And it's not a tiny risk of being injured by a car. About 2.5 million injuries a year in the US are caused by automobiles.
Just look at this chart and tell me how massively unsafe riding the train is.
https://www.bts.gov/content/injured-persons-transportation-m...
Drunk driving is a crime. It hurts other people more than it hurts the drunks. It has absolutely no bearing on how the victim carried themself. You can just be driving normally and completely following the law and a drunk t-bones you at 70mph through a red light.
You can be driving normally and just happen to draw the ire of a road rager and have them shoot you or commit other forms of violence against you. Happens more often than you think.
A person on the train is unlikely to have a weapon on them. Every other person on the road is piloting a giant death machine capable of hurting a lot of people in a moment's notice even if by accident.
People act like they're all safe in a car but once again it's the thing most likely to cause you serious injury in your life outside of your diet.
You're more likely to be the victim of a crime that will seriously hurt, maim, or kill you driving a car than riding the train.
Hey, maybe I reduce the odds of getting pickpocketed today by massively increasing the odds of getting killed by a drunk driver. Seems like a excellent trade!
This was his point. He was talking about the perception people have.
Source: someone who takes transit almost daily and has seen a LOT, and has received death threats on the bus twice in one year.
I find the US really weird sometimes.
Yes, they do. I was specifically thinking of replies like this when I said the risk is "almost completely up to them and how they conduct themselves."
>I've had friends get put in the hospital because of someone else's road rage.
And what role did they play in developing that situation? I'm serious. The frequency of road range in which the victim did not take action or willful inaction through ignorance or malice is vanishingly, vanishingly, tiny. While I am sympathetic to people who do truly mean well but are simply ignorant the degree to which road rage is a meeting between those disposed to violence and those disposed to entitlement and "bad but within the rules" behavior I consider it a generally self solving problem.
It's kind of like my elderly and senile mother who's been in a couple accidents that aren't technically "her fault" but she most certainly precipitated by failing to drive responsibly even though she doesn't see why it might not be ideal of her to panic stop rather than miss her exist on a major highway in a major city.
Driving the speed limit and stopping at a stop sign was one of these instances. I watched the dash cam of that.
Another instance I saw was someone flying up a shoulder trying to get around a big traffic jam. After three or four cars denied him merging in, he took out a gun and started shooting at cars.
And you're still just going to ignore all the victims of people not paying attention, of people tailgating, of drunk drivers, of people driving recklessly.
I think, even considering this, you must be a few orders of magnitude more likely to be a victim in a car than on transit.