Well, sure.
I'm not afraid I'll get stabbed but I'm not a fan of some dude staring daggers at my wife and I while he laughs and talks to himself. When I've traveled alone I've seen fights, peeing, groping and all sorts of stuff. Nobody I saw ever got killed but I can't say I miss public transit.
I bet they count only deaths and injuries, but not PTSD cases acquired.
Interestingly enough I used to do volunteer facilitation of groups for adults with newly acquired ptsd (ie not caused by child abuse which is otherwise I think the #1). In nearly every group the slight majority were there because of car crashes, the other approximately half of the participants being all other causes.
So I don't have the stats and maybe you weren't being serious anyway but I think cars are a huge source of actual for real ptsd that people have to deal with.
I had no idea. Thanks for the reply.
The entire crux of the article hinges around one graph at the end, where they compare traffic annual deaths per 100k people with subway annual deaths per 100k people .. per person who rode the subway 500 times?
Why is there some 500 ride part thrown in? Why is it not just simply comparing "X people in NYC / Y people die yearly on subway" with ""X people in NYC / Y people die yearly in traffic"?
They also don't link to their sources for subway crime. They do link to a MTA document, but that document only shows subway crime rates for 6 months out of the year, not the whole year.
Also the comparison they do make at the end is apples to oranges; the issue isn't purely about death rate, but there's the other categories of series crime on the subway, like assault/rape/etc., that aren't really factored into the final claim. They moved the goalposts and deftly switched from a discussion about "safety" to a discussion about "deaths".
Regarding the comparison likely because the data source only gave homicides per ride and didn't come with the corresponding information to convert that into homicides per person year of use. The choice of 500 is a bit of an arbitrary example of what the latter might look like (~2x per workday).
What they really want to compare is per equivalent trip in the city (same mileage, same path, same time) but that's a bit impossible to do directly. Showing the number for going to work and back every day for a year is 1/10th that of traffic deaths in NYC as a whole gets the same idea across despite the lack of precise data anyways.
> other categories
Exactly. By the time my co drivers start staring me down, turning up their boombox, or worse their cellphones, leaving graffiti, food waste, vomit, used needles, and feces in my car, this apples-to-oranges comparison will make sense.
I don't know why this is so hard to understand and why people like you argue so hard against the safety of transit over cars.
"Passenger vehicles are by far the most dangerous motorized transportation option compared. Over the last 10 years, passenger vehicle death rate per 100,000,000 passenger miles was over 60 times higher than for buses, 20 times higher than for passenger trains, and 1,200 times higher than for scheduled airlines."
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
In 2019 there were 268 public transit fatalities in the entire USA. 36,096 vehicle deaths, 2.7 milion injuries, 6.7 million crashes.
In 2019, there were at least 14,375 total reported assaults on public transit in the US, with 8,309 on rail modes and 6,066 on bus modes. These assaults occurred both in-vehicle (50%) and in-station (49%). Additionally, there were 10,430 injuries and 250 fatalities related to these incidents.
Keep in mind that at least some transit crime is not crime that you avoid by taking a car. A lot of crime incidents happen between people who know each other and the fact that they were on transit was merely where they happened to be.
Something like 2-5% of all trips and 2% of all miles are made by public transportation in the US, so we can normalize our numbers to compare apples-to-apples. Even if we normalize conservatively in favor of automobiles at 2% (take our transit numbers and multiply by 98/2), we are at:
13,132 transit deaths
704,375 assaults
511,070 assault injuries
12,250 assault deaths
This means that after normalization you are still looking at 4x more vehicular injuries than assault injuries and still more deaths for automobiles compared to transit. And really, transit statistics would not scale linearly like this as current ridership skews lower in socioeconomic status than the population as a whole (i.e., if everyone entered the transit system the overall rates of incidents per person would likely decrease).
Let's not forget the health outcome benefits that are proven for transit users. Better cardiovascular health is one of many known benefits of taking transit instead of sitting in the car.
Look, maybe seeing real life sometimes is a lot scarier than experiencing a contained and isolated life behind the wheel, but it is factually statistically safer. And maybe seeing some more real life would be good for people right now in a political environment where individualized motorists are only thinking for themselves and voting for politicians who want to cut social services. You'll believe in universal healthcare and housing pretty quickly if you are taking transit rather than resorting to the motorist's steel shield of blissful ignorance.
It's the cost of Democracy, they say.
Nobody ever stabbed me in my car.
