I'm no angel but I have gotten more diligent... I'm just reacting to "the degree". The goal has to be zero degrees of impairment when a moment of inattention can kill.
Also, my son was just hit by a driver while he was on a bike and in the bike lane. They claimed not to see him. He's fine thankfully but it's really scary to watch him ride off.
No driving if you haven't been getting proper sleep; no driving if jet lagged. No driving if your attention is impaired by grief, stress, or impatience. Or if your annual physical reveals a risk. Or if you've ever had psychological complaints.
We should absolutely make transportation safer, but it's a continuum of tradeoffs.
Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of preventable death for people aged 5–22, and the second most common cause for ages 23–67.
But yes, what you say is the logical consequence (except I'm not kidding about grief and impatience).
My point really is that if we want our kids not to get horribly injured or killed, we can't just focus on "other people" making bad decisions like driving drunk. We have to acknowledge that we've collectively built a system that requires people to put each other in danger with cars, and we have to think about how to change that. Cars bring a lot of benefits like autonomy and decentralization, how do we keep that but kill fewer people?
'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
This is a solved problem: look at the current state-of-the-art road design documents from the Netherlands. Apply. Problem solved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
(Wikipedia links to itf-oecd.org/ where those numbers come From)
And in particular for the Uber situation, if taking a taxi 10 miles causes 15 miles of taxi-driving, that's less safe than driving 10 miles with a small to medium impairment.
I know this is going to get downvoted by people who cant imagine an alternative but it’s possible all the same.
FYI murder requires intent, otherwise it is just manslaughter. Your indoctrination is showing by your turns of phrase.
There are ways to make it less dangerous, sure. But they're never 100% safe. Which makes them, by definition, inherently dangerous. That's... What those words mean.
Like, really man? If you can't even recognize as dangerous the one activity that famously requires someone specifically trained to save people to be present, then I'm happy to end this conversation right here. It's clearly just a waste of time all around. I just hope there's no one in your life depending on you to judge what's safe and what's not.
And swimming pools are pretty dangerous though? There are around 4,500 drowning deaths per year in the US, so on the order of 10x fewer than due to car accidents, but still quite a lot.
I agree with you that it’s a comically wrong threshold, which is why I offered that series that was progressively more safe but never 100% safe as examples against that line of reasoning.
So yea cars are inherently dangerous.
I’m not sure who you think I’m indoctrinated by but around 3000 people are killed every year in my country by cars.
Meanwhile around 200 people are murdered each year.
I’ll give you one try to guess which one dominates the newspapers and public discourse.
And you tell me something about indoctrination, real funny
Let me guess, the painted line on the road did not in fact prevent the vehicle from crossing into the bike lane? What we as a society consider acceptable cycling infrastructure is pathetic.