The car doesnt kill anybody. Its the driver on their phone, checking their nails, eating McDonald’s, etc that kill people.
the car absolutely kills people. that same big mac licking driver on a bike or bus or scooter causes 0 deaths. it’s the cars
Okay, yes. You are correct. The weight of the car is what does the damage since a bike or scooter doesnt kill people. However, the carelessness of the driver is at fault. If the person never got in the car and ate the big mac the car would not have killed somebody. Because the car would never have moved.
No it doesn’t lol. You need an operator for a car to function. Cars just don’t go driving around running into people and random objects. If you get into an accident, who do they go after? The at fault driver. Not the car. It wasn’t the vehicles fault it got into an accident. It was the person operating said vehicle.
Operator error.
Edit: I’m starting to think most people here just don’t want to take responsibility for being stupid. Downvote all you want, drivers in cars kill people, not the car itself.
while you are factually correct that the human is a part of the chain of blame, it is systemically inefficient to blame the driver
in order to make systemic change and make cars safer, we CANNOT say “oh lol drivers fault, get good.” expecting that order of change from hoards of people is unrealistic.
however if i blame unsafely sized cars, fast, wide unsafe roads, a failure of US public transport—these are also realistic points of systemic change that i can point to.
tldr cars are unsafe, cars need to get safer, no amount of blaming the driver will solve things
Build a decent train line and those people using phones or checking they nails will not put anyone in danger.
I’m all for better public transit.
But for those of us who don’t live in a city, it’s not an option. I live about a five minute walk from my nearest neighbor, and a 20 minute drive from work. I’m not in a neighborhood or apartment. They could not feasibly build a rail system to service me and the millions of others who live like I do.
Busses are an option but then my commute would start hours earlier, and they would not pay for themselves where I live. Or I would be paying a very high fair.
Just build a rail system is not the solution.
Public transit isn’t supposed to “pay for itself” via fares. It is a net-good that makes it so that everyone doesn’t need a car and all the supporting infrastrucutre and wastes of space and energy that cars require.
If cars weren’t subsidized to be the primary mode of transportation, you wouldn’t live “5 miles from your neighbor,” and you wouldn’t need a car to get to work.
Public transport isn’t supposed to “pay for itself”. How about asphalt roads in your area, have they paid for themselves?
As much attention EVs get car fires kill about 500+ people per year in the US and cause over 1.9Billion in property damage.
Regular gas cars have been recalled many times for spontaneous combustion while parked burning down garages and homes.
Most of the time however yes it is from operators driving.
Its also people who dont know how to cross the street or anyone who disobeys traffic laws. Ive seen bikes just run red lights, dart through stop signs, people just cross against the light without even looking.
Its general carelessness with regards to the roads
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. You’re not wrong. It’s the operator. If people actually drove responsibly, we probably wouldn’t have as many issues. There are definitely too many distractions, and people in general just naturally mind wander.
That being said, it would be much better to have a mass transit system. Less accidents, I can watch my phone, do my nails, and eat my mcdonald’s without worry of killing someone.
Dude also forgot that cars used to be cars and not ww2 tank sized monstrosities
But that’s the thing: like you say, people are naturally prone to “mind-wander”, keeping that in mind and to then compare the amount of rigorous training and checking that pilots have to go through compared to the in comparison measly process of acquiring a driver’s license (and then indefinitely keeping it with no questions asked unless you do indeed run somebody over) is absolutely mind-boggling. Some countries have some safequards in place such as required driving-tests when you reach a certain age as a driver but it still does in no way account for how much of a murder-machine cars are and how casual we are about just about everyone with a shrimp for a brain driving them.
What we need is mass transit with cubes. I think a lot of the reason people dont like busses is having to listen to peoples screaming children, dealing with drunks, etc. I imagine a bus with small cubes that are soundproof kinda like those portable toilets but with a bus seat instead. Get on the bus, pay, go into an empty cube, slide the door closed. No crying babies, drunk people, etc. Pull the cord when your stop is announced.
Good idea but you lose a huge amount of capacity with the cubes. It would still be magnitudes more efficient than a car per person though.