Nobody ever stabbed you on the subway either lmao
You don't have to be stabbed for a fellow driver to kill you. They just have to look at their phone or have too many drinks at the bar or not realize how much their new meds are affecting them or underestimate how tired they are.
If you normalize transit assault rates versus car crash injury rates (in other words, assume we all take transit instead of cars and normalize based on 2% trips being transit by multiplying the transit statistics by 98/2), the car crash injury rate is still 4x higher than the transit assault injury rate. If you combine all transit deaths plus assault deaths (again, normalized) you are still at a lower than car crash deaths. I based this on 2019 statistics.
Per trip you are 4x more likely to be injured in a car crash than be injured in a transit assault incident.
I realize this is all napkin math and could be wrong, but I really want to emphasize just how crazy high the car crash injury and death statistics are. Over 6 million car crashes happen per year. 2 million+ car crash injuries, and close to 40,000 deaths.
Transit assaults and other incidents of the sort really are a rarity in comparison to all the ways driving can injure you. The only thing that your car gives you is the ignorant bliss of believing you are in control and nobody else can affect you.
The last thing to keep in mind is that getting assaulted while on transit doesn't necessarily mean you were a random victim. A lot or imagine possibly most most assaults are happening between people who know each other. In that case, public transit is merely a neutral location for the incident.
And the other last thing to keep in mind is that transit users are healthier with better cardiovascular rates and lower rates of obesity. Every 1% of increased transit use is associated with .2% lower obesity rate. Heart disease kills a whole lot more people than transit assaults.
public transport will not be safer in general than private transport unless you have a special circumtance
About 40,000 people die in motor vehicle crashes every year.[1]
How many die on public transit? We tend to hear about it when it happens.
what youre missing here is agency. I have complete control over how safely I drive my car. Sure there are crazy people driving but its best to be in another car than being a person walking when you have a crazy crash. In public transport I have no control over what other people can do to me or my loved ones, I can only react and the law is probably not in my side
You don't really have agency. You don't have agency over that person blasting down the road coming the other direction running the red light. You don't have agency over that drunk nodding off and crossing the yellow line. You don't have agency over someone not looking and merging into you causing you to go off the road and roll over. You don't have agency over that person looking at their phone and not realizing they're approaching you stopped at that red light ahead while they're going 20 over the speed limit.
You think everyone injured in a car accident caused the accident?
And you think people walking have more agency over a car coming and crushing them? That's why I said it's best to be a in a car in a car crash because that way you're protected. I'm not even against public transport is just simply not more safe than private transport
> And you think people walking have more agency over a car coming and crushing them?
And you think you have more stuck with a car in front of you and beside you? Or active cars going through the intersection while you're supposed to be stopped? Or merging into you when you have cars in front of you and behind you and beside you? You have the same agency, probably less in that car stuck in traffic.
But if you were in a bus, you'd have a much larger vehicle and have far less energy imparted to you as a passenger, or if you were on a light rail you wouldn't even be in the intersection in the first place. Better yet, that drunk would be on the bus instead of being forced to drive and cause the accident in the first place!
Every statistic shows transit is far safer than cars.
You're clearly not thinking through the scenarios through to actually analyze which leads to more agency and outcomes which is what you really care about. Spend some time reflecting before you reply and give actual concrete examples please.
buses have no airbags though, people walking across the street neither. Cars won't be eliminated and crime is getting worse across the board. I'd rather be in a car if I can
Busses barely even feel the impact of running over the Suburban. Have you ever been in a collision of a car and a bus? I have, in the bus colliding with an SUV that ran a red. The driver of the SUV was wheeled away seemingly unresponsive. It cost me about a 20 minute delay in my travel a long with everyone else on the bus. Who do you want to be?
Think about how you feel safer in that giant SUV compared to a subcompact. Then remember the bus is significantly larger than the SUV even comparing the SUV to the subcompact. Which "wins" in the accident? Now think of the light rail train, even larger than the bus.
I'd rather not even have to be in the path of a drunk driver in the first place. Maybe we could redesign our cities ahead of time so those drunks could walk or ride the bus or bicycle instead of getting behind the wheel. Impossible, I'm sure.
You seemingly can't even imagine a world where one doesn't need to get in a car to go to a bar or go get groceries, it's just assumed both of these people and you will have to be in a car and share the path.
Once again you haven't actually logically thought about these differences. Think about it again before you reply.
- [deleted]
Because you say so?