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FWIW: a single car crash killing 21 people would still be newsworthy in America. And I think if you math it out with something per capita equivalent, this would actually be an exceptionally bad day/incident for the US.

But of course you're not wrong, trains are vastly safer than private cars. If anyone uses this as evidence against having a proper rail system, they're ignorant.

But - until someone does that, there's no reason to make this about the US or cars vs. trains. It's borderline offensive to reflexively politicize this before anyone else had; it almost feels like you're intentionally trying to sow conflict, here.

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~107 people die per day from car accidents in the USA [0].

0. Per 2024 stats from the NHTSA (https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/nhtsa-estimates-39345-t...)

Right, so, mathing it out, the US has a population of around 340 million but Spain has a population of around 49 million. 340/49 is roughly 7, so the per capita equivalent in the US would be a single incident killing 21*7=147 people. So that'd be one incident killing 1.5x the average number of people usually killed across the rest of the country combined.

Like I said, a pretty bad day.

A completely unremarkable day, more like it. Given stochasticity there's bound to be at least a dozen days per year with 50% more than the average, especially since car deaths depend a lot on weekday, holidays, weather and so on - much moreso than train deaths. No one would look up from it, wouldn't make the news.

You're assuming it was the only incident in America that day, rather than an exceptional outlier stacked on top of the usual day in America.

Yes, a single car crash killing 150 people would make the news. It would be among the worst, if not the single worst, car accident of all time [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-vehicle_collision

> And I think if you math it out with something per capita equivalent, this would actually be an exceptionally bad day/incident for the US.

This is now how I interpreted "bad day", think it would be clearer to remove "day" if that's what you meant. Of course you're right in that it would be awful as a car accident, they simply don't happen that many as a time. Which is why our monkey brain's lack of emotional response to "many small cuts" vs "one big cut" incorrectly causes the belief that cars and e.g. coal/gas are much safer than they are.

> "many small cuts" vs "one big cut" incorrectly causes the belief that cars and e.g. coal/gas are much safer than they are

Did anyone say that? This conversation was mostly about newsworthiness.

https://international-railway-safety-council.com/safety-stat...

In Europe, trains are 28 times safer than cars (fatalities per passenger-km).

I was born in the mid-late 80's, and I remember the 90's being an era where everyone knew in the remotest tiny village about youngsters dying in-road (usually because of being drunk). Dark ages.

You would find car related fatalities for granted every Summer in the news.

The discourse here is more of a criticism of Puentes, who is a very controversial minister overseeing this.

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