New York City's Subway Is Safer Than Your Car
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I'm not afraid I'll get stabbed but I'm not a fan of some dude staring daggers at my wife and I while he laughs and talks to himself. When I've traveled alone I've seen fights, peeing, groping and all sorts of stuff. Nobody I saw ever got killed but I can't say I miss public transit.
Why is there some 500 ride part thrown in? Why is it not just simply comparing "X people in NYC / Y people die yearly on subway" with ""X people in NYC / Y people die yearly in traffic"?
They also don't link to their sources for subway crime. They do link to a MTA document, but that document only shows subway crime rates for 6 months out of the year, not the whole year.
Also the comparison they do make at the end is apples to oranges; the issue isn't purely about death rate, but there's the other categories of series crime on the subway, like assault/rape/etc., that aren't really factored into the final claim. They moved the goalposts and deftly switched from a discussion about "safety" to a discussion about "deaths".
Exactly. By the time my co drivers start staring me down, turning up their boombox, or worse their cellphones, leaving graffiti, food waste, vomit, used needles, and feces in my car, this apples-to-oranges comparison will make sense.
What they really want to compare is per equivalent trip in the city (same mileage, same path, same time) but that's a bit impossible to do directly. Showing the number for going to work and back every day for a year is 1/10th that of traffic deaths in NYC as a whole gets the same idea across despite the lack of precise data anyways.
"Passenger vehicles are by far the most dangerous motorized transportation option compared. Over the last 10 years, passenger vehicle death rate per 100,000,000 passenger miles was over 60 times higher than for buses, 20 times higher than for passenger trains, and 1,200 times higher than for scheduled airlines."
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
In 2019 there were 268 public transit fatalities in the entire USA. 36,096 vehicle deaths, 2.7 milion injuries, 6.7 million crashes.
In 2019, there were at least 14,375 total reported assaults on public transit in the US, with 8,309 on rail modes and 6,066 on bus modes. These assaults occurred both in-vehicle (50%) and in-station (49%). Additionally, there were 10,430 injuries and 250 fatalities related to these incidents.
Keep in mind that at least some transit crime is not crime that you avoid by taking a car. A lot of crime incidents happen between people who know each other and the fact that they were on transit was merely where they happened to be.
Something like 2-5% of all trips and 2% of all miles are made by public transportation in the US, so we can normalize our numbers to compare apples-to-apples. Even if we normalize conservatively in favor of automobiles at 2% (take our transit numbers and multiply by 98/2), we are at:
13,132 transit deaths
704,375 assaults
511,070 assault injuries
12,250 assault deaths
This means that after normalization you are still looking at 4x more vehicular injuries than assault injuries and still more deaths for automobiles compared to transit. And really, transit statistics would not scale linearly like this as current ridership skews lower in socioeconomic status than the population as a whole (i.e., if everyone entered the transit system the overall rates of incidents per person would likely decrease).
Let's not forget the health outcome benefits that are proven for transit users. Better cardiovascular health is one of many known benefits of taking transit instead of sitting in the car.
Look, maybe seeing real life sometimes is a lot scarier than experiencing a contained and isolated life behind the wheel, but it is factually statistically safer. And maybe seeing some more real life would be good for people right now in a political environment where individualized motorists are only thinking for themselves and voting for politicians who want to cut social services. You'll believe in universal healthcare and housing pretty quickly if you are taking transit rather than resorting to the motorist's steel shield of blissful ignorance.
So I don't have the stats and maybe you weren't being serious anyway but I think cars are a huge source of actual for real ptsd that people have to deal with.
Per trip you are 4x more likely to be injured in a car crash than be injured in a transit assault incident.
I realize this is all napkin math and could be wrong, but I really want to emphasize just how crazy high the car crash injury and death statistics are. Over 6 million car crashes happen per year. 2 million+ car crash injuries, and close to 40,000 deaths.
Transit assaults and other incidents of the sort really are a rarity in comparison to all the ways driving can injure you. The only thing that your car gives you is the ignorant bliss of believing you are in control and nobody else can affect you.
The last thing to keep in mind is that getting assaulted while on transit doesn't necessarily mean you were a random victim. A lot or imagine possibly most most assaults are happening between people who know each other. In that case, public transit is merely a neutral location for the incident.
And the other last thing to keep in mind is that transit users are healthier with better cardiovascular rates and lower rates of obesity. Every 1% of increased transit use is associated with .2% lower obesity rate. Heart disease kills a whole lot more people than transit assaults.
How many die on public transit? We tend to hear about it when it happens.
You think everyone injured in a car accident caused the accident?