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by atonse 801 days ago
It might be the most dangerous thing we do but that doesn’t mean it’s that dangerous, it may say more about how safe the other things we do are.

I’d probably wager that being a pedestrian is less safe than driving.

2 comments

First of all, no, that's very unlikely: around 8 thousand pedestrians die in the US every year, out of around 40 thousand total deaths in traffic accidents.

But also, even if it is, this doesn't mean we should drive instead of walk to reduce our risk - it means everyone should drive less to reduce risk for everyone.

Everyone was very safe on foot, bikes and transit before there were so many cars. Cars made it dangerous to walk, so now everyone is in cars, which also makes driving more dangerous. Then people buy bigger cars that give them higher chances of survival in a crash at the great expense of everyone else involved, so everyone is buying bigger and bigger cars now.

Well of course it is, because of the drivers.
Depends on how you frame it. Yes, there might be many cases where it's the driver's fault, but there are cases where the pedestrians were jaywalking and behaving in erratic ways.

I remember hearing a statistic (I can't find the source yet so please treat it as unverified) that a non-trivial proportion of pedestrians that were run over were intoxicated (the pedestrians, not the drivers).

I'm not saying this to assign blame to one party or another, just to refute the simplistic statement that it's just the drivers' fault.

It’s almost always the driver’s fault for speeding or not paying attention – people say “they jumped in front of me” but almost any time the police look for camera footage or find witnesses, it turns out that the driver wasn’t paying attention.

The problem is that if someone is killed, they aren’t around to argue their side of the story and most cases simply aren’t investigated.

It doesn't matter if pedestrians are intoxicated. You should be driving slow enough to stop. Here in Japan, if a driver hits a pedestrian, they're always at fault, with almost no exceptions. It doesn't matter if some kid runs out in front of you: you're the one traveling faster, in a dangerous vehicle, so you should be able to stop. Because of this, vehicle speeds in residential or pedestrian-filled areas are generally quite slow; people only drive fast on the limited-access highways.