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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

Because for air travel we pre filter out the morons who are drunk, untrained, scrolling facebook, etc. Any incident left is overwhelmingly more likely a systems issue. For a road incident, the most likely cause was just one driver was violating one or more rules. The only system failure was not canceling their license beforehand.

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While that is true, "Drivers consistently ignoring rules" is also a systems issue, which can be mitigated through e.g. better road design (narrower roads reduce speeding, for example).

Or “design cities to be less car centric so we can keep the antisocial drivers out of a car”. It's definitely a system issue.

Why jump to cities? Low speed traffic in cities is not the main location of car collisions.

The main issue is highways and rural roads.

    The main issue is highways and rural roads.

Source? I'd wager most accidents happen where the most people are. Cities.

It seems we are talking about different things.

The majority of car collisions happen on urban roads where the majority of cars are.

The majority of fatal collisions occur on rural roads, where vehicles are travelling faster.

I live in the UK.

https://www.simplyquote.co.uk/insights/where-do-most-car-acc...

> I'd wager most accidents happen where the most people are. Cities.

Sure, in absolute numbers. But..

In the US, highest deaths per 100M vehicle miles:

1.79 - Mississippi

1.73 - Arizona

1.72 - South Carolina

And the lowest:

0.56 - Massachusetts

0.70 - Minnesota

0.78 - New Jersey

Or, highest per 100,000 population:

25 - Mississippi

25 - Wyoming

21 - New Mexico

Lowest per 100,000:

4.9 - Massachusetts

5.7 - New York

6.5 - New Jersey

Maybe the average MS driver drives 3-5x as many miles as the average MA driver? I doubt it. Something else happening there.

https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...

Fortunately deaths are only a fraction of the accidents though, and it's not even necessarily the kind of accident that bothers insurance companies the most as long as the driver only kills himself.

“Highways” and “city” aren't incompatible, quite the opposite: most of the traffic on highways is commuting, in urban areas.

.... in the USA.

I live in the UK where highways majority used for inter city transport.

I can't tell about the UK, but it's definitely true as well in France and Germany.

And a quick look at map of London and Birmingham suggests that it may very well be the case in the UK as well…

Maybe actually looking at research and statistics might serve you better than casually glancing at maps and taking wild guesses.

I'll get you started:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/national-travel-sur...

Funny how you don't even bothered to get the data by yourself get still felt entitled to act like a jerk.

> The only system failure was not canceling their license beforehand.

Why was their license not canceled beforehand?

Did they not get caught? If so, why? Likely other drivers have noticed the bad driving behavior. If so, why did they not report it? If they did report it, did the reports get ignored? Is there even a system and process in place for such reporting?

If they got caught, was there hesitation to revoke their license? If so, why? A potential factor would be driving in an area where you have to drive to get anywhere, which is common in the US. Why has it not been addressed that you have to drive, even if your driving habits are bad?

If bad driving behavior is too hard to punish, why? If regulations do not allow adequate punishment of bad driving behavior, why have these regulations not been changed? If evidence is missing, what evidence would that be, and how could it be collected?

If the driver was drunk, what would have been the alternative to driving? Is there adequate public transportation for drunks to get home? "adequate" depends on the drinking culture in the area where that happened.

If the driver was untrained, why were they allowed to drive? You wrote about canceling their license, so they did get a license. How was that possible without training? Does the process for handing out licenses have to be changed? Is frequent re-training necessary (more data is needed for that; if that data isn't avilable, why not?)

Obligatory link to the CAST handbook in case you want to follow that line of thinking: http://sunnyday.mit.edu/CAST-Handbook.pdf

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