Bloomberg: People need a reality check. Despite common assumptions, traveling by bus, subway or train is actually safer than driving.
It's safer because the incidence of crime is very low and the incidence of car fatalities is comparably high.
But these modes of transit also put you in close proximity to strangers. And we've deluged our already-somewhat-xenophobic brains with news gore that amounts to "Stranger Danger!!!" squarely fixated on mass transit. Also doesn't help that most modern mass transit lines have a disproportionate number of Evil Poors.
So anxiety is higher for infrequent users of mass transit. And that's a much bigger influence on people than the real (and overall very rare) risk of car injury or crime.
Same as people think cycling is dangerous. In reality, cycling makes, on average, your life longer, while driving a car makes it shorter. And this is because lack of excercise is killer number 1, and cars are like a comfortable but very unhealthy drug.
It's worse than that. In the US cars are the #1 non-medical way people die. They're fucking killing people and we've grown so accustomed to just shrugging our shoulders when yet another person is killed by a car that it's weird just how little we notice what's causing our suffering.
I'm up to two dead family members from different car accidents. Another few have been in major accidents and others hit by cars. Once you start looking at just how many people are harmed, both directly and indirectly (family, friends) its scary that these predators are allowed to just roam our cities on the scale they do.
Cycling is dangerous. It's inherently a lot safer, but when you get bumped by a car in the morning because some wage slave didn't have time for their morning coffee that day, it's a lot safer to be in a car. Couple this with unreliable and expensive public transport and you have the recipe that made me give up on cycling to school/work after over 25 years and get a driving licence. The tipping point for me was being hit by a car going at least ten miles over the limit on a straight, totally empty road in broad daylight while wearing a hi-vis jacket and barely walking away from it. A few inches the other way and I would certainly have been killed. Nope. Nope nope nope. I've put on a lot of weight since then and I am not enjoying car ownership much, financially. But sadly I have had a traumatic experience and I just feel nervous about cycling now, even after all those years.
Cycling is dangerous.
Sure, there are accidents with bikes. I do not want to discount your trauma (I had a traumatic car accident waliking when I was a pupil), and I had on the bike a collision with car whose driver took a left turn without looking.
I also have seen two probably fatal bike accidents in my life, where cars turning rolled over bikes and a lot of blood was left on the street.
The numerous terrible accidents with cars, when we pass wrecks on the highway, we somehow don't register that much.
But the whole point is, you will objectively and statistically live longer when you use a bike. Our views and risk perception are a bit distorted. And this is because cars are also dangerous to our health.
This is the first time I hear such an assumption. Are you sure it really exists or is common?
Carbrains have always been convinced that public transit is dangerous because it puts them in the proximity of the poors
Weird.
I know a lot of carbrains, a and I have heard this precisely zero times in my life.
They do say it's expensive, though. And then the "I have children, I therefore couldn't survive without a car", while in reality children are in reality an obvious argument against using a car.
But yeah, the argument about expenses is funny.
The total cost of owning and using a car is around 300 € per month. (And my parents say they are paying aboout 400 €)
A public transportation ticket costs some 85 € per.month.
It's amazing that people are willing to pay 300 € to save 85 €. And I woild say that's an argument I hear from at least 30 % of my city's adult population.
(But "dangerous" is an argument I have never heard against public transportation, in any case)
It is absolutely true. I grew up in a large urban city but now I live and work in rural, very conservative area. People who have never been within 20 miles of an urban area think it is a garentee that if you step on a train or bus, there will be someone running end to end giving everyone the "London Special" 🔪. Some people seemed genuinely surprised to hear that I've never been robbed or had my car stolen. It is fucking wild what happens when someone watches nothing but Fox News all day
i'v been mulling over the idea of just how you even begin to deprogram half a country off of such engrained propaganda.
it's not even just fox news either, murdoch owns WSJ and like half the "independent" radios across the country
It is easily the most common answer I hear to the "why don't you use transit in this city that is very well served by a robust network and also REALLY sucks to drive in?" question.
I've heard it before including from people on Lemmy. However, I usually hear it more where people are concerned with their personal safety around other people and not with their safety cage.
Even within the realm of fatality statistics on transit, about half are trespassing and suicide events (from FTA data for 2024). So the rate of homicide and violent incidents towards regular passengers is even lower than the reported statistics on the dangerousness of transit.
(Everyone that drives, including myself): Yeah but I'm a good driver. I'm more worried about other people on the road then myself.
For real though, if I had the option to take public transportation to where I work I would take that pretty much daily. Cars are expensive and dangerous even if you are a good driver. And if my car broke down I could lose my job. The fact that so many people in car centric countries don't even have a back up when things go wrong is abysmal.
I know a bunch of people who readily admit they’re bad drivers. But there literally are no classes in their country to improve their practical skills.
The fact that so many people in car centric countries don't even have a back up when things go wrong is abysmal.
