The US has a whole lot more miles of road, and a lot more miles traveled, but I'd be extremely surprised if there weren't areas that prove to be far more dangerous than any other mile of road, and where some efforts couldn't minimize the problem. The way we look at traffic is so much different though: In Spain most roads where cars travel fast tend to be outside of cities. In the US, we have a wide variety of streets rated at 30-40mph, With width and sight lines like roads where you could do 60, but that are really suburban streets where people might actually attempt to cross the street. Who is going to want to track, and fix, the fact that there are a lot of accidents near a high school, in a place where people do 45mph, and teenagers are trying to cross the street to get to the only nearby convenience store?

We build more dangerously, and organize our government in ways where it's far less likely accountability will happen.

[0] https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2010/04/inflated_traffic...

Wary = cautious about

This long lecture is making me weary.

He was wary of drunk people with an attitude.

I can't find a source for it, but they are definitely rarer than most other places, and I feel like they are taken more serious because of it.

It's true however that some countries are more prone to what I call "traffic restrictions overshoot" then others - e.g. in Italy there are many stretches of highway limited to 50 km/h, apparently in hopes that drivers will at least reduce their speed to 70-80 km/h, and many STOP signs hoping that drivers will at least slow down at the intersection.

But I'd think a Give Way sign should suffice in practice even if the intersection has poor visibility. Only if the intersection proves to cheat drivers in to thinking the visibility is not so bad (and hence drivers won't slow down enough) is a Stop sign needed?

It's the old "if it looks safe but isn't".

For safety, the crosses should probably be placed far ahead of the dangerous corner, not distracting drivers at the precise point they most need to pay attention.

Perhaps they could install some sort of blinking warning light on top of the hill and maybe joyriding teenagers would heed that warning, or maybe not. Otherwise I think you'd have to cut through the hill or move the roads completely, either of which there probably isn't much money for.

On the side of a hill? That's a ton of earthwork.

Country lanes don't get roundabouts. There's no money for that.

This also seems to be farm country. Converting productive fields to non-productive traffic calming structures would be about as popular as banning pickup trucks.

A example of this (here done for laugh) is [0], where a single lane muddy curvy hillside road has a speed limit of 80 km/h (50 mph).

The point I would like to make here is that on a street like this is it impossible to joyride and even with low visibility intersections the risk of a T-bone or a fatal crash is minuscule.

This particular example is a strawman of the problem: there are many reasons why most roads cannot be like this, it is just an example of "If the drivers have to pay attention they will pay attention"

[0] https://funsubstance.com/fun/294735/irish-speed-sign/

https://youtu.be/lkmBP-ISzKk

The vast majority of rural roads get plowed. Everyone who lives in a rural area has at least one plowed route from their driveway to the rest of the world.

I'd just love it if roundabout signs posted before the entrance showed: * The lane starting from the left, that you need to be in to get to a certain exit * Number of lanes/exit

Atm it's a bunch of guesswork involving: * Not being able to see the arrows/road names painted on the road because THEY'RE COVERED BY CARS OH HOW DID WE NOT THINK OF THIS * Not being able to see the arrows/road names painted on the road because they're so faded because they haven't been painted in 5-10 years

It's several orders of magnitudes different amounts of effort. Putting up a cross can be done one person in an hour. Fixing a road or intersection is months of work for tens of people,several machines, tonnes of material. Source: I've worked on making several dangerous intersection less dangerous

Economics/value of human lives at play, I guess...

I mean, I want to know when I'm on a road that's got problems, so it's useful for that much I guess, but we kind of have that already in form of the roadside memorial (Descansos) trend that crept north from Mexico and Texas, If a road merits a "safety corridor" sign changes should be being made, otherwise you risk an incentive to build dangerous roads or to do nothing more about them in order to make more money on traffic tickets.

The most dangerous roadways are what Strong Towns (article source) refers to as a stroad, which are characterized by many, wide lanes, with frequent turnoffs and other points of conflict. They make drivers feel safe, and so they go fast (regardless of speed limit) and kill people. There is a lot more nuance there that is valuable to learn about, but at the moment, it is really difficult to build safe streets, and even fix unsafe streets, in North America.

This relates to a general issue with society(in the US, and to varying extents in other industrialized countries) that has gradually crept up over time: in the post-war period, one-size-fits-all bureaucracy was normalized across many institutions. The rules were necessarily kept simple and strict, using a small amount of data, so that they could be followed accurately. When an exception was needed you talked to an appropriate contact and hoped you were listened to. It was under this system that you got things like the interstates, redlining and urban renewal projects, because there was arbitrary power to decide what was built where and all you had to pass to get a shovel-ready project was a routine checklist.

