[fiddly_bits]

You have many of the same observations as me, but form a different conclusion. Although, one thing: you say, "My goal is to safely get from Point A to Point B..." Cars are a great way to kill 30 or 40 thousand people a year. Not very safe. And the quality of service (and riders) will surely improve on public transportation as more people use it, don't you think? Japan seems to prove that.

[kstenerud]

The quality of service will never reach the level of Japan. Transit operators have it easy there because people don't vandalize and they don't litter. This means that your maintenance costs are very low and it's more economical to buy high quality, comfortable seating.

As well, transit is only good for getting you around in the cities. Once you get out to "inaka", a car is all but a requirement, much like in North America.

This "world without cars" is a nice pipe dream, but the reality is that no matter how good your transit system, it's still a huge time sink to use it. The only time it becomes faster than a car is if you live in a dense city with poor traffic flow, and that accounts for a tiny percentage of the world population. That's also why it's only the pampered urbanites who dream of a carless world.

[wheels]

> if you live in a dense city with poor traffic flow, and that accounts for a tiny percentage of the world population

That's false. Most of the world's population now lives in cities. Deciding what percentage of those fall below the threshold of "poor" traffic-flow wise is difficult, but it's not "tiny". (http://www.gizmag.com/go/7613/)

Cars beget cars. The reason people need cars in a lot of the US is because they moved somewhere that they need a car to get to. People talk about the amount of time that things take without a car forgetting that said problem was created by cars in the first place. In places where most folks don't have cars you have a small grocery store every few blocks rather than a large one every few miles. The demographics of public transit differ from society at large because the well-off drive cars.

I grew up in American suburbia and have lived in Europe for the last decade. The amount of time required to say, go shopping, or commute to work has remained broadly similar in the half-dozen areas I've lived in, though the distances have not.

Progressively moving away from cars is largely a cultural rather than technological problem. Some well-done urban planning (including structuring energy prices to favor more efficient means) and a few decades to execute it could drastically shift the balance to where we have far fewer cars.

[kstenerud]

The generic "city" is not a very useful term here. How many people are there? There's a big difference between New York and Maza. What is the topography like? Is it sprawling like Phoenix? Or dense like Tokyo? How much density, population, and infrastructure is required to make a convenient and economical transit system? I'd wager far too much to displace cars in any meaningful way except in the largest cities.

Cars are used because they are versatile. Every other form of transport has far more narrow use cases.

[trothamel]

While trains appear to be slightly safer, the difference isn't that big, at least here in the US.

According to http://www.transit-safety.volpe.dot.gov/publications/sso/CRS... , commuter rail kills .09 people per 10 million passenger miles.

According to http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx , cars kill 1.14 people per 100 million passenger miles - or .114 people per 10 million passenger miles.

That's not a huge difference - I actually wonder if the more direct routing and door-to-door service allowed by cars could make up that difference entirely.

[_delirium]

> commuter rail kills .09 people per 10 million passenger miles.

The non-suicide number is quite a bit lower, though, by (probably) an order of magnitude. Pedestrians on the tracks in an area they aren't supposed to be, who are struck and killed by trains, are classified in the bucket category of "trespasser" fatalities. Unless they left a note or something it's usually impossible to conclusively say that they were suicides, but the assumption is that the vast majority of trespasser fatalities are suicides, because the number of people struck while trying to steal things or take illegal shortcuts is relatively small. And, trespasser fatalities account for 88% of total commuter-rail fatalities (p. 13 in that report). All other commuter-rail fatalities (passengers, collisions with automobiles, etc.) add up to 0.011 people per 10 million passenger miles.

[trothamel]

The way I'm reading table 18, of the 526 commuter-rail fatalities, at most 285 of them are suicide-by-train. As you point out, trespassing is a wide category - it includes things like highway-rail collisions. That 285 number might be high, as it also includes things like a child straying onto the tracks that was hit by a train.

I'm not sure it matters. The automobile statistics seem to include various methods of suicide involving cars. If rail inspires suicide, that's a safety problem.

[_delirium]

> The automobile statistics seem to include various methods of suicide involving cars.

I'm not sure they include them equally, though. The most obvious way of killing yourself on train tracks is standing in front of a train, but the most obvious way of killing yourself on a road usually does not involve a car, but involves jumping from a bridge (which doesn't get counted as an automobile fatality).

> If rail inspires suicide, that's a safety problem.

I'm not too sure about that one. If there are a significant number of people who, absent trains, wouldn't kill themselves, that would be significant. But I would guess a larger proportion are just choosing a suicide modality, and if it weren't trains, it'd be jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, taking pills, etc. It's hard to come up with any real data for that counterfactual, though. I suppose a blunt correlational approach would be to see if there's any correlation between availability of commuter rail and suicide rates, after controlling for other confounding variables. I would guess that there isn't one, but could be wrong.

[trothamel]

You're just as dead if you jump from a railroad bridge, though.

http://www.fra.dot.gov/downloads/safety/tdreport_final.pdf

is a Federal Railroad Administration report that breaks down the cause of trespasser fatalities. This isn't 100% comparable to the previous report, but it does claim that 23% of trespasser fatalities are suicides.

Appendix H breaks down the reported fatalities - it looks like walking and sleeping (drunk?) on tracks each claim more lives than suicide.

One really interesting story is the massive increase in car safety. Deaths per 100M vehicle miles have dropped from 1.73 in 1994 to about 1.09 in 2010.

Fundamentally, I'm not sure any of this matters. We're talking a very small difference in safety - to the point where convenience is probably more important to most people.