[VLM]

This article is being flooded with weird anti-car hate. Yet, my car is perfectly safe and can only kill someone in a hit and run at 100 MPH if, and only if, I get drunk first.

Given that I don't drink very much and then only at home (a sixer lasts me about a season, sometimes half a year) that means my car is incredibly safe and will almost certainly never kill anyone. Odd how there's no anti-alcohol hate here on HN, yet its the alcohol doing the actual killing.

If you subtract out deaths due to drunkenness, cars kill less people than bathtubs. Perhaps we need a war on bathtubs. Because nothing is ever a drunk's fault.

[Chevalier]

...dude. No, you don't have to be a drunk going 100mph before you kill someone with your car. That you "don't drink very much" doesn't mean that your "car is incredibly safe and will almost certainly never kill anyone."

Your car is an extremely heavy, extremely fast machine that will crush anyone unlucky enough to be in its path. That includes not only incompetent/incapacitated/elderly drivers, but also dumb accidents and unaware pedestrians. You will easily kill a child who tries to play in her suburban street even if you go 10mph -- not because you're a drunk, but because American structural design forces everyone to drive two-ton bullets to go anywhere, which inevitably results in lethal wrecks. Compare Denmark's road fatality rate of 3.0 per 100,000 inhabitants versus the US ratio of 11.6 per 100,000. [1]

The question is not whether you enjoy driving. The question is why cars are entitled to the vast majority of public space -- not only for parking (often for free or nominal fees), but also for individual transportation that endangers the lives of pedestrians and cyclists. Please take a look at this illustration to get an idea of how much land your car takes from everyone else. [2]

Do you really think a kid trying to bike to school should have to risk his life every day... because you feel entitled to barrel through his home town?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

[2] http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/18/7236471/cars-pedestrian...

[ethanhunt_]

"because American structural design forces everyone to drive two-ton bullets to go anywhere, which inevitably results in lethal wrecks. Compare Denmark's road fatality rate of 3.0 per 100,000 inhabitants versus the US ratio of 11.6 per 100,000."

Check the per-vehicle-km rate. Denmark isn't safer because they drive less.

[scbrg]

Unless I'm reading the table wrong, US is still at 7.6 deaths per billion km, while Denmark is at 3.4. That's more than a 1:2 ratio. I'd certainly say that's safer (even if the difference is smaller than GP indicates).

[Chevalier]

Scbrg beat me to it, but Denmark is still twice as safe as the US when you consider kilometers driven. Keep in mind that this means cars-vs-cars.

And more to the point, take a second to think about what you just said. Denmark is nearly four times as safe as the US because they gave people lovely cities like Copenhagen where kids can safely bike to school and adults can walk to work or to a local restaurant. This means...

...yup, that they don't risk their lives every day in cars and thus the per-vehicle-kilometer rate isn't terribly useful in assessing a walkable lifestyle. The kids that bike to school in Copenhagen don't die in automobile wrecks and aren't exposed to risk on a per-vehicle-kilometer rate. Those dangers are for American kids.

Even when you disregard the safety/quality of daily life for urban Danes and use the car-vs-car per capita per-vehicle-kilometer rate, it's astonishing that Denmark's excellent urban planning has even influenced Danish drivers, in that it's more than twice as safe to drive in Denmark as it is to drive in the US. Contrary to your last statement, Denmark is RADICALLY safer because they drive less. Even drivers are safer because of the superior design of Danish cities and streets.

[pash]

> If you subtract out deaths due to drunkenness, cars kill less people than bathtubs.

In case anybody actually thought this might be true, here are some statistics that show it almost certainly isn't.

Accidental motor-vehicle crashes account for slightly more deaths than accidental drowning and falls combined; in America, about 35,000 people were killed in car crashes in 2013, while about 33,000 died by falling or drowning [0, 1]. Alcohol was involved in less than a third of traffic fatalities in the same year [2].