Then computerization took over and every bureaucracy started adding more complex data models and rulesets. More choices appeared, forms got bigger, more rounds of approvals were added and everyone lost track of who to talk to when things went wrong. You are more likely to be addressed as a categorical minority(e.g. gender or ethnicity) but aren't allowed to be singularly exceptional because there's too much automation in the way.

And when we look at the state of road infrastructure now there's absolutely a case of that phenomenon: The design premise remains locked in "first design for cars at speed" and then other modes are the exceptions that are harder to access: you have to make exceptions to have less parking space, exceptions to add bike paths, exceptions to try a different intersection design and so forth. Major cities are undergoing reform to a lot of these rules, but at varying rates and levels of pessimization. Once you have an established rule, it's not a career-ender to follow it blindly, so you have to take a risk to not follow it.

What kind of lunacy is that.

Basically the city I lived in is going anti-car, which would be cool... if it weren't for ALSO de-prioritizing bicycling, busses, and sidewalks. Basically, it's anti-car and laggard to non-caring about alternate choices.

note: i am a leftist. Cars need reduced, significantly. But that also means converting roads to trails, making friendlier bicycling/walking areas, better and free public transit. Basically it'd be improving society at all levels upward - from a pollution, transit, AND poverty position. Which, in the case of the US neoliberal "you will suffer", well, won't really happen except in actual leftist enclaves.

There is a very good reason:

> Results show that the average risk of severe injury for a pedestrian struck by a vehicle reaches 10% at an impact speed of 16 mph, 25% at 23 mph, 50% at 31 mph, 75% at 39 mph, and 90% at 46 mph. The average risk of death for a pedestrian reaches 10% at an impact speed of 23 mph, 25% at 32 mph, 50% at 42 mph, 75% at 50 mph, and 90% at 58 mph. https://aaafoundation.org/impact-speed-pedestrians-risk-seve...

And this understates the difference, because at lower speed those collisions are also much less likely to occur at all.

If you could systematically reduce the speed on all urban/suburban streets to no more than 20 mph (actual driving speed, not posted limit), it would be a huge safety win for humans living in those places.

It would also make the environment much calmer, quieter, and less stressful.

What evidence is there that the attrition we see from car accidents is actually a net-loss for society?

Furthermore, is safety the highest priority, or is it balanced with other concerns, including road efficiency?

If safety trumps all other priorities, why don’t we just eliminate roads altogether. We can mandate that everyone wear inflatable sumo suits, assign a personal “safety monitor” to every individual, responsible for ensuring they do not make unsafe choices, and then monitor the safety monitors to make sure they’re correctly monitoring everyone else.

Or, we can accept that life has risks and that “accidental” death isn’t actually the worst thing on a societal level.

What does "attrition" mean? People killed in car crashes? How could that not be a net loss? Your second sentence says "furthermore" to introduce the idea of the cost of safety measures, so that seems to imply the first sentence isn't considering the cost of safety measures.

Yes

> How could that not be a net loss?

Is every human a net-positive to society? Obviously an objective measure is impossible to establish, but I doubt everyone is a net-gain.

How random are car-related deaths? Is this actually a problem?

Yes, the US does today in fact actively kill some people with the death penalty. Though it does have a lot of checks in the process to avoid making the determination wrongly. It's a very expensive and thorough process. I'm against the death penalty because it goes against the idea of the inherent value of human life. If you live in a society where jails are very primitive and can't stop determined prisoners from escaping, then the death penalty could make sense to prevent prisoners escaping and then hurting others. We have jails that can hold people though.

So, if you don't care much about Bob one way or another, but Bob and his family care about Bob, on net society cares about keeping Bob alive.

We’d be much better off if we re-planned the whole society to switch as many trips as possible to other methods of transportation. This would require changes in land-use laws, a shift in investment toward mass transit and pedestrian/bicycle infrastructure, etc.

Making the roads we already have safer would be a good start though.

What is lacking is any learning. Despite widespread knowledge of what is wrong nobody does anything about it for the future. We keep designing new roads with all the known bad features. We keep allowing people to get and keep their drivers license with minimal training. I'm sure traffic engineers who study this stuff have a better list than me, but the above two (or variations thereof) will be near the top of theirs. So long as we don't act on what we already know nothing will change.

More often than not EU designs will put main roads apart from the activity centers, and have shared ways or slower ways inside dense areas. From a car POV it is subobtimal and ill thought out, while from people's point of view it's pretty great in general.

The most dangerous situation I can think of would still be where cars cross a bicycle road after doing a left or right turn in a crossing and not checking for trafic on the bicycle road.

We got all around Europe (Slovakia to Switzerland to Italy to Austria and back) all without a car. As a US citizen this priority can be frustrating at times because some cities even have no admittance for non-local cars, so you gotta park out of the city and transit in if you don’t have a local plate. But as a US citizen I am incredibly envious of the rail network and the downtown areas which are pedestrian only and entirely devoid of cars.

