In 2004, 42,836 Americans were killed in motor vehicle accidents. So this number actually represents a huge improvement.
Something to realize is that potential replacements to cars are not that much safer. Highway travel is responsible for 7.7 deaths per billion passenger-miles. Mass transit is responsible for 5.4 deaths per billion passenger-miles. Given the less-direct routings used by transit, it's not totally clear this is a meaningful difference.
All of this sucks - but it's the price we pay for being able to move a long distance quickly, something that seems to be a net benefit to society. (How many lives are saved by ambulances each year? How about by being able to easily visit a doctor?)
These are all statistics for the US in 2011. Sources are:
I'd really like to see that broken down by type of transit, as well as deaths for transit passengers versus people killed in e.g. private cars involved in accidents with busses.
My guess, and this is very much a guess, is that buses will be disproportionately dangerous, and a fair number of those killed by busses are in cars that collide with them.
For one random example, the DC metro has seen 9 deaths in the past five years and appears to run at about 1.8 billion passenger-miles per year, for a fatality rate of around 0.1 deaths per 100 million passenger-miles (or 1 per billion). This is very rough as deaths are spiky (those nine deaths happened all at once almost five years ago) and the long-term average is tough to judge.
In my town and the towns around me (suburbs of NYC in New Jersey) there are a lot of deaths from people being hit by commuter trains. It's quite possible that we have more people dying that way than in traffic accidents, especially if you don't count deaths on the highways in the area which don't have any pedestrians.
The problem here is that the trains mostly run at ground level, and the stations are mostly completely open. It's very easy to walk around behind of or in front of the train while it's still in the station or approaching the station. We've had incidents where individuals or groups of commuters who just got off the train try to cross the track behind the train, assuming that the gates are down because the train hadn't left yet, only to be struck by a train arriving on the other track. There was a big public education campaign after the last incident like that, but the town had to resort to a police officer stationed there during rush hour handing out jay-walking tickets before people would stop trying to cross while the gates were down.
There's also a strong suspicion that a lot of these deaths are suicides, but that's pretty hard to prove.
That's exactly the sort of thing I mean. I imagine that the safety of commuter trains with open stations and at-grade crossings must be vastly different from the safety of subways with closed stations and full grade separation. But I would love to see real numbers.
>All of this sucks - but it's the price we pay for being able to move a long distance quickly, something that seems to be a net benefit to society. (How many lives are saved by ambulances each year? How about by being able to easily visit a doctor?)
They are not mutually exclusives. You could ban private cars but still have ambulances. Or make the speed limits absurdly slow or something like that. I'm not saying that we should do this, but we are definitely choosing to sacrifice lives for our convenience.
Of the 5.4 deaths per billion passenger-miles, are there any statistics to show what percentage of these are the result or have a contributing factor of cars involved?
It would be fascinating to see if the 5.4 statistic would drop significantly if the car-related deaths were factored out.
Moderation is key. If we can cut down on driving, things would be even better.
Making telecommuting a standard business practice would be huge in reducing pollution, energy usage, etc. It would also allow people to spend more time with their families & live where they want.
I agree that having exactly the same urban design but just replacing the transit modality is likely to produce only a minimal improvement (not to mention being difficult to do, since transit modality and urban layout are interlinked). I think the bigger wins come from shifts in commute patterns. People who take transit typically also take it for fewer miles, making the annual per-person death rates of transit riders considerably lower than the smaller per-mile gap would imply. I think having an urban layout where transit could even work is the big change. But those are pretty deeply tied, e.g. people won't move into denser "transit-oriented development" if there's no good transit to it.
That's the main factor impacting the total number, also. Americans are about 2-3x more likely to die each year while commuting than Germans are, but mostly because they have longer commutes, not because the per-mile safety is worse (though it is slightly worse).
My guess, and this is very much a guess, is that buses will be disproportionately dangerous, and a fair number of those killed by busses are in cars that collide with them.
For one random example, the DC metro has seen 9 deaths in the past five years and appears to run at about 1.8 billion passenger-miles per year, for a fatality rate of around 0.1 deaths per 100 million passenger-miles (or 1 per billion). This is very rough as deaths are spiky (those nine deaths happened all at once almost five years ago) and the long-term average is tough to judge.