most of us, driving is also more pleasant and more convenient. In Austin I took the train to work daily for three years. It was awesome. But it was slower and more expensive than driving, despite the train stops being a 5 minute walk from my home and office. It would be even less convenient for others. Also I had to go back home once because I sat in someone's pee. It was busy enough that I never felt unsafe, but when I take the train in Portland, I have at times been one of the only non homeless people on it. These experiences matter. The (perceived) safety is just another factor on top.

This could happen anywhere. In this case, the train was stationary with its doors open. It was at a terminal and hadn’t started its route yet; the trains sit like that for a while before departing.

Also this terminal station is above-ground and partially open-air, and is located a block from the beach. It’s not like the “trapped deep underground” situation most people seem to be envisioning here.

A crazy person could do the exact same thing in a park or basically any random bench. Not subway specific at all.

This happens in cars very often.

Surely you apply the same rigorous analysis to driving as you did to this, correct?

Talk about a false equivalence

People die horribly - including the specific example of "being burnt to death" - in both methods of getting places, in fairly low numbers per million passenger miles.

So we shouldn’t be concerned about random subway murders cause of car accidents? What?

We should weigh the usefulness and the relative frequencies of dying, not singular anecdotes.

It’s not as if there has never been a murder in a car.

If you’re gonna spend your time solving a problem, are you gonna try to solve:

1) the 10 murders a year using a mode of transportation that sees 2 million daily users

2) the 250 murders a year using a mode of transportation that sees 1 million daily users

???

Cars are dangerous and they cause crime.

Whereas I agree with the general thrust of your point, I am not sure cars cause crime. Perhaps their drivers do; perhaps the cars are accessories. But the cars are not causing the crime.

If the mode of travel inherently results in a high rate of death and injury, then what’s the difference?

We call it a crime if someone does it to another person, but it’s just an accident if cars keep doing it over and over again?

The justice system does not work on cars, no matter how guilty you allege they are. People, on the other hand...

There's almost certainly a case like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U... ("United States v. $124,700 in U.S. Currency") and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Article_Consi... ("United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls") for a car.

edit: Ah, here we go. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_1958_Plymouth_Sedan_v._Pen...

Or even cats in cars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Fifteen_Impoun...

More seriously, though, I'd very much like to see civil liability for the car manufacturers for deliberately making cars bigger and more dangerous for pedestrians over the last few decades. (https://www.npr.org/2024/12/10/nx-s1-5222277/taller-vehicles...)

> It's the latest study to find that taller vehicles are more dangerous for pedestrians. The majority of vehicles sold in the U.S. are now SUVs and light trucks, which can have front ends that are often 40 inches or taller. Safety advocates say that's one reason why pedestrian fatalities are up more than 75% since reaching their lowest point in 2009.

The justice system is entirely our own creation and we have arbitrarily decided who and what is to blame when driving causes the significant amount of violence that it causes every day. If we didn’t place the blame on the XYZ for XYZ reasons, or if we didn’t have no-fault accidents, then driving would be functionally and practically illegal. So we make up methods of keeping it legal to the level that we’ve deemed necessary or desirable. Does it matter whether a person chops up another person vs a car decapitates another person? Functionally no. The person is still dead, their family is still grieving, and their contributions to their community are still gone. But we’ve decided that one of those is a crime while the other is an “accident.” Coincidentally, a group of highly influential and rich car manufacturers have also lobbied trillions of dollars to “encourage” that decision.

I agree that "accident" is an unfortunate term. However, these cars are not self driving. The person is at fault.

People are murdered by road rage-ing drivers relatively frequently. They rarely make national news though.

https://everytownresearch.org/road-rage-shootings-remain-ala...

(the link only counts shootings; there are surely more intentional homicides-by- and homicides-while driving)

It was murder, wasn’t it?

Murders happen on and off the subway. Some in cars! Some using cars! Most are horrible. Plenty include fire.

More people take the subway each day than total residents of some entire states. No one says “avoid Wyoming” over one murder, but it only has 500k people. The subway has millions.

I can think of way better reasons to avoid Wyoming.

But...but..but... J hole!

There's plenty of people that die because of cost cutting/saving a buck with vehicles/roads. Just those intentional... sorry, I mean, acceptable deaths are just fine with society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Murders_by_motor_vehi...

That seems to have been going around for, oh, the past 47 minutes or so.

> And only one of them was a person being burnt to death

Flying is getting safer and safer… only one recent crash at Ronald Regain airport (KDCA).

Are you sure it wasn't a strawman?

Safer than driving, you say?

I'm pretty sure one of the properties of cars is that they can catch on fire (due to all that gasoline, which is famously flammable), so I don't think you should start driving if you want to avoid burning to death

Cars are mostly dangerous to other people, less so to the people inside of them. Especially at inner-city speeds.

(Well, at least when you like at direct injury. People inside the cars might have long running health effects from insufficient exercise.)

Even as a car occupant, you’re still significantly likelier to die in a crash than you are riding the subway. In NYC — but also basically anywhere else, at any time of day.

Chance of being in a car accident on the train is zero.

Chance of being the victim of a crime is low but not zero.

This person enjoys discussing ML, according to their post history.

Either they are stupid, actually talking out their butt and should be no where near a mathematical discussion or they are purposely using their ethical statistics class to be disingenuous and their "conclusions" should be thrown out.

Being on a subway, regardless of the parent poster's sarcastic point about "only" one person being burned to death, is far safer than driving.

This very simple conclusion does not require an "ethical" statistics class, and you are being disingenuous and rude in your post. Have you considered reading HN's posting guidelines?

In NYC there are 250 traffic fatalities per year with 1 million daily drivers

There are 10 murders in the subway per year with 2 million daily riders

The cars are WAY more dangerous and it’s not even funny. Plus cars cause 50,000 injuries per year. The amount of money we waste on cars is insane.

Yes, i know that the subway is way safer than driving. The post i was responding to, however, does not.

And only one of them was a person being sparta-kicked onto the tracks

And only one of them was a young woman having her face randomly shoved into the side of an arriving train rendering her a quadriplegic.

And just a week ago 70 people died in a fireball that ended up with their bodies at the bottom of the Potomac.

Terrible things happen, statistically they aren't likely to happen to you. With crime, it's less likely to happen in a crowd.

A scenario that has never occurred a) outside the subway or b) outside NYC, yes?

There's people burned to death all over the US. Most of them were murdered by negligent road engineers.

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