cars
This is the only correct answer. Cars kill so many people it’s absurd.
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Okay, but we aren’t willing not to license dumb drivers because we have decided as a society that to lose your car is to lose your right to an independent life. We aren’t willing to hold dumb drivers accountable for killing people for the same reason. We establish parking minimums for dive bars even though we know people are going to drink and drive and kill people.
The car doesnt kill anybody. Its the driver on their phone, checking their nails, eating McDonald’s, etc that kill people.
the car absolutely kills people. that same big mac licking driver on a bike or bus or scooter causes 0 deaths. it’s the cars
Okay, yes. You are correct. The weight of the car is what does the damage since a bike or scooter doesnt kill people. However, the carelessness of the driver is at fault. If the person never got in the car and ate the big mac the car would not have killed somebody. Because the car would never have moved.
No it doesn’t lol. You need an operator for a car to function. Cars just don’t go driving around running into people and random objects. If you get into an accident, who do they go after? The at fault driver. Not the car. It wasn’t the vehicles fault it got into an accident. It was the person operating said vehicle.
Operator error.
Edit: I’m starting to think most people here just don’t want to take responsibility for being stupid. Downvote all you want, drivers in cars kill people, not the car itself.
while you are factually correct that the human is a part of the chain of blame, it is systemically inefficient to blame the driver
in order to make systemic change and make cars safer, we CANNOT say “oh lol drivers fault, get good.” expecting that order of change from hoards of people is unrealistic.
however if i blame unsafely sized cars, fast, wide unsafe roads, a failure of US public transport—these are also realistic points of systemic change that i can point to.
tldr cars are unsafe, cars need to get safer, no amount of blaming the driver will solve things
Driver chose to drive, therefore taking the responsibility of not only their life in their hands, but others on the road as well. Yes, you blame the driver. Because the driver also made the choice to drive the vehicle, then chose to check their cell phone and cause an accident. It’s just responsibility at that point.
It’s not vehicles, it’s people. Cars are safer than they’ve ever been. People in general, just choose to not be responsible. And that’s the reality of it.
Don’t get me wrong, vehicles in general are dangerous in the fact that they are basically rolling hunks of metal with combustibles.
At the end of the day though, it’s just that most people aren’t willing to admit to themselves that they shouldn’t be driving because they’re too easily distracted in the first place.
Responsibility and self awareness. Put the phone down, don’t eat and drive, put your music on before you put the car in drive. It’s not rocket science.
At the end of the day though, it’s just that most people aren’t willing to admit to themselves that they shouldn’t be driving because they’re too easily distracted in the first place.
Is there any room in your mind for the possibility that some people simply have different values than you?
You’re acting like the only people disagreeing with you are people who have been in accidents and are looking for something outside of themselves to blame. You’re acting like deep down they agree with you that all error comes from a lack of competence and responsibility.
(Aside: I hate cars and our car-centric infrastructure and I haven’t been in any accidents, which means I don’t fit into your narrative here. But that’s not likely to sway you. And I know that’s not likely to sway you. Because I know you don’t share my perspective.)
But is it remotely possible to you that some people out there might just believe:
mistakes and errors are inevitable for everyone – not just for stupid, careless, irresponsible, incompetent, hopeless lost causes masquerading as people.
And even if mistakes were only made by those kinds of people – meaning a single mistake could mark you as a “bad person” – saving “bad people’s” lives is still better than letting those people die. Just because they couldn’t figure out a car doesn’t mean they deserve to die in an accident (or starve to death because their suburban house is too far from the nearest grocery store and they accept that they can’t drive.)
Is it really impossible for you to imagine that some people might just place value on human lives, regardless of cost and regardless of personal responsibility?
Prehistoric humans are now known to have spent years dragging around and caring for their paralyzed tribe mates millennia ago. Meaning the kind of people I’m talking about have existed for thousands of years. People who don’t care about personal responsibility. People who just want the best for everyone around them.
If you told these people, “some of your tribe mates will be incapable of safely driving vehicles. How should we build this city?” They would (once you showed them what all of those words meant) have intentionally laid out the city to allow those poorly-driving tribe mates to walk or use transit. They would place nearby grocery stores. They would direct high density housing to go up in the area. They would try to make it possible to avoid using cars. And the city they built would have 90% less cars because of it.
To them such a city would be an obvious choice.
