this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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Fuck Cars
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Okay but, counterpoint, cars kill kids.
Edit, so I don't have to keep repeating myself, and because this is important fucking information:
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/
Thank you for excepting the exhausting challenge to explain this to a bunch of meat-/car-brains.
Drowning kills kids. Shall we get rid swimming pools?
There are other, better ways to transport people that are not only more efficient, but significantly safer. Cars are basically the worst way our society could practically organise our transport needs.
There is no other way to swim than by getting in the water, but if your pool in particular keeps on killing loads of people then maybe your pool in particular has a problem and should be shut down.
Edit:
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/
I'm all for reducing the amount of cars on the road, but in many areas it's simply not practical not to own one.
I've done the math. Not owning a car at all or paying for note/gas/maintenance/insurance, and instead living in walking/cycling distance from work would require me to spend about $700/month more than I am now living 35 miles away and paying for my car expenses, and would leave me effectively stranded at work.
This is exactly the problem that I am trying to highlight. I don't think individual consumptive actions will fix this. This is a political issue that needs collective action to fix.
Don't forget that your taxes go towards other people's driving. Gas, roads and parking comes out of your taxes.
Don't also forget that your commute is probably 1 hour each way of unpaid work.
If there was an alternative you couldn't drown in then yes, we should get rid of swimming pools.
Buses kill kids too. Trains too. Airplanes too. Let's get rid of transportation.
Or is it about the numbers all of the sudden?
You've got to be a special level of dumb to think that anything in life has zero risk. Even food kills kids under certain circumstances.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/
Those aren't absolute rates, those are effectively per capita
Uh. It's literally per type of vehicle per 100,000,000 miles against passenger vehicles.
You can have your car, go nuts, but people who don't want one shouldn't be forced to have one to survive. I should have the freedom to not need a car.
I'm actually quite good at abstraction. It's my entire job, so I better be.
The statistics are directly comparing different forms of public transport against passenger vehicles. Are you saying that you want it to compare different types of passenger vehicles as well? Fine, but the statistics are still in favor of public transport.
While busses technically are involved in around the same amount of accidents per 100 million miles, and they're more likely to kill a pedestrian when involved in an accident, they're transporting significantly more people with every mile driven. Passenger miles takes this into account: 1 mile driven with 20 occupants is 20 passenger miles. Busses are twenty times less likely to kill someone per 100 million passenger miles.
Per vehicle mile, cars and light trucks made up around 40-45% of pedestrian deaths. Note this is in vehicle miles not passenger miles, so a direct comparison doesn't work as well. However, even if we assume there were 5 people in every single car on the road (which is absolutely not the case), busses are still less than than half as likely to kill per passenger mile.
If that's not what you were asking to compare, then you suck at asking questions and need to be more specific.
"Per 100,000,000 passenger miles". It's literally right there.
Name anything else we do that kills more kids. I will wait.
You've said, "You suck at abstraction" to two people now who've explained very clearly what's wrong with your understanding of the study. If you can't be bothered to explain yourself nobody will know what you mean.
It's hard to see how "quality of life" can be balanced against enormous numbers of people killed, but it sounds like you can't name anything that kills more kids? Maybe because there is nothing? Maybe this is a huge problem and saying, "cars kill kids" is actually pretty valid?
Cars are terrible for quality of life unless you live rurally. Not only are they massively wasteful, their highways cut swathes through communities, they create noise pollution, they dominate our landscape and rob us of communal spaces, and they cause urban sprawl and force us into enormous and stessful commutes.
There is no part of our lives that is made better by cars. You can't just say "quality of life" and expect that to mean anything unless, again, you explain yourself. You don't seem interested in doing that though.