> Reviewing British fatality rates from previous centuries, demographer P. E. H. Hair concluded in 1971 that the “supercession of the horse by the internal combustion engine was by no means the disaster in terms of travel safety it is often supposed to have been,” and suggested that between 1840 and 1900, accidents involving horses produced an average yearly mortality rate of about five per 100,000 population
> fatality rates from horse-powered transportation occurred at a rate more than 15 times greater per mile in 1775 than from motor vehicles in 2000 (even using very conservative estimates for per-mile horse-related fatalities)
> In New York in 1900, 200 persons were killed by horses and horse-drawn vehicles. This contrasts with 344 auto-related fatalities in New York in 2003; given the modern city’s greater population, this means the fatality rate per capita in the horse era was roughly 75 percent higher than today. Data from Chicago show that in 1916 there were 16.9 horse-related fatalities for each 10,000 horse-drawn vehicles; this is nearly seven times the city’s fatality rate per auto in 1997.
Only if you've been not looking through e.g. the entire history of the NHTSA. Comparing horseless carriages under modern safety regulations to horse-drawn carriages not subject to those is a huge confounder. (And 1997-2000 sounds like a cherry-picked period; motor vehicles have been redesigned to kill significantly more pedestrians since then).
Modifiers like that don't really matter because the comment was acting like the alternative was zero deaths.
And modern safety regulations can only have so much influence on pedestrians especially.
> (And 1997-2000 sounds like a cherry-picked period; motor vehicles have been redesigned to kill significantly more pedestrians since then).
Well I'll assume if we were using carriages en masse they'd also be going through design changes to kill more people since that seems simplest and still supports my point that there would be many deaths.
Not necessarily, they could just mean many fewer deaths.
> Well I'll assume if we were using carriages en masse they'd also be going through design changes to kill more people since that seems simplest
It's not simple, there's a lot of complexity and path dependence to how we've ended up with these car designs and there's no reason to believe it would happen in the same way and the same order for carriages. But regardless, you have to average over such variations rather than picking one unrepresentative point.
> and still supports my point that there would be many deaths.
No it doesn't; you're cherry-picking the years when motor traffic was least deadly and comparing to a random time (or perhaps even the most deadly time?) for horse traffic.
Maybe but "Imagine not having" sure sounds like you remove the deaths entirely.
> you're cherry-picking the years
That's a quote of an article that only compares those years. I'll thank you not to accuse me of cherry-picking here.
> It's not simple, there's a lot of complexity and path dependence to how we've ended up with these car designs and there's no reason to believe it would happen in the same way and the same order for carriages. But regardless, you have to average over such variations rather than picking one unrepresentative point.
You wanted to consider "modern safety regulations" as a confounding factor.
I see three options here.
1. Let's assume carriages would have undergone the same evolution of safety. That means modern carriages would have a lower death rate than old ones. It also makes the possible cherry-picking matter a lot less because the increasing menace of transportation over the last 20 years would be the same either way.
2. We say it's too complex and ignore those factors.
3. We invent an entire alternate history in excruciating detail.
Option 2 is bad, of course. I think option 1 is fine. If you want option 3, you're on your own.
That's like saying it's fine to compare the cost of houses in New York and San Francisco by comparing the cost of a house in New York in 1998 to the cost of a house in San Francisco in 2009, because house prices change at more or less the same rate everywhere in the country. It's true that house prices tend to go up or down at a similar rate everywhere, but it's still a problem if you cherry-pick the two years you're making a comparison with!
https://www.accessmagazine.org/spring-2007/horse-power-horse...
You can criticize their choice of sources, you can dig deeper and provide more comprehensive data, but going post after post admonishing them for cherry-picking data that is just gauche. They didn't pick the years!
But since they are just presenting you with the most commonly available data, nothing you say will make them produce different results.
Imagine not having 40,000 deaths a year, and many more seriously injured.