Meanwhile, figures for 1990–2010 show that only 9.7% of accidental drowning deaths occurred in bathtubs [3]. So roughly three quarters of all fatal falls must occur in bathtubs if we're going to reach the number of deaths caused by car crashes in which everybody involved is sober. I can't find figures, but the number of total deaths that occur in bathrooms suggests that it's not close.

0. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm

1. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf [PDF], see Table 10, p22

2. http://www.cdc.gov/Motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impai...

3. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db149.htm#x2013;2010...

[seanmcdirmid]

I saw a girl on a bike get hit and killed by a taxi trying to beat a light. She was going across even though the light was red, as is common in China. I'll never get the "crash" out of my head.

I don't really blame the driver, but the whole system is crazy: you have tons of cars and tons of non-cars (bikes, electric bikes, pedestrians) mixed up all together with limited infrastructure, these things are just bound to happen. I can't wait for self driving cars to be a thing, they'll be able to handle this much better.

[icebraining]

I agree, it's the drunk's fault. But that's irrelevant if you're trying to stop people from getting killed, instead of just trying to assign blame. What matters is what we can do about it, and pushing for a reduction in car usage is an effective way of reducing vehicular manslaughter.

Being drunk is not the only way to kill someone while driving at 100mph. As someone who was in a car when the steering wheel simply stopped controlling the wheels while we were in a road with heavy traffic, which culminated with it rolling over 270°, I can guarantee you that (nobody got killed, but it was pure luck).

EDIT: reduced dumb and useless aggressiveness.

[zo1]

"What matters is what we can do about it, and pushing for a reduction in car usage is an effective way of reducing vehicular manslaughter."

Let me play a bit of devil's advocate here. Where are you going to draw the line? All too often I see people talking about reducing this, preventing that, etc. However, everyone does so with all sorts of weird convenience and funding constraints/caveats, effectively reducing the problem to "how far can we take this before it becomes too inconvenient/expensive for us".

I say, if you want to prevent/fix something, do it. Throw money/laws at the problem until it goes away or is near-zero. I genuinely used to say that, and believe in it. These days, with my eventual political beliefs, I hope it gets taken seriously so we can all realize the futility in it. Like grasping a balloon in a fist.

[icebraining]

I view it in the opposite way - to me, there's nothing weird about stopping when it becomes too expensive; nor do I see a need to draw a line - each possible measure has a different line over which the costs are higher than its benefits.

I don't want to "declare war" on drunk driving. I want to take small and measurable steps that achieve a sustained y/y reduction in those deaths.

[lawnchair_larry]

And being in a car is not the only way to kill someone when you're drunk.

[zzleeper]

Alcohol? For me, every time during the day that I see a car doing stupid things (i.e. stuff that can kill me on my bike) they are on their phones. Looking down, driving erratically, either too fast or too slow, etc.

I still can't believe its not illegal to use the phone while driving on many parts of the US (and where its illegal, its just a slap on the wrist)

[lutorm]

According to NHTSA, 39% of all traffic fatalities in 2005 were alcohol-related. Your car is not "perfectly safe", not to you and certainly not to non-drivers around you, no matter what you would like to convince yourself.

[untog]

If you subtract out deaths due to drunkenness, cars kill less people than bathtubs.

If you remove a major cause of road deaths, road death becomes less common? You amaze me.

my car is perfectly safe and can only kill someone in a hit and run at 100 MPH if, and only if, I get drunk first.

Absolutely false. Everyone is capable of making mistakes, you and I included. You can be a perfect driver 99% of the time, but that one time when you look down because your phone went off, or because there was a noise on your right, or the guy coming the other way has his full beams in your face, or... you're deluded if you think you cannot possibly crash your car unless you are drunk.

[prawn]

I'm not really at risk of being killed by someone else's bathtub in my daily movements around a city...

[hobarrera]

False. Anywhere above 40km/h can kill a pedestrain. That's why speed limits in cities are usually around that value.