“We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas” is the theme with car-centric countries. Or they tried, built 1/10 of a solution and then absolutely neutered it by making it somehow secondary to cars. Where they do have practical public transit it’s absolutely slammed full of people but they wont even maintain let alone invest in it.
We moved from the US to a developed nation. Sold the car on the way out the door. Haven't looked back. Love living without the car. Our kids are so much safer here. Even the cars that are around driver slower and the roads are human scale so we have wide sidewalks with narrow streets to cross.
I commute by tram and train to work and shopping is mostly done on foot. When we need more, we can always rent a van for a day or do a delivery service. There's also the cargo bike option, which works for upwards of small appliances without much trouble.
When all you have is a car, everything looks like a place to put more roads.
Plenty of comments here : "Well OK but I know this guy..." or "my opinion is..." whereas the article is precisely about perception vs reality.
I've literally never heard someone claim that buses and trains are more dangerous than cars.
Same, but I have no doubt they're out there.
If Camel said with a strait face that cigarettes increase health, I'm certain there have been public advertisements at least insinuating that a car is safter than public transportation.
Every single city community group in the US has a vocal population that swears the local bus service is filled with nothing but homeless murderers and thieves and that's why public transit should never be built and will never be used by anyone normal
Ask people how they get their kids to school and if its safer to drive them or send them on the bus
Eh... I did and they didn't mean safety from accidents, they meant safety from crime. Nobody is going to pickpocket (might get carjacked at an intersection) or insult you (well...) in your car but in the subway they might.
one of the reasons why i bought a goddamn manual threadmill instead of walking around the city is because, from where i live, some of these drivers tends to hit pedestrians who are in the side of the road and on the FREAKING pedestrian lane, like idk whats up with these people...idk if they're in a rush? a total nutcase? or just too stupid to drive a vehicle.
I’m not sure who is making the argument that these are less safe, but I’d have to imagine that if someone is making that argument it’s on bad faith.
How could you believe that being surround by hundreds of poorly qualified drivers to and from work every day is more safe than a single trained (haha) professional handling that task while all the tired and bored people sit back and relax?
Anytime they expanded the local rail system in Virginia all the drivers would say it increases the chance of a train to car collision. Wankers.
this is the country that'll only expand rail-crossing to safer tiers if enough peoppe die at one, right?
They have to actually exist as options, though...
Not safety, Way way way fucking safer. Does anyone think otherwise?
This is gonna shock you, but everyone who watches Fox thinks otherwise. They legitimately think because they have a big mega truck they're safer. I've heard my own relatives say you're more likely to get stabbed and robbed on a train than a car accident. They bought fully into the car brain.
Of course, driving seems safer than getting on a bus or climbing down into a subway station. Motorists have a sense of control and feel protected in their vehicles. In contrast, transit travel means sharing enclosed spaces with crowds of unpredictable strangers, which naturally invokes anxiety.
Yeah, but social contracts go out the window whenever people feel protected. Whether that be by a steel frame or internet anonymity. When exposed, everyone behaves much better.
We should be more aggressively taking licenses away from folks who shouldn't be driving. Honestly like half of the people currently on the road. Then watch how much safer everything gets, and how much more popular busses and trains become.
Yes, but jumping in front of a moving train is much more dangerous than jumping in front of a parked car. Checkmate, car haters!
Having worked at the railways, I would kindly request you don't mention what you just did.
Every time we read in some newspaper that someone had died, we knew that within the next about three days, a colleague or two will get traumatized by having to see someone's last facial expression right before a horrible clattering sound coming from the bottom of the locomotive. It was a rare exception that a newspaper mentioned someone having jumped in front of the train and there not being at least one person who got inspired by that article. And then, a long time without such accidents or almost no such accidents. Until there's an article mentioning this, and then there will be a couple in the next few days. Again.
And mind you, this is in a country with 5 million people. If it's written in a paper with tens of millions of readers, the article's killcount will be increased in proportion to the population difference.
The train drivers were telling me how they still sometimes wake up in the middle of a night because of someone having used them for a suicide two decades earlier. That they can still crystal clearly remember the last expression on the person's face.
Suicide is always an incorrect solution, because there's always a way out, and there will always be people who will be devastated. But at least, if someone absolutely must do the mistake of killing themself, then please, at least don't wreck anyone else's sanity by using them as an instrument for your death.
I'm not sure if a post on the Forumverse will cause someone to alter a suicide plan to include a train, but it's always a possibility. And the results on others' minds are not nice to see.
Good comment, man. Believe it or not, I did not even make my comment with suicide in mind, that is something I usually try to avoid for this exact reason. But I see now how that's actually the obvious conclusion to make here.
Lol not where I live. People get stabbed on busses here.
That's terrible yet I believe the point is that those are freak events that do not represent the statistical reality. It happens, sure, but it's very infrequent and it also happens that violence happen in cars too.
The question is how likely it is to happen per person per trip, or some way to genuinely compare both situation.
Crazy, people get shot in their cars here
Does that happen daily or hourly?