> Perhaps it will finally cue people in to how intrinsically dangerous cars are.
Until you consider the _billions_ of miles that cars in the US drive every month. Cars are exceptionally safe, and they're getting better every year.. because we keep driving _more_ miles year after year, yet fatalities continue to drop.
Also, how do you interpret facts like: California has 30% more people living in it than Texas, yet TX has a _greater_ number of roadway fatalities than CA?
> they're still orders of magnitude more of a risk factor for ordinary
The problem is: you absolutely cannot view vehicles as a _single_ risk factor. Thus, any comparison between human drivers and AI drivers on these terms is flawed from the outset.
Cars are a leading cause of death in the US, especially among young people. That's a fact worth taking notice of, regardless of how many miles are driven or whatever else.
Yes, it's great that fatalaties are trending downwards.
So cap the power, weight and speed of cars young people are allowed to drive. In the US you can only vote at 21, but you can join the army and kill people if you're 18 and in most states drive powerful cars at 16 (although subject to some conditions such as a curfew and limits on the number of underage passengers present in the vehicle). In most European countries one can only drive heavy quadricycles (<=450 kg curb weight, <=15kW, <=45 km/h by construction) at 16 years of age.
Same for autonomous vehicles: until the NTSB or whatever federal or state agency is responsible decides which tech is mature enough and issues licenses for a given AV system. A person has to have a driver's license, however AV systems do not. Why not certify which of them are able to operate heavier/more powerful/faster vehicles without human intervention (meaning they'd slow down to a stop when the driver would take his/her hands off the wheel).
The problem with the "billions of miles" metric, I have nothing to compare it to. If you compare it to safe of trains or buses (at least in countries that properly fund their public transport), how does it compare?
Cars are not anything close to exceptionally safe. Indeed, they are the exact opposite: They are the most dangeorus thing that most people encounter on a daily basis.
There are many age and other cohorts of the population for which the leading cause of death is vehicles.
And compare against commercial aviation, which has a per-mile death rate three orders of magnitude less than driving.
> They are the most dangeorus thing that most people encounter on a daily basis.
It's actually yourself, and it's worse when you're at work. Deaths due to vehicles: 36k per year. Deaths due to suicides: 44k per year. Deaths due to accidents: 190k per year.
> There are many age and other cohorts of the population for which the leading cause of death is vehicles.
This is not true for any cohort. [1] And yes, I'm aware that accidental deaths include vehicular deaths, but if you dig into the FARS data [2] and do a comparison between the two sets, you'll see that this statement can't be correct.
It is; however, true that young men 15-24 exhibit the highest risk rate in vehicles compared to anyone else.. it's even 8x higher than females of the same age, but it doesn't make vehicles the greatest risk they face.
> And compare against commercial aviation, which has a per-mile death rate three orders of magnitude less than driving.
Yea, but a "deaths-per-journey" that's three times worse [3]. By the way, the aviation insurance industry uses the per-journey statistic, not the per-mile. Which further reveals my point, I don't think you can't take a single axis view on this information and come to any meaningful conclusion.
If we are considering deaths-per-journey, then cars look even worse when compared to planes: most people take many more journeys by car in comparison to planes. Let's say we take 500 journeys by car for every one journey we take by plane (not that outlandish), then cars are 1500 times worse than planes.
Edit: it seems like it is the other way around. Planes are 3 times as worse than cars per journey, so flip that number around a bit (3 times better, but 500 more trips, so cars are only 166 times more dangerous than planes).
> but 500 more trips, so cars are only 166 times more dangerous than planes
In terms of fatalities, yes. My data completely discounts non-fatal car accidents; however, there are far fewer "non fatal aircraft accidents" for obvious reasons. So, there's not a lot to glean from this, particularly given the highly regulated nature of aircraft operations in the USA and most of the world.
You could reduce vehicle fatalities by a huge amount just taking motorcycles off the road. They afford no protection to their passengers and increase fatalities just by existing.
You could reduce vehicle fatalities a huge amount by not allowing young men under the age of 24 to have a vehicle with more than 90 horsepower. They have a tendency to lose control of their vehicles and drive them off the road and into trees or other solid objects. Many also die because they weren't wearing a seatbelt and got ejected from the vehicle. Some survive all of that and die because while laying in the road injured, they got hit by a vehicle completely unrelated to their crash.
