We should be retaking driver tests every seven to ten years to keep our license.

Poorly designed roads, signage, and intersections cause a lot of accidents. Think on ramps that throw you into traffic, and off-ramps that want you to get over three lanes after exiting in order to turn right at your cross street.

Lack of traffic enforcement drives up insurance costs and reduces city revenues. Some states have cheaped out on the reflective paint used to stripe roads, so you can’t see lane dividers in the rain. More of that wonderful “deregulation” and people not wanting to pay taxes I guess.

It also doesn’t help that many states are getting rid of car inspections for some bizarre reason. Not great to avoid shit falling off of the car in front of you when you’re going 70 mph.

But the question is deaths by car and you don’t need to entirely get rid of cars to make a huge difference.

• inspections. It boggles the mind that some places don’t have them

Traffic calming really can work. I’m not talking about speed bumps, but things like curb bumps to narrow the road at intersection while increasing pedestrian visibility, traffic islands, roundabouts. Even repainting lines can make a difference. My town’s master plan is driven by accident stats, so every road rework is a noticeable improvement

A couple years ago my town repainted a two lane road into one lane plus turn lanes. Now traffic is slower and calmer yet you get through that area more quickly. Most importantly it’s no longer one of the most dangerous roads in town

Most recently they built a median. This was a dangerous intersection because it always backed up so impatient people would blast straight through in the turn lanes, causing accidents. Now they can’t

And yes, because of Florida Man, my town built medians at every railroad crossing so idiots can’t go around the gates. We never had that problem, but idiocy is contagious.

Every city and town can make a difference. Now. Relatively cheaply. Just by collecting accident data and prioritizing by that. Just by making small changes a little at a time

there are precious few real, concrete plans for getting from the current situation to the car-free utopia.

Ban cars today and let people figure it out themselves.

I mean, how many times have we seen news reports of people intentially driving into protesters? I do wish they had the leading cause of death for comparison tho. Probably cancer, looks like a low-estimate is 6000 people a year just in Chicago.

Yeah heart disease kills more than either but we don’t hold candlelight vigils to ban butter. Because food is a normal part of life. I know a lot of people grow up with guns, but to me, guns are weird. I don’t know anyone who owns a gun. Not that I know of anyway. I have never held a gun. I have never seen a gun, except strapped to a cop walking by. I hope to never touch a gun (or be touched by one).

They don't have 50+ hours of mandatory training before hitting the roads like we do. In some states you can practically just go to an exam and luck out.

Their perception of freedom is messed up and literally causing huge amounts of unnecessary deaths.

Car guns. Fully automatic.

They are not alike. It’s a dumb comparison. Transport (albeit flawed) brings many more advantages than shooting people. That’s why people accept cars more than guns.

Vehicle fatalities are generally far higher than gun fatalities in the US. For decades it was the #1 cause of death under 45, only recently being dethroned to poisonings thanks to fentanyl

For Chicago, this is brought down by very low car ownership rate (by US standards), and a high gun fatality rate (including suicides by gun)

Still surprising guns have kept up though

Phobias are, by definition, irrational.

They should fear neither. Orders of magnitude relative risk to a minute risk is still very little.

Driving is orders of magnitude more likely to kill you at any second you're in a car, than flying is at any second you're in a plane.

This is an oft-repeated factoid that comes straight from the airlines bending statistics to meet their desires. It’s true that on a per mile basis, planes are safer. But on a per trip basis, cars actually win on safety.

And this makes some sense once you actually think about it. A car ride is typically going to be a frequent, short distance; An average of like 90% of all driving happens within 5 miles of the person’s home. Whereas air trips are infrequent and cover huge distances. So the accident-per-trip stat is watered down with cars having lots of trips, but the short distances tend to inflate the accident-per-mile number. In contrast, the accident-per-mile stat is watered down with planes covering a lot of miles per trip, but the infrequent nature of the trips means the accident-per-trip number is inflated.

And airlines conveniently only ever quote the accident-per-mile number when comparing safety statistics, because they have a vested interest in making airplanes seem statistically safer. If anything, seeing this factoid repeated is just a reminder that even math can be intentionally biased to fit a certain agenda.

I want to see it broken down into the fatal and non-fatal portions and also the mental health of the cars at the time of the crash.

I think the better stat would be time handling a gun/driving a car.

The average person probably spends about an hour in the car per day (based on some loose numbers I saw online). But I suspect the number of hours holding a gun is a lot less.

Its kinda like the fact that new Yorkers bite more people than sharks. It isn't because new Yorkers are more likely to bite you, but with eight million people interacting daily the amount of interactions outweighs the odds of a bite.

You need three prongs, infrastructure, training and enforcement. No one wants to spend the large amount of $ it would take to redesign thousands of miles of roads in each city. There is also the issue of how ridiculously low the bar is set for getting a license and how basic safety inspections are. In my state I can count on one hand how many times I've seen highway patrols enforcing traffic laws.

Right. I can't ride my gun to work or the grocery store. I get that there's a lot of negatives associated with car culture, but it's a tool in a way that firearms are not.

Cars, roads, and car culture are inflicting harm though, even if it’s seen as a neutral tool by many

Yeah, cars aren't even designed to kill people and they still do it just as much as guns. They're way too dangerous to be legal.

Are you saying that OP is making a "cheap false equivalence"? They are commenting on news coverage, so I don't follow what you mean.

Chicago is pretty different to most of the US. There is actual reliable public transit. The average resident isn't doing nearly the driving of the average American

cars, like guns, should require a mental check and a license to even purchase and own, be kept in secure storage, and only used in highly regulated locations where safety is guaranteed.

That doesn't make the comparison invalid, it can just be misleading to those with poor data literacy. Knowing how many "preventable" deaths from each source is valuable, but only if people are planning to do something about it.