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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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cars
This is the only correct answer. Cars kill so many people it's absurd.
Cars don’t kill anyone, dumb drivers do.
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, the driver just didn't react fast enough or a light distracted. Its not always stupid reasons but maybe in your movie world.
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.
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:
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.
The issue for the commenter you replied to is that they think that laying the blame for a specific incident at the personal responsibility of the people directly involved somehow means that the diffuse responsibility of wider society in creating conditions wherein those incidents are guaranteed to regularly occur is somehow no-longer relevant.
All that seems to matter in their assessment is who gets the finger pointed at them when the problem happens, not, why does the problem happen and what can we do to avoid it?
Okay, yeah. These people definitely find comfort in hiding behind "personal responsibility" as a means of abdicating social responsibility.
But have you seen the Alt-Right Playbook video, "Always a Bigger Fish" ?
In that video, Innuendo Studios lays out the idea that there is a base, core, philosophical difference between conservatives and progressives in how we think the world ought to be, and what kind of world we think is possible.
To the conservative, nature is full of hierarchy. The strongest chimp gets the most bananas, you know? (Yes, I know that's not actually true. But it's the way they see the world.) The smartest, strongest human survives and hunts well and eats well. (Yes, I know early hunter-gatherer societies hunted in worker cooperatives and raised children cooperatively. So I know this isn't really a well-researched scientific hypothesis. But it is believed by a particular group of people.)
When they say, "take personal responsibility," it's kind of a code word for, "accept your rightful place in the hierarchy. Accept that you are simply the weaker, stupider chimp and you are inevitably going to get less bananas and society can't be expected to coddle you and give you more than you deserve."
According to a worldview that asserts humans are naturally divided into the strong, the weak, and the in-between, a person complaining about their own outcomes is just in denial of this fundamental, universal "truth." A whiner unwilling to admit they receive less because they provide less. A deceiver attempting to usurp a more deserving person's place in the hierarchy because they are unwilling to accept the consequences of their "actions."
There's no better frontier for this idea than the open road, where a single mistake can kill you and everyone in your vicinity. Transit activists, who want to take people off the roads, put them on buses and in trains where they will be safe even if they aren't "vigilant" and "responsible" and "alert" (read: unlucky), are trying to spend society's limited resources coddling people who will never really provide a return on that investment -- because they are weak. Which wastes money, since the weak will never lead society to better places.
To these people,
Hence, roads are a convenient way to cull the weak.
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you should look into some common causes of car accident, which include:
no (nbcnews article)
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?
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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.
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!
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.
they're still cars in most countries
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.