But also fundamentally we found that just as in states within the US, country to country things were vastly different with road quality. Many Eastern European countries are still weeding out corruption in their political systems and funds allocated for infrastructure are finally making it into public projects, so they often had worse roads and rail systems.

Modern metro areas or developed suburbs not so much.

When we drive in a different country we know that the driving rules are slightly different. We suspect that the conventions for driving are not quite the same. But the differences in rules and conventions of road design are mostly invisible. We may notice the most glaring differences like preferring roundabouts vs preferring crossings, but the large majority of those design principle differences, they are so close to invisible that we expect our expectations to still work. But they don't. Everything just feels subtly off, and sometimes there's a large difference standing out and we just declare that badly planned. Even when it's in fact perfectly in line with local expectationsand usage patterns, and works just fine (except for the confused foreigner). We notice a few standout differences and then blame every bit of traffic badness we encounter nonetheless on the few differences we consciously notice. The parts that work well are usually completely invisible, because traffic, in our perception, only exists when it's bad.

Rules/conventions on the design side exist for and can differ in just about every aspect, down to draining angle of road surface (do you drain symmetrically or to one side? Do you switch to draining to the inside in a curve? What about softer curves, sharper curves? A consistent threshold is very valuable, but if one country has a different consistent threshold than the other it feels "wrong" to everybody cross-driving even if no side is objectively better). Or the general shape of curves, some places have strict rules for keeping the second derivative of direction as flat as possible, with few, definitive jumps, others prefer a gentleness above all approach.

But that makes sense statistically, because those are thousands of ostensibly independent events that don't necessarily have a single common cause, where the massacre of a thousand people in one place obviously has a single common cause. So of course the natural reaction is to shrug in the former case, because there's no obvious connection between them. Of course, if you can prove that those have a single common cause that can be tackled, then it makes sense to tie them all together.

I don't think a common cause is what makes the difference, and you see it with lung cancer due to smoking.

The shock factor of plane crashes is brought on by them being so rare, killing a lot of people at once, and almost guaranteeing those fatalities. This makes them shocking and unforgettable, they get a reputation.

On the other hand most people have been in a car crash of some sort (a fender bender) and not only survived but walked away without a scratch. Plus the stream of news about individual crashes just desensitizes people even further.

However, overeating (and the consequences) are extremely common and utterly unshocking.

People engage in the risky behavior 3 or more times a day, and have normalized the deaths they see resulting from it.

Honestly it’s like a lot of problems where it’s easier to solve when it’s one big thing as opposed to 1000 little things. Imagine cutting one big expense out of your budget versus having to cut 1% out of 500 things. One of those is vastly easier.

You don't need to fix 500 individual incidents but just a bit. You should fix one root cause. If your car won't drive faster than the speed limit for the area or the weather, if it won't drive at all if the driver is inebriated, sleepy, doesn't wear the seat belt properly, etc. then you prevent most of the accidents and fatalities.

So you don't cut 1% from 500 things, you cut all payments for a certain something you don't want.

If we regulated automobiles the same way we regulate aircraft, every single automobile would have a speed governor installed.

We also know that size is a significant factor. This is especially true anytime an accident involves a pedestrian or cyclist. And here again, despite clear, common sense evidence, cars are getting larger and heavier over time, not smaller and safer. (Cars have of course gotten safer, but mostly not through commonsense measures like, “make them smaller” or “make them go slower.” And so safety features inside the car are always fighting against our intransigence on those two fronts.)

Size and speed. This is really obvious stuff, if anybody cared.

Even a street dead ending in a cul-de-sac and no legal steeet parking is often in excess of 30 feet wide. All that width encourages speeding.

With regards to airplane speed limits in FAR 91.117, the responsibility is entirely on the pilot. There are no speed governors to prevent the pilot from busting this reg and it’s somewhat common for pilots to struggle with this in their first jet transition.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.117

1. Total US population, and total deaths per year

2. Amount of miles traveled yearly.

Measure butt-in-seat hours.

If we aren't then you're just measuring the fraction of the population that drives (which is largely a reflection of wealth and demographics) which isn't really a measurement of the safeness of the roads and driving.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

Specifically in the US the limit is 26,000 lbs GVWR without a CDL. That is the gross vehicle rating cannot be over 26,000 lbs, even if it actually weighs less when driven.

I've always assumed that exceeding the GVWR is illegal but searches show conflicting results.

That said, I think people should be reasonably safety-conscious about vehicle maintenance, avoiding risky situations, and avoiding things that could sabotage the automatic-driving part of their brain, like doing other things at the same time that require their attention and their hands and eyes.

Be a passenger in a car with a driver you're unfamiliar with. Lots of people struggle with that and way overestimate the speeds the driver is going at.

