this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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It’s an older article, but the point stands!

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (7 children)

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:

  • Motorcycle: 21.3%
  • Car: 7.3%
  • Ferry 3.2%
  • Amtrak: 0.43%
  • Airplane: 0.07%

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:

  • Motorcycle: 0.426%
  • Car: 0.146%
  • Ferry: 0.064%
  • Amtrak: 0.0086%
  • Airplane: 0.0014%

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

if we divide each of those percentages by 50, we should come up with the odds of dying in a given vehicle per year,

I'm being very nitpicky but this isn't quite how it works, if you have a 90% chance of survival one year, you'd have 0.9^2 = 0.81= 81% chance of surviving two years in a row. With that in mind, the odds of dying should be relative to the fiftieth root of surviving fifty years, which gives:

  • Motorcycle: 0.478%
  • Car: 0.151%
  • Ferry: 0.065%
  • Amtrak: 0.0086%
  • Airplane: 0.0014%

Without additional decimals it's hard to see the change for the really small numbers but it doesn't make much of a difference in reality.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you, 1/5 of lifetime motorcyclists dying in wreck doesn’t add up.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have no idea about the statistics about motorcycle fatalities and for personal reasons I'd prefer not to get into them. I was just commenting on the way the statistics were calculated year-by-year with the assumption that the original statistics for fifty years were accurate. That being said, it's possible that those statistics were not completely correctly calculated as well.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The fifty year statistics were also computed wrong, for the same reason you already explained. It doesn't make much of a difference since the probabilities are so small anyway.

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