Fuck Cars
This community exists as a sister community/copycat community to the r/fuckcars subreddit.
This community exists for the following reasons:
- to raise awareness around the dangers, inefficiencies and injustice that can come from car dependence.
- to allow a place to discuss and promote more healthy transport methods and ways of living.
You can find the Matrix chat room for this community here.
Rules
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Be nice to each other. Being aggressive or inflammatory towards other users will get you banned. Name calling or obvious trolling falls under that. Hate cars, hate the system, but not people. While some drivers definitely deserve some hate, most of them didn't choose car-centric life out of free will.
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No bigotry or hate. Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, chauvinism, fat-shaming, body-shaming, stigmatization of people experiencing homeless or substance users, etc. are not tolerated. Don't use slurs. You can laugh at someone's fragile masculinity without associating it with their body. The correlation between car-culture and body weight is not an excuse for fat-shaming.
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Stay on-topic. Submissions should be on-topic to the externalities of car culture in urban development and communities globally. Posting about alternatives to cars and car culture is fine. Don't post literal car fucking.
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No traffic violence. Do not post depictions of traffic violence. NSFW or NSFL posts are not allowed. Gawking at crashes is not allowed. Be respectful to people who are a victim of traffic violence or otherwise traumatized by it. News articles about crashes and statistics about traffic violence are allowed. Glorifying traffic violence will get you banned.
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No reposts. Before sharing, check if your post isn't a repost. Reposts that add something new are fine. Reposts that are sharing content from somewhere else are fine too.
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No misinformation. Masks and vaccines save lives during a pandemic, climate change is real and anthropogenic - and denial of these and other established facts will get you banned. False or highly speculative titles will get your post deleted.
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No harassment. Posts that (may) cause harassment, dogpiling or brigading, intentionally or not, will be removed. Please do not post screenshots containing uncensored usernames. Actual harassment, dogpiling or brigading is a bannable offence.
Please report posts and comments that violate our rules.
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Before I make this statement, yeah, I know where I am.
All of these fatality rates, for all of these forms of transportation, are vanishingly small. Comparing the rates of one vehicle to another with phrases like "17 times more likely" while ignoring the "billion passenger-miles" scale is misleading.
In order to present these in a more complete way, the odds of dying on each of these vehicles is:
That is per mile, which is usually not the distance humans limit themselves to in their lives. Assuming you travel a million miles in your life, you do have a 20% chance of dying if exclusively using a motorcycle, which I would consider relevant. The change from car to train already far less so.
Fair and excellent points.
Assuming 20,000 miles traveled per year, it would take 50 years to reach 1,000,000 miles. So let's lay out the % odds of fatality over 50 years, at 20,000 miles per year, if using each of these means exclusively:
You're also getting at another important point: it is difficult for people to really comprehend very large or very small numbers. With that in mind, if we divide each of those percentages by 50, we should come up with the odds of dying in a given vehicle per year, again, given a 20,000 mile per year usage and exclusive use of one vehicle type:
Of these, only motorcycle and car are anywhere near significant, and they're still really unlikely. The remaining three still are small enough to be essentially incomprehenisble. (And who travels 20,000 miles a year on a ferry, anyway?)
Another bit I would like to note is that the comparison posed was between car and train, based on safety. Why was airplane not mentioned? It's far and away the least likely to kill you.
Of course airplane wasn't mentioned. Airplanes are not appropriate solutions to many kinds of necessary travel, and airplanes in general have a worse reputation for their environmental effects. Trains are not solutions to many kinds of necessary travel, either, at least not in the current landscape of travel options available to very many people in the United States.
Again, I know exactly where I'm commenting. I definitely think that there should be way more public transportation options available. I think the number of individual-operated vehicle miles can and should be reduced. I think the kinds of individual-operated vehicles should be addressed more sensibly (we don't get to have the small pickups of the 80s and 90s because of unintended consequences of CAFE standards driving manufacturers to create larger and larger "light" trucks, for example).
Pointing out that "cars are 17 times more likely to kill you than trains!" does not serve the purpose of making a better world through transportation reform.
1 in 1000 is not really unlikely if it is in regards to your life ending.
However even taking your number it would lead to devastating pictures.
2 married people with 4 grandparents 1 aunt 3 friends and 3 kids means every year 22+-5 out of a small 1000 family neighbourhood will be affected by car deaths.
Assuming that a relevant time period is from the birth of a child till it is 30 and therefore might have had a child of their own, so 30 years we get that around 66%+-10% of families will be affected. Instead of only 1-3 families during that time.
You did not lift the veil of ignorance, you created a new veil of diffusion.
It would mean that two out of three families would lose a close person within a 30 year generation due to cars, instead of only a small percentage. This is the power of the 17 times!
The alternative of train rides would mean that within a generation virtually no family is affected by car deaths.