[nerb]

> a few tens of thousands of deaths in car crashes a year, is vastly outweighed by the time saved by everyone else compared to even an excellent public transit system.

what in the absolute f** are you talking about? have you ever experienced the sudden death of a loved one? what about the network impact of someone dying? even if you want to look at it through a capitalistic lens, think of the reduction in capability people going through that trauma. the amount of resources it takes in the health care, and public service sectors. you're off loading the immense costs of a person dying onto folks at random like an inverse and more likely lottery.

since you're so confidently in having the empirical measures of what outweighs what, at what point would a public transit system start to be a "good cost tradeoff" in your framework? cause there's a logical end goal you could get to: individualized transport with an experienced driver; and then work backwards from there until you balance the cost of implementation with those tens of thousands of death. would it be $1,000/day/person? $500/day/person?

though more than likely you're speaking like this because you've lived your entire life transported by car, benefiting off of the externalized costs passed off to the less fortunate, and you fear having your subsidized conveniences justifiably going away.

[adamomada]

He’s right, though. There are as many if not more lifetimes saved in aggregate.

You make a decision to get into the car with eyes open and most people are okay with the deal & the odds.

I have a feeling your response is because you’ve lost someone, so sorry about that. Life ends up more or less as a shit lottery and sometimes you get lucky (unlucky)

[nerb]

personally lose someone, no, but i've gotten the chance of being a citizen first responder to a lost of life one. i feel like your's and OP's response are because you've never seen or been impacted first hand what dying by car is like. it is usually horrific and violent that to be able to say those outweigh the time saved traversing the sprawled built environment created for the sake of those very same cars shows a lack of any lived experience. your argument fundamentally relies on the idea "all i know is cars, and there is nothing better". it's uncreative, unrealistic, and devoid of humanity. it's terrifying you and others with your mindset are on the road.

[adamomada]

I think that in North America the deal is done, there is no way of going back this far down the path and private vehicles on the road are never going away until the fall of said civilization (or plan B: making the country dirt poor, but this may lead to plan A anyway)

And props for being a responder and seeing it with your own eyes. I actually think it should be more widely spread, showing it on the nightly news, etc. it’s an effective strategy to make more careful drivers.

[rayiner]

This has nothing to do with capitalism. Quite the opposite, it’s about the needs of the many outweighing the lives of the few. There’s 200 million+ adults in the U.S., who save 5-10% of their waking lives by the US being car dependent compared to transit dependent places. Road deaths amount to 0.015% of that population. For every person who does, 7,000 live a more comfortable and convenient life.

[nerb]

i think you forget 2 things:

1. deaths directly by car are not the only deaths to account for. look at the history of lead poisoning from gasoline and the ramifications we're still reckoning with today from that. think of the rubber, heavy metal pollution we are just finding out today is driving critical ecosystems rapidly to extinction (in my neck of the woods: salmon). the death from the resource gathering required only for cars. there are so, so many externalized costs you don't consider even tho i'd argue that due to no experience with it yourself that the violence associated with a death by car is no easily written off as a statistic.

2. the environment built for cars is the only environment that can be. you've been duped by automobile manufactures, oil barons, and the affluent class that needs their chose mode of transportation adopted and subsidized by the masses. i see many more countries with better public transit and less folks living with cars all with better measures of comfort and convenience. you have exact measures to compare number of deaths, population, and road miles, but there's no way to measure whether those miles were worth it for anyone because of the baked in assumptions of no other choice. but what is always measurable is that deaths are directly caused by the existence of cars, and that death impacts people greatly.

rethink your assumptions and misanthropy.

[rayiner]

Rethink your misanthropy. We live in a free and rich country, and you hate people so much that you assume they’re being duped by “automobile manufacturers” instead of making their own choices about how they prefer to live. The fact is that Americans live like we do because we can afford to be comfortable. My mom, an immigrant to the US who grew up in Bangladesh, went to Australia recently and came back complaining about how cramped everything was over there and how small everyone’s houses are. She didn’t come to America until nearly age 40–she didn’t grow up being brainwashed into car culture. She just has eyes and can see what’s a more comfortable life.

There’s no country that can afford to be car dependent where most people don’t drive. Even in Sweden and Japan, which have amazing public transit systems, 80% of households own a car.

[mistersquid]

> For every person who d[i]es, 7,000 live a more comfortable and convenient life.

That you see this tragedy as a benefit reveals the grotesquerie of your world view. You also do not address the downstream effects of that lost life in terms of grief, material loss, and reduced capacity. (You’re not even a good capitalist.)

May you never experience the losing end of a “more comfortable and convenient life”.

[rayiner]

Again, who said anything about capitalism? My point is exactly the opposite: that the collective welfare outweighs the individual welfare.