this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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Fuck Cars

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.