This is obviously incorrect reasoning for the United States. If countries around the world had statistically similar collision rates, then you would have a point, but this isn't some sort of power law or random distribution. The fact that our fatality rate are so significantly higher than other developed countries, means that there is a reason. It's not random, it's statistically showing us we're doing something very, very wrong

It’s a recipe for people getting killed.

Not only that, but in the case of a plane or train crash, the passengers were completely powerless to do anything about it. So it's a death that's imposed on them by the event.

In a car, the driver has nearly all the agency to do something about it and not be part of a crash. Car crashes don't just suddenly happen to people on a random distribution.

Many of them are directly the fault of the driver, so you can opt of those (don't drive drunk, sleepy, etc). Many are the fault of other drivers but you could often opt out by paying attention (go watch youtube dashcam car crash videos, it's astonishing the number of crashes where the victim could've avoided it but doesn't do anything). Many are also due to lack of skill (e.g. car slides on an oil slick and driver doesn't know how to control it) which you can opt out by taking car control training. Some are from equipment malfunction which you can also opt out (maintain your car).

Whilst pedestrians should avoid risky behaviour, we're still largely powerless; e.g. I recently had an encounter with a motorist reversing out of their driveway without looking, and I've twice had motorists drive down the pavement (sidewalk) towards me (once when the road was water-logged, the other time they were trying to bypass traffic).

In such a world (where cars disappeared) would we be having this thread about a need to now ban all bicycles?

To some extent there will always be some risk, just need to find ways to minimize it while balancing utility.

As for a hypothetical bicycle ban in a counterfactual universe, I find the premise too uninteresting to form an opinion about.

I'm far more interested in this world; and don't much care for vacuous syllogisms like 'killing is bad; X kills; therefore X is bad', when there's more to be gleaned from measurement, comparison and statistics. For example, off the top of my head:

- How many are killed by cars compared to bicycles (say, per person-km)?

- How likely is a car crash to kill someone compare to a bicycle crash?

- What is the impact on life-expectancy from driving versus cycling (e.g. sedentary activity versus exercise)?

- How does the throughput of bicycles compare to that of cars?

- How does the infrastructure cost of bicycles compare to that of cars?

- How does the environmental impact of bicycles compare to that of cars?

- etc.

I find these to be far more interesting questions than trivial binaries like 'do cars kill?' (yes; so what?), or 'do bicycles kill?' (yes; so what?).

Similarly, the statistics above can inform a whole spectrum of decisions and interventions that can be made; again, off the top of my head:

- The setting of speed limits

- The setting of road-worthiness criteria

- The setting of test and license requirements

- The layout and features of infrastructure (sight-lines, speed bumps, roundabouts, pedestrian crossings, traffic lights and their sequencing, etc.)

- The classification and permitted uses of roads (e.g. one-way systems, bus lanes, segregated or integrated cycle lanes, etc.)

- etc.

Again, these are seem far more interesting than strawman cliches like "should we ban X?" (which, as far as I can see, you're the one bringing up? I certainly never mentioned it)

When a scheduled aviation passenger plane crashes.

GA (General Aviation, "private pilots") flights crash all the time, people in them even die most days. If it happened in their catchment it'd probably make your local TV news, but it won't be their main story and it won't be a national headline unless somebody "important" died. A few hundred people die this way, in the US, in a normal year.

The reasons are much the same as for private car ownership:

- The private pilot cuts corners. They cut corners on maintenance and fuel, they cut corners on training, they cut corners on procedures. So their plane may fail more often than it should, or when one thing goes wrong there's less slack left than there should be.

- The private pilot is subject to very relaxed medical requirements, especially in the US. So too often these pilots will become disabled in flight, and they're usually alone or with a non-pilot so if this happens they're probably dead.

- The private pilot's skills are poor, they're subject to minimal day-to-day oversight and few of them seek real development of their skills once qualified. This means when things go wrong the pilot is less likely to successfully recover from a situation which was salvageable.

- "Mission mindset" easily creeps in for private pilots. Particularly for weather, but also for loss of daylight, private pilots often have a purpose (e.g. "Get back in time for Sarah's wedding on Saturday" or "Fit in one more trip to the lake before winter") which causes them to make unwise decisions to press on into poor weather, deteriorating daylight, etc.

Even as it is, the medical staff have been overworked and extremely stressed. They've been quitting the medical field in very high numbers:

https://morningconsult.com/2021/10/04/health-care-workers-se...

Yes, because of the lockdown, we have paid a high price, but don't just dismiss the higher price we would have paid if no mitigations had been attempted.

California and Florida couldn't have been further from each other in terms of policy and response, yet the age-adjusted mortalities weren't that far apart [1].

[1] https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-age-...

How much more? And how would that increase compare to the drug overdoses and other mental health related deaths that lockdowns caused?

What's the control group you're using to make your claim?