You could also get some reduction by creating safety systems that do less damage to elderly bodies in an accident. Protection of the heads and necks of adult passengers in the rear of the vehicle needs a lot of work currently. Way more elderly passengers die in the back of the car than in the front, even in low velocity (< 40mph) accidents.
You could eliminate 1/6 of all vehicle fatalities, 6000 per year, by removing pedestrians from the road. The fatalities are pretty well split across setting (rural/urban), sex, age and time of day. Sidewalks and traffic > 20mph is pure insanity.
You could also definitively figure out _why_ Texas has not only higher fatalities _by number_ but a much greater fatality _rate_ over California. A statistic I opened with because this is a _huge_ point. Seriously, look up the numbers per state; because, when I do, I _cannot_ come to a blanket conclusion like "cars are dangerous."
When really: Cars present _multiple_ and often _unrelated_ risk factors and we still have room for all kinds of incremental improvements in their overall safety.
Unrelated to my argument, but still a worthwhile thought: How much room is left for improvements in Aircraft safety? The most highly regulated and automated vehicle and transport system in service today?
Deaths per journey is also useless because a vehicle owner might make many trivial car trips per day, but when you're flying somewhere in a plane it's usually meaningful. For the same death rate, I'd much rather go on an awesome vacation across the world than on three errands.
I think it is, for a pretty reasonable slicing of the data. Here[1] you can find a table on pages 33-34 that contains cause of death by age cohort - the 15-24 group has only a single row that beats motor vehicle accidents, and it is "accidents", which motor vehicle accidents is considered a subset of.
I think part of the confusion from the table you linked to is that it doesn't contain motor vehicle deaths, and they are hidden in a weird way - in the 15-24 cohort, motor vehicle deaths are a substantial subset of all of the top 3 causes - unintentional injury, suicide, and homicide.
> By the way, the aviation insurance industry uses the per-journey statistic, not the per-mile.
That's perfectly reasonable for insurance purposes; a lot of the risk is concentrated in the takeoff and landing, so risk per journey is a more stable measure than risk per mile. But as a person who doesn't want to die, that's a nonsensical choice - I don't fly across the country because I wanted to take one journey; I fly across the country because I wanted to get somewhere that was 3000 miles away.
> think it is, for a pretty reasonable slicing of the data. Here[1]
You missed the reference.
> group has only a single row that beats motor vehicle accidents, and it is "accidents", which motor vehicle accidents is considered a subset of.
Right, but then you have to ask why? You might find a dataset which further breaks the cohort down into "Male" and "Female" categories; because when you do that, you'll see the data does not line up between the two at all. There will, last time I checked, be about an 8x difference between the two.
This highlights the fact that the driver of the vehicle carries the risk, _not_ some inherent property of the vehicle itself. Ask yourself this question: if we took cars away from young men, would they be any less prodigious when it comes to fatally injuring themselves? History and psychology suggest that they wouldn't fare any better.
> in the 15-24 cohort, motor vehicle deaths are a substantial subset of all of the top 3 causes - unintentional injury, suicide, and homicide.
Suicidal behavior is not a risk factor that you can then translate to vehicles, neither homicide for the reasons I stated above. Finally, when you compare total vehicle fatalities for the cohort to the accidental death category for the same cohort, you realize it's around 30% of the overall deaths. When the 15-24 group injures themselves, it most often _does not_ involve a vehicle.
> a lot of the risk is concentrated in the takeoff and landing
Aircraft bodies are only rated for a certain number of "pressure cycles." There's genuine risk baked right into the airframe.
> Until you consider the _billions_ of miles that cars in the US drive every month. Cars are exceptionally safe, and they're getting better every year.. because we keep driving _more_ miles year after year, yet fatalities continue to drop.
How many people do pedestrians kill per mile? Or bicycle? Or subway?
And either way, cars are still the number one killer if you look at miles per death.
Until you consider the _billions_ of miles that cars in the US drive every month. Cars are exceptionally safe, and they're getting better every year.. because we keep driving _more_ miles year after year, yet fatalities continue to drop.
Also, how do you interpret facts like: California has 30% more people living in it than Texas, yet TX has a _greater_ number of roadway fatalities than CA?
> they're still orders of magnitude more of a risk factor for ordinary
The problem is: you absolutely cannot view vehicles as a _single_ risk factor. Thus, any comparison between human drivers and AI drivers on these terms is flawed from the outset.