You don’t have to agree with the cavemen who cared for their dying relatives. But please acknowledge that they existed, and didn’t hold your beliefs. Please acknowledge that the people you’re arguing with, don’t hold your beliefs.
ppl just choose not to be responsible
you should look into some common causes of car accident, which include:
- rain
- night driving
- design defects
- ice
- snow
- tire blowouts
- fog full list
cars are safer than theyve ever been
overall, my position is the same as yours: the average driver is WILDLY unfit to operate a multiton chunk of metal on a daily basis.
however, it is wildy unrealistic to hope against hope that one day, every driving person will wake up and realize that they should drive safe. there has to be systemic effort, whether thats reduction in cars, increase in mandatory car training or increased access to public transport, in order to see systemic improvement.
The driver can be personally responsible for their own failures without that alleviating the responsibility of good decision making by those who are responsible for ensuring people are able to live their lives safely.
Build a decent train line and those people using phones or checking they nails will not put anyone in danger.
I’m all for better public transit.
But for those of us who don’t live in a city, it’s not an option. I live about a five minute walk from my nearest neighbor, and a 20 minute drive from work. I’m not in a neighborhood or apartment. They could not feasibly build a rail system to service me and the millions of others who live like I do.
Busses are an option but then my commute would start hours earlier, and they would not pay for themselves where I live. Or I would be paying a very high fair.
Just build a rail system is not the solution.
I think it’s got to be subways in big cities, buses in suburban towns, and trains to connect rural/suburban/urban areas. All of these being free like libraries would be great, and the commute would be shortened by rides available every 15 minutes.
It is the solution for the vast majority of people (though I personally like bikes better).
Public transit isn’t supposed to “pay for itself” via fares. It is a net-good that makes it so that everyone doesn’t need a car and all the supporting infrastrucutre and wastes of space and energy that cars require.
If cars weren’t subsidized to be the primary mode of transportation, you wouldn’t live “5 miles from your neighbor,” and you wouldn’t need a car to get to work.Ok, so I’m supposed to move when they build this new transit?With what money?
Public transport isn’t supposed to “pay for itself”. How about asphalt roads in your area, have they paid for themselves?
Yes via the commerce that results in taxes. But the pint is that public transit does not get built unless you can convince law makers that it will be cheaper than any alternative to the government’s pocket.
Road related taxes are not even enough for maintaining roads let alone build them. Watch the below video from the 3.18 mark.
https://youtu.be/QPAil1xY42I?t=191
Tell me this, if your sparsely populated area justifies asphalt roads because of the “resulting commerce”, why can’t public transport achieve the same?
As much attention EVs get car fires kill about 500+ people per year in the US and cause over 1.9Billion in property damage.
Regular gas cars have been recalled many times for spontaneous combustion while parked burning down garages and homes.
Most of the time however yes it is from operators driving.
The combustion is supposed to be internal, you crazy machines! Internal!
But if they were doing all those things while being a pedestrian among other pedestrians none of them would die. It’s adding the car that makes it dangerous.
Its also people who dont know how to cross the street or anyone who disobeys traffic laws. Ive seen bikes just run red lights, dart through stop signs, people just cross against the light without even looking.
Its general carelessness with regards to the roads
Ive seen people casually walk in front of lightrail trains against the light too. If they want to take their stupid out of the gene pool have at it.
A jaywalker came within half a second of running in front of my car just a couple of days ago.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. You’re not wrong. It’s the operator. If people actually drove responsibly, we probably wouldn’t have as many issues. There are definitely too many distractions, and people in general just naturally mind wander.
That being said, it would be much better to have a mass transit system. Less accidents, I can watch my phone, do my nails, and eat my mcdonald’s without worry of killing someone.
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they’re still cars in most countries
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Because it’s annoyingly pedantic.
But that’s the thing: like you say, people are naturally prone to “mind-wander”, keeping that in mind and to then compare the amount of rigorous training and checking that pilots have to go through compared to the in comparison measly process of acquiring a driver’s license (and then indefinitely keeping it with no questions asked unless you do indeed run somebody over) is absolutely mind-boggling. Some countries have some safequards in place such as required driving-tests when you reach a certain age as a driver but it still does in no way account for how much of a murder-machine cars are and how casual we are about just about everyone with a shrimp for a brain driving them.
What we need is mass transit with cubes. I think a lot of the reason people dont like busses is having to listen to peoples screaming children, dealing with drunks, etc. I imagine a bus with small cubes that are soundproof kinda like those portable toilets but with a bus seat instead. Get on the bus, pay, go into an empty cube, slide the door closed. No crying babies, drunk people, etc. Pull the cord when your stop is announced.