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.19...

https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature...

Lockdowns have devasted education:

https://www.economist.com/international/2022/07/07/covid-lea...

The cost to lifetime earnings is estimated to be $17 trillion:

https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2021/12/06/l...

Which will massively exacerbate poverty and all of its associated illnesses.

The education losses have been worst for the poor:

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/05/remote-learni...

Social distancing and other COVID control measures, which became mandatory with lockdowns, have been associated with a surge in childhood obesity:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a3.htm?s_cid=mm...

And a decline in children's IQ:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34401887/

97 million more people are estimated to be poverty due to the social reaction to COVID, the most drastic and disruptive of which were lockdowns:

https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/updated-estimates-impac...

It turns out following the lead of an authoritarian communist state on the COVID response, by totally abrogating civil liberties with community quarantines, i.e. lockdowns, wasn't a great idea.

As for voluntary social distancing, it has been found to impose more measurable costs for 89% of the population than it reduces through mitigating risks of contracting COVID.

Truly the "it is what it is" method of governance.

Otherwise if anyone else gives a counterexample you can easily move goalposts on them.

[1] https://www.bioinformaticscro.com/blog/states-ranked-by-age-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...

Sweden deaths per million: 1834

U.S. deaths per million: 3043

However you can also choose various European countries that avoided masking children and minimized school disruption. France and UK for starters, but also all the Nordic countries. Sweden being quite different from the other Nordic countries, but all of them being consistent in avoiding school disruption or masking children.

Most of Europe does not recommend vaccinating young children either.

France deaths per million: 2242

Denmark deaths per million: 1122

Paris proper is 2mln people squeezed into a 100km^2 city. Greater Paris is 10mln at a definitely urban density. It's no wonder they had larger death rates and this is a apples to oranges comparison.

When we tried the same thing a second time it didn't work, but that was due to people not following the rules.

If you could just lock everybody in the world for a month you could basically get rid of all the infectious diseases. However you can't. So lock down only helps to win time.

After you win your time you really need to know what to do with it - e.g. effective vaccine is created in this time.

Otherwise you just delay inevitable and that is it.

It's your fault for not following orders, not our fault.

So if I understand correctly NZ had a short hard lockdown to reduce cases to zero and then maintained it by severely restricting and controlling arrivals from abroad. I live in a Central European country that simply cannot seal itself off from the world like NZ did, we have open borders within the EU via Schengen (a good thing IMO) but there's very little chance of every country in the Schengen area agreeing to follow this model. This means virus carriers would inevitably enter the country, cause an outbreak of cases, necessitating repeated lockdowns and the public would quickly rebel against the measures.

Ahem.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/22/politics/donald-trump-testing...

https://floridaphoenix.com/2022/01/06/desantis-admits-roughl...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/19/rebekah-jon...

By the way, despite the rhetoric, states were getting money from the federal government for reporting a COVID death. There was literally a per-death payment. If that is not an incentive to over-report (despite the usual bloviating from Republicans), I don't know what is.

https://www.cms.gov/files/document/se20015.pdf

> Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) Hospitals - Section 3710 of the CARES Act directs the Secretary to increase the weighting factor of the assigned Diagnosis-Related Group (DRG) by 20 percent for an individual diagnosed with COVID-19 discharged during the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) period.

Hospitals get to charge Medicare/Medicaid a 20% surcharge for COVID patients and COVID deaths.

Note that this is deaths and patients who test positive for COVID while at the hospital, not deaths/patients whose reason for being in the hospital is COVID. At one point, those were all counted as "COVID hospitalizations/deaths" respectively by the CDC.

Given that COVID tests are tuned to have high sensitivity and (comparatively) low specificity, all a hospital needs to do to get their hands on that money is just give out a lot of COVID tests, and avoid re-testing the false positives. COVID tests are cheap, and to patients, it looks like the hospital being extra careful about keeping them safe from COVID.

I don't expect anyone who has swallowed the pandemic conspiracy theories to change their mind. Perhaps someone who is reading along will gain insights into how misinformation starts and is spread.

It sounds a lot like you were presented with evidence that people, particularly hospital administrators, were incentivized to pump the numbers of COVID cases in the US, and dismissed it as a "conspiracy theory."

---

The fact of the matter is that people respond to incentives. Whether consciously or not. When you pay people to hand out COVID diagnoses, you are going to get a lot of COVID diagnoses. Particularly, you are going to get people who accept false positives as true positives.

Note that this doesn't mean that they over-counted cases in total: the US likely still under-counted cases due to all the people who never took a test when they were sick. They just under-counted a lot less than many other countries, thanks in part to the incentives being in favor of producing positive test results. Past epidemics have had reporting rates well under 10% in countries with good surveillance.

