cars
This is the only correct answer. Cars kill so many people it’s absurd.
The car doesnt kill anybody. Its the driver on their phone, checking their nails, eating McDonald’s, etc that kill people.
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.
Because it’s annoyingly pedantic.
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.
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.
Almost got hit today by two separate dipshits not paying attention and/or having zero awareness about the size of the dumbass large trucks they were driving.
Edit: forgot a word.
Cars.
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.
Heart disease is #1 IIRC.
deleted by creator
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!
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. 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.
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
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.
Also, heart disease
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.
That is horrifying, I hope she’s managed to recover at least a bit from that
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.
Dihydrogen monoxide. That stuff’ll kill you.
Psh, I drink it everyday and I’m FINE
But everyone who drinks it will die…
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
Careful! It’s found in 100% of all malignant tumors!
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?
Edit: I love that one reply is claiming it’s self defense, the other is claiming they’re capitalist
Necessary to prevent invasions by imperialists and capitalists who feel threatened by successful socialist models or who are looking to exploit other countries.
Imagine how much more they could have accomplished if they didn’t have to fear the very real threat of foreign invasion. Remember, they were invaded by foreign powers shortly after the revolution in 1918.
Ah yes
The peaceful CCCP
Known for not invading or suppressing anyone
Yes, yes, totally true facts 👍
Go read a book, chud.
> claims to know better
> unable to defend position in spite of this
Sure pal
…they’re capitalist. Tell me you’ve never lived there without telling me
Electricity?
Fossil fuel pollution.
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.