Good idea but you lose a huge amount of capacity with the cubes. It would still be magnitudes more efficient than a car per person though.
I think if i remember right our city busses could sit 30 or 34. With the cubes i figure maybe 25?
Buses are designed to carry a lot more people than the number of seat they have since they allow for standing. Adding cubes would take away that standing space.
Almost got hit by two separate dipshits not paying attention and/or having zero awareness about the size of the dumbass large trucks they were driving.
Cars.
Firearm injury 2nd: how to know this is US data without it being labeled as US data.
correct! And even in USA where there is a mass shooting like every day, the car is worse than firearms
Not if you’re under 24, and in the good ole US of A, it would seem. Even in the graph above, urban areas are more likely to result in gun violence than automotive injury.
indeed! just to clarify: by no means do i want to defend firearm practices there. Interesting graph - especially the development in recent years! 😰
That third one is just fancy talk for cancer
Cars are very dangerous.
Cars
Statistically speaking, you will either die by cancer, or you will die in an automotive accident.
Don’t you mean: Statistically speaking, you will die.
Statistically speaking I’ll never die. I’m 1-0 so far.
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Two way roads.
If they didn’t exist today and someone came up with the brilliant idea of having people in control of machines (cars or bikes) moving in opposite directions at 50mph, separated by a few feet and a painted line, it would be dismissed immediately.
I drive on a lot of rural roads in the UK, mainly Wales, most of the time I’m just happy when the road has space for two cars to squeeze through and some visibility for what’s coming around the corner of that rural lane. Actual physical lines separating the lanes? Oh boy it’s my birthday. Yet with all that, we have a death rate per 100 million miles of just over a third of somewhere like the US, so I’d imagine the size of cars and inadequate licence requirements are probably bigger issues for road safety
I can’t remember which episode it was but in the Cautionary Tales podcast by Tim Harford a guest once explained that cars are too safe. Through the years we blamed cars for not being safe when people get hurt but few alterations were made to our behaviour if you campagne it to the advances they’ve made in car safety. If imminent death would follow everytime we made a mistake people would be more careful. That’s how I feel about the roads in Wales. The lack of oversight made me be more cautious. That and the fact that I normally drive at the other side of the road.
The general concept you’re describing is called Risk Compensation. It feels intuitively correct, but in whatever context it’s been studied in almost all cases it turns out that the safety feature is actually better overall. Some people might be a bit riskier knowing about the safety net, but not enough to counteract the safety improvement.
Also - in the UK - road deaths go down over time, while miles driven goes up. Driving is getting safer. Cars are part of that, but so is road nd signal design and driver training.
It’s so much safer to have an accident in a modern car than one from even just a few decades ago. There’s no amount of better-than-what-we-have levels of driver awareness that can make up that gap.
Actually a positive correlation has been found between the amount of roadway lighting and car accidents. More streetlights cause more crashes.
I drive a little Skoda so I’m very cautious on those little roads, don’t have the same feeling of safety as the great big SUVs that barrel along
Rural Scotland has a lot of single-track roads. One lane for two directions, 50mph speed limit, with pull-offs every few hundred feet so cars can stop and let others pass. FUN™.
Ok, this is a weird hypothetical, but if the world had been overcast for the last thousand years, and then suddenly there was sometimes just a completely blinding light in the sky that you sometimes have to drive straight toward, it would be chaos.
Before COVID I imagined that the death toll would be so high that most roads would be shut down until technology had been developed and distributed so that you could never be blinded by the sun while driving. (Not just a flip down sun visor, but something like an LCD screen front windshield with head tracking that automatically blocks just the sun from your view).
Now I know how quickly and easily people become acquainted with mass death.
Now I imagine there wouldn’t even be a new driver’s test required that requires you to demonstrate that you can safely drive into the sunset.
Just “We recommend, but don’t require, that you have a sun visor in your car when using public roads.”
Motorcycles, for the same reason
Your car.
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Also garage doors for that matter. That spring can be lethal when it breaks.
Surprised I had to scroll this far down to see this!
The top three causes of preventable fatal injury in the US are:
- poisoning (including drug overdoses)
- motor vehicles
- falls
We might generalize these to:
- chemistry
- engineering
- physics
im pretty sure the engineering is not at fault for most car accidents.
thats true, but we got to agree N°3 is solely Isaac Newton’s fault, for inventing gravity
I’ll never forget the last thing grandpa ever said to me:
“Stop shaking the ladder, you little shit!”