In China, the incentives are different. Chinese administrators are heavily incentivized to have fewer COVID diagnoses. This means much more draconian lockdown policies (which reduce the number of true positives for COVID), but it also means that they will accept negative test results (true and false negatives) without much question and try very hard to eliminate false positives.

---

IMO the most likely story ("conspiracy theory") is:

1. The US and Western Europe, which had similar disease management policies and similar levels of contact between people, likely had very similar true positive rates of cases.

2. China probably had a lower true positive rate due to using more serious procedures to reduce R.

3. Due to co-morbidities (Americans being fat), cases in the US were on average more serious than cases in the EU, meaning more infected people going to the hospital and more people taking tests. On its own, this raised the reporting rate in the US.

4. Hospital systems and doctors in the US followed their incentives and over-reported cases (still under-counting the actual number of total cases by a factor of at least 2). What could have been "you have a mild cold, go home and get some rest" turned into "better take a COVID test just to be safe," and if that test was positive, it was reported as a case.

5. Hospital systems and doctors in China followed their incentives and under-reported cases (under-counting total cases by a factor of 50+). Things that could be COVID cases, but were unlikely, would get swept under the rug without a test.

6. Hospital systems in the EU ended up somewhere in between the US and China in terms of their surveillance rate.

This logically explains the variance in the reported case numbers between countries that did the same things, and also explains why a rational person could be skeptical of official numbers in certain countries. But sure, offering a narrative that lines up better with reality than the official narrative is a "conspiracy theory." As we all know, the official narrative is always correct, even when it is "there are WMDs in Iraq" or "smoking has no adverse heath effects."

Upon challenge, dialed back to "over-reported cases" or even "under-counted a lot less than many other countries" or "[didn't] try very hard to eliminate false positives" (which is a very strange accusation for different reasons?), still sounds like you have an ideological axe to grind here.

New Zealand had the equivalent of 2000 US deaths yesterday. Australia 1500. The vaccines didn't keep people from dying, they postponed them to the next flu season.

The old and sick will catch covid and die. There is nothing you can do about it. Putting your head in the sand and hoping for a magic bullet to save us - vaccines, masks, lockdowns - just means that the rest of the health system will collapse too. We need to be realistic and prepare for a world in which life expectancy is 10 years lower and we need a lot more hospital beds.

+ New Zealand had the equivalent of 2000 US deaths yesterday.

+ Australia 1500

+ The vaccines didn't keep people from dying

Were wrong? Because a 100% false rate is a pretty high bar, especially since you already admitted 3 was true.

The covid vaccines are shit and don't work.

End of story.

The mental gymnastics needed to claim they do fall apart when you compare them to vaccines for any other deadly disease. We don't still have small pox running rampant in countries with 90%+ vaccination rates. No one walks around telling you that having only your face paralyzed by polio is a great out come and a reason why we should vaccinate toddlers. If you get the MMR vaccine you're not told to be happy that you only got one of the three.

We need to move people's minds to the real world where everyone gets covid during flu season, rename it covid season while we're at it, and build a hospital system to solve that problem.

The vaccines are unreasonably effective given how radically the virus has mutated.

The argument that things had to go this way, that we should just lay down our arms from the outset, throw immunocompromised, children and old folks under the bus, and treat it like "flu season" (which has a vaccine for f's sake!) has bequeathed our massive world-wide (or at least west-wide) gain-of-function laboratory that is bringing powerful new mutations to a geo near you.

Track-and-trace and countless bog-standard public health responses (like requiring masks on planes for f's sake), and yes the occasional lockdown, PLUS the fact that we got lucky on how fast we got vaccines delivering measurable improvement in outcomes, would have been a powerful combo. But it wouldn't have made any money.

What is needed is effective prophylactics (beyond mRNA vaccines) and effective treatment. But the effort spent on that is, sadly, minimal.

A tiny, tiny fraction. And this would benefit us for way more than just Covid.

UV bulbs are expensive (and invisible unless you get to poke around a buildings mechanical room.), they need to be replaced typically ~annually (they won't be). If they get dust on them, they don't work as well. Etc. etc.

And here's the issue: To actually deal with high concentration infectious aerosols you need to get that air out of the room ASAP. (i.e. negative pressure rooms) If you can sterilize the return air that's great, but frankly I suspect dilution and air movement is going to be the dominant effect in reducing infection chains.

I was in a gym that required everyone to wear a mask (yes, while working out / on a treadmill / etc), but all the large windows were shut, and nobody seemed to care or notice. No staff, no patrons, nobody. So I walked around and opened all the windows. And this wasn't March 2020. This was like end of 2021.

I'm not claiming to be some pandemic savant, nor getting into a mask debate, but what shocked me was the "group psychosis" on masking at the expense of proven and incredibly easy mitigation efforts like opening windows!

