You're way more likely to die riding in your car than riding public transit. It's not even close. Riding in your car is likely the most dangerous thing you'll do and yet people just act like it's a totally safe thing to do.
Nobody(TM) is worried about the tiny risk of dying. They're worried about the risk of being victim of a crime or other unpleasantry at the hand of someone else, a risk which is small and fairly up to change on transit but damn near zero for most people in their own car and if not nearly zero almost completely up to them and how they conduct themselves.
People get shot and battered from road rage incidents, I've had friends get put in the hospital because of someone else's road rage. People die from drunk driving and people running red lights. Driving a car isn't a guarantee you won't be a victim of a crime. It actually means you're more likely to die from one.
And it's not a tiny risk of being injured by a car. About 2.5 million injuries a year in the US are caused by automobiles.
Just look at this chart and tell me how massively unsafe riding the train is.
You're ignoring that the average ride on Muni, Bart, or AC Transit involves someone who's visibly or audibly tweaking out, loudly muttering curse words or threats to themselves / others, blasting music in the back from a tinny phone speaker, carrying a bag of cans and/or trash, or smelling offensively bad. It's no wonder that people won't want to take transit.
Source: someone who takes transit almost daily and has seen a LOT, and has received death threats on the bus twice in one year.
Meanwhile, here in India, where there absolutely are valid questions over the behavior of general public as a whole, particularly over freeloading, crowding, decorum and cleanliness issues: I don't think there are many tweaking, curse words or death threat complaints going around in public transit.
>people get shot and battered from road rage incidents,
Yes, they do. I was specifically thinking of replies like this when I said the risk is "almost completely up to them and how they conduct themselves."
>I've had friends get put in the hospital because of someone else's road rage.
And what role did they play in developing that situation? I'm serious. The frequency of road range in which the victim did not take action or willful inaction through ignorance or malice is vanishingly, vanishingly, tiny. While I am sympathetic to people who do truly mean well but are simply ignorant the degree to which road rage is a meeting between those disposed to violence and those disposed to entitlement and "bad but within the rules" behavior I consider it a generally self solving problem.
It's kind of like my elderly and senile mother who's been in a couple accidents that aren't technically "her fault" but she most certainly precipitated by failing to drive responsibly even though she doesn't see why it might not be ideal of her to panic stop rather than miss her exist on a major highway in a major city.
> And what role did they play in developing that situation?
Driving the speed limit and stopping at a stop sign was one of these instances. I watched the dash cam of that.
Another instance I saw was someone flying up a shoulder trying to get around a big traffic jam. After three or four cars denied him merging in, he took out a gun and started shooting at cars.
And you're still just going to ignore all the victims of people not paying attention, of people tailgating, of drunk drivers, of people driving recklessly.
Drunk driving is a crime. It hurts other people more than it hurts the drunks. It has absolutely no bearing on how the victim carried themself. You can just be driving normally and completely following the law and a drunk t-bones you at 70mph through a red light.
You can be driving normally and just happen to draw the ire of a road rager and have them shoot you or commit other forms of violence against you. Happens more often than you think.
A person on the train is unlikely to have a weapon on them. Every other person on the road is piloting a giant death machine capable of hurting a lot of people in a moment's notice even if by accident.
People act like they're all safe in a car but once again it's the thing most likely to cause you serious injury in your life outside of your diet.
You're more likely to be the victim of a crime that will seriously hurt, maim, or kill you driving a car than riding the train.
Hey, maybe I reduce the odds of getting pickpocketed today by massively increasing the odds of getting killed by a drunk driver. Seems like a excellent trade!
> Riding in your car is likely the most dangerous thing you'll do
Not even remotely close. Anytime you elevate your feet more than 6' of the ground you can fall and kill yourself. This is 2x more common than vehicle fatalities and is in the category of "accidental self inflicted injury." The third most common cause of death. Vehicles are like #11. You're more likely to commit suicide than die in a car accident.
I'm in my car multiple times a day. I'm probably only 6'+ off the ground once a month or so. And I do agree in any given situation I'm more likely to be seriously injured using a power tool than I am driving, but once again I rarely use those while I'm in a car several times a day.
> I'm probably only 6'+ off the ground once a month or so
Do you never take the stairs?
> but once again I rarely use those while I'm in a car several times a day.
Which is why your car has a built in safety system and your power drill doesn't. The majority of fatal accidents involve drugs or alcohol. 15% are motorcycles and 15% are pedestrians. We see all miles as "passenger miles" in a vehicle but there are "inebriated passenger miles" and "sober passenger miles" with wildly different expectations between them.
Not daily (often not even weekly), and a lot of the stairs I do take have regular landings. I work from home, live in a one-story home, stores around me are often on the ground floor, etc. I figured your 6' off the ground was mostly focused on things like working on a roof, climbing ladders, being in a bucket lift, being on scaffolds, being near ledges, etc. But yes, stairs do cause a lot of injuries. Nowhere near as many deaths as automobiles though, and usually fewer injuries. So even climbing stairs is less risky than being around automobiles.
> The majority of fatal accidents involve drugs or alcohol
You don't have to be the drunk one to be the fatality in a collision involving alcohol. Once again, acting like if you do everything right, you'll be fine. Even if you're a perfect driver, you're surrounded by imperfect ones.
15% being pedestrians doesn't mean driving the car is safe, it's still an injury related to a dangerous task of driving a car. But I guess you're of the mindset as long as you aren't the one getting hurt its somehow OK?
But in the end, we're still just splitting hairs here. Operating and being around automobiles is a risky thing practically all Americans do without even thinking about the safety of it, and for a lot of people it is the least safe thing they'll do that day. 40,000 people a year die from automobiles and well over a million get injured.