Sure, but neither is the chemist at fault when someone drinks bleach.
What about the chemical engineers creating fuels that turn out environments into toxic hellholds? Where does all of the pollution in the world come from?
We could use engineering controls to limit the speed of consumer vehicles to 10 mph, still faster than a human can walk, but slow enough that most deadly accidents could be avoided.
Then establish administrative controls to have public transportation or other professional drivers (taxi operators) have “unlocked” vehicles. They would be required to have routine training and testing to keep their unlocked license.
#1 Distracted Driving. …
#2 Drunk and Drugged Driving. …
#3 Poor Weather. …
#4 Reckless Driving and Road Rage. …
#5 Speeding. …
limiting speed would not affect the leading 4 causes of car accidents
The third is more gravity than physics, or perhaps you should consider it the absence of gravity.
What I’m trying to say is: stop following geodesics.
Your car. Just think about the forces and mechanisms invovled for this to happen. Every single day we travel at 100km/h in our 2ton at least metal box surrounded by hundreds of other people in their equally large and heavy and fast machines in a space barely wide enough to react in case of an emergency(not even considering if most are actually ready to act in such a case. All of this with realistically little training. Not to mention most people don’t really pay attention while driving and certainly don’t consider the life of others while doing so. It’s so impersonal and dangerous. If it was a never heard of concept, individual cars driven by any normal person would be considered laughably stupid at the very best.
Dihydrogen monoxide. That stuff’ll kill you.
Psh, I drink it everyday and I’m FINE
But everyone who drinks it will die…
But it’s the stuff which is used in nuclear power plants to store the used rods.
Hitler also drank it every day and he also thought he was fine…
Yeah but he also killed Hitler, so that means he’s okay right?
Too much dihydrogen monoxide? Death.
Not enough dihydrogen monoxide? Also death
Just enough dihydrogen monoxide? Believe it or not, also death
At least here in a very anti-public transit US city: Automobiles
Short of war zones, they are the most common cause of unnatural death almost everywhere.
Capitalism. Most of the other (daily, specific) dangers out there are dangerous because someone’s making money off putting other people in danger. I’m including the military industrial complex, but also regular industries and the exploitation of vulnerable populations.
Idk if we use capitalism so much as we get used…
What would you call the military industrial complex of CCCP?
…they’re capitalist. Tell me you’ve never lived there without telling me
Ladders. Most serious workplace accidents in a lot of trades can be linked back to falling from a hight. Don’t be cocky when up a ladder, even little ones.
Ladders are legitimately one of the leading causes of death and serious injury among otherwise healthy middle aged adults. A basic fall protection system with some flex rope and a climbing harness can be had for around $100. I don’t care if my neighbors think I’m a dweeb, I’m not dying for clean gutters.
Can confirm - fell from one this week. ;(
RIP to this man
What happened? Was this at work or home?
At home, due to complete user error. I have a 4x4ft foldable ladder which I did not lock properly. I did see myself falling in slow motion, which feels really weird. And i dont know why this surprised me, but there’s nothing you can do to save your fall, you just fall straight down like a bag of potatoes. Nothing broken, just bruises and some pain. I feel really lucky.
A friend of mine’s father died falling from a ladder on her birthday while decorating for her party.
Electricity?
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titanium implants are pretty leet though
I’ve got balls of steel!
Would you say you understand the weakness of your flesh?
Swimming pools, with kids in the house. More dangerous than owning a gun:
Pools are more dangerous than owning a gun in the same way that vending machines kill more people than sharks.
People are near vending machines way more often than they are near sharks, and people let their kids play in the pool more often than they let them play with firearms
Nope. Under 10% of households have a swimming pool, but over 40% of households have a gun in the USA. When we’re talking about owning one as opposed to actively using one, the pool is more dangerous than the gun.
Now, if you just left your loaded gun out in your backyard 24/7, it may be a different story.
I don’t doubt your numbers, but that wasn’t the point I was making. Guns may be more common, but it isn’t common to let your children play with them. It is, however, common to let your children play in the pool.
The original thread was about how houses with pools have more children die than houses with guns. Your point indicated that this was only because guns are less commonplace (sharks are less commonplace than vending machines). However, guns are more commonplace. The guns sitting in a safe aren’t harming anyone. The pools sitting in backyards might be.