[1]https://led-ld.nichia.co.jp/en/product/uv_uvc.html

As far as I can tell the single most deadly power plant disaster in history was the 1975 Banquiao Dam failure[0] that killed 26000 to 240000 people. Yet when you try to google "most deadly power plant disasters" you'll mostly get Chernobyl with 100 attributed deaths.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

There is something poignant that nuclear apocalypse is better for the environment than human civilization as it normally functions.

Are you sure you're not discounting that figure because it's contrary to your conclusion? Very few people have ever died as the indirect long-term result (let alone by direct immediate result) of nuclear energy accidents, even according the highest estimates from histrionic ideologues like Greenpeace.

The relative risk of nuclear to coal is unbelievably low yet there is still this irrational ability to weigh risk/reward benefits correctly.

That's how coal plants operate.

But guess what is always in the news, and talked about by politicians on both sides, until their constituents are whipped in a frenzy, donating to their campaign, and can no longer see the other side as humans anymore...

[0] https://www.criminalattorneycolumbus.com/which-weapons-are-m...

[1] https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/202...

Pistols and other Guns aren’t very effective at stopping deaths, but they’re perceived to be good defense, so banning them en mass is less palatable.

NYC banned pistols once because it was often the source of gang violence - and violence went down. Smart legislation used to address statistic use not headlines. But any ban will save lives and make people safer (and feel safer) so that’s why politicians today are clawing for whatever legislation they can pass.

People who think this should have a grizzly bear run at them at least once.

Having seen it from a car I became pro-minigun instantly.

Friends were traveling to the famous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfăgărășan just for kicks and halfway through they got SMS alerts "Bears in the vicinity" even though they were visiting foreigners. They actually saw the bears on the road itself, but a quickly dispatched van with park rangers arrived at the scene, mostly to control the traffic and protect the bears from all the people in the death machines, as well as tourists "making selfies with the bears" ... after some minutes the bears tired of the situation and left the road.

I guess my point is its a matter of implementing "a greater good" measure, and then fixing the edge cases with some smart policies / tech / people.

Like in tech sometimes its worth it to implement a big refactor that would enable faster / better code, even though it might lead to some edge cases that need to be addressed. Its tricky of course but such a _massive_ win as gun laws just can't be ignored I think.

It's like complaining that if you change your lead pipes to copper / plastic is too much work, and who cares if some people die of lead poisoning now and again, but leaks are much easier to fix with lead ... and you already have so much stock of pipes just not worth it ...

P.S. I'm truly sorry if this leads to a flame work and I know its a sensitive topic, but from a European perspective the threat of violent uprising has always been such a weird thing to put as a "benefit" having rifles around. Like if your system is designed in such a way that violence is a "check" on something ... is it really a good system? Like sure governors feel a bit scared of loonies with rifles killing them for their transgressions, but wouldn't it be better that people actually rely on safer and more gentle political transitions rather than coup d'état? And I don't think gun laws ever prevented disgruntled constituents to kill government officials - e.g. Abe in Japan.

How are things in Ukraine? 20 years ago do you think anyone in Ukraine would have imagined Russia would be bombing their cities?

You never know when a situation changes and you need an armed population.

European brown bears are cuddly lovable puppies by comparison, grizzlies are murder machines with an attitude which can outrun and out climb you.

>I guess my point is its a matter of implementing "a greater good" measure, and then fixing the edge cases with some smart policies / tech / people.

This is a prime example of being confidently wrong and making moral judgments from ignorance. It's easy to put down "those people" living in the mountains when you've never been there. It's even easier to make laws that kill them since they are obviously too stupid to know what's good for them and you'll never have to see them.

Federalism is a good thing, and not just when you can smoke weed.

You do not need assault rifles, this sounds silly and over the top. You just need to be aware of your surroundings, follow the rules and have a bear spray : https://www.nps.gov/subjects/bears/safety.htm

It’s such a small portion of the population that would have such a need for a gun that it can be handled as a special case in laws. No reason the rest of society can’t be safe.

Also, it’s funny that when people actually fight back against government abuse (George Floyd protests) the gun owning demographic seems to find it wrong to be violent despite claiming guns are meant to be used against the government.

It's possible to want to ability to defend yourself while also thinking violence for the sake of violence isn't right. The issue most people had with the protests were that so many innocent people got caught in the cross hairs.

An assault rifle is a normal rifle that because of a few cosmetic features looks like a military gun. None of those features make it more deadly than any other gun.

Actually, I'm not sure why I get sucked into these discussions time after time. Nothing will ever change without a constitutional amendment. The left needs to make its peace with that.

Any other gun is still plenty deadly that my point stands.

But a lot of headlines talk about banning assault rifles so I used that term.

There’s a somewhat valid claim that pistols are good for self defense because they’re easy to carry. Will anyone use it for self defense? Statistically no. But the perception is there. Rifles, cosmetically altered or not do not have such a feature.

