It's amazing how much death and disease we're willing to suffer for the sake of convenience, isn't it.

We treat automobiles as a necessity of modern life in all places, but it wasn't always this way. In the 1910s and 20s, many writers excoriated all of the roads bringing dangerous cars into places where people live and play. It turns out they were right, but we just became blind to the danger.

More people died in those years of horse and cart related deaths proportionate to per capita than they do today by auto-mobiles. Both indirectly and directly.

Read Super Freakonomics for the interesting data that they observe between the two.

but we tolerated a lot more (early) death from all causes in those days, in part be cause we didn't have technology to mitigate those risks. The argument I am trying to make is that we have technology (public transit) that would mitigate those risks now, but we choose not to use it.

(My assertion is that if we had a place where we had US standard driving safety requirements but more than half the miles traveled were via public transit, we would have fewer per capita injuries. Or more generally, that the per capita injuries goes up with miles driven in cars. I have so far failed to provide statistical evidence of this.)

In the latest season of Black Mirror, the most dangerous technology is cars: https://medium.com/@galencro/whats-up-with-car-accidents-and...