Removing guns from law abiding citizens is preferred by one vocal faction, rather than imprisoning criminals who use them in committing crimes (and who usually don't possess their guns legally).

The other faction says that removing guns from law abiding citizens actually increases crime[0].

[0] https://twitter.com/AnneMarieWTHR/status/1549484122497843200...

Sure, we get that changing US gun culture might be a bit more challenging than, say, the UK, where there weren't that many people with handguns to start off with when they were banned, and so it was particularly easy to convince even most criminals carrying wasn't worth the additional penalties. What we find bizarre is that someone buys an assault weapon in the sort of store that's ubiquitous in the US and nonexistent in other countries, walks into a mall with it because local regulations say there's no reason to apprehend somebody entering a mall with assault rifles until they've killed someone, and that event gets chalked up as a win for local gun policy because the casualties were in the single digits this time due to the rare use of a civilian gun against a mass shooter

…who will later be law not abiding when they shoot someone.

People want to prevent violence not punish it more.

I’ve never seen any real claim that people aren’t getting arrested for hurting people, but I’ve seen a lot of people that want to stop the violence before it happens.

Also, we’ve already been incarcerating people at an alarming rate.* It seems like there’s something more fundamental being neglected — that’s compelling Americans to use our (abundance of) weapons more readily.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarce...

What % of the population do you think needs to be imprisoned before we recognize that maybe its guns that are the problem?

But my point was more that we only ever talk about gun violence when a very specific type of gun violence occurs, and pointing out the incidents that constitute the bulk of the aggregate number usually gets you called a racist.

However the gun lobby has been generally ineffective and uncaring when it comes to protecting Americans' right to import guns from other countries. Collectors like importing guns, but American gun manufacturers have little interest in that. For instance, the NRA doesn't seem very upset about the Norinco ban, even 20+ years ago when the political/strategic situation between America and China was not on the minds of many. Another example is 922(r) compliance concerning domestic/foreign part counts; notorious among gun collectors as inane, arbitrary and pointless. Yet there doesn't seem to be much drive from the American gun lobby to get this fixed.

There were 18,361 total homicides in the US in 2007, 10,129 of which were committed with firearms.

There were 1,975 gang homicides in 2007, or ~10.8% of all homicides [1] I can't find anything contemporaneous, but a 1995 study said that 94%-96% of gang homicides used a firearm. Using the lower number, that would mean 1,857 of those were firearm homicides, or 18.3% of all firearm homicides.

There were 2,340 domestic murders in 2007 [2] (the header says female victims of domestic violence, but that stat is for both genders). [4] says that in 2002 54% of domestic violence homicides were carried out with a firearm, so that would be about 1,264 or ~12.4% of all firearm homicides.

Neither of those numbers is isolated to firearms; I couldn't find any studies specifically scoped to firearms. I also didn't dig very hard into how they get those numbers.

Estimates on accidental deaths put them at ~400 a year. [3]

CDC data for 2007 says there were ~17k suicides with firearms in 2007 (these aren't counted in the homicide numbers above).

Gang violence does seem like it has more firearm homicides than domestic violence, but not by a staggering margin, and it may have flipped since 2007.

1: https://nationalgangcenter.ojp.gov/survey-analysis/measuring... (scroll to the bottom, couldn't get a direct link)

2: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/fvv.pdf

3: https://injepijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40...

4: https://www.futureswithoutviolence.org/userfiles/file/Childr...

It's become the cynic's take to point out how quickly an unprotected pedestrian crossing gets a traffic light after a fatal accident there.

The media makes the thousand deaths at once -- and its response -- more salient than a thousand individual deaths.

There is a decent bit of literature around the role of the human and his/her purported error in a plane or train crash, compared with the culpability of a negligent operator (i.e., driving drunk) of a motor vehicle. Also, the FAA and NTSB have a very broad mandate when it comes to regulating planes and trains, while the NHTSA has traditionally not been willing to impinge on individual rights, perceived or otherwise, in the name of safety.

As for why we find the crashes surprising it’s probably because they’re rare, ie we think of these as safe in this respect, so are surprised when a death occurs. If anything a feather in the cap of public transit.

There was a train crash less than a month ago that killed 4 people and injured 150, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Missouri_train_derailment.

It was at a crossing that didn't have warning lights or crossing gates. Which is a known issue and has been for many decades.

We are not going to stop everything and redesign the entire rail network to prevent this from happening again, because it would cost too much. Even if saving lives and preventing injuries was the only priority, there are better ways to spend money than improving railroad crossings in rural areas.

The current mileage death rate for motor vehicles is around 1.5 deaths per 100,000,000 miles driven. Marginal improvements in that have to be cheap to be cost-effective, there are many ways to save lives and prevent injuries in America if you have money to spend.

The fact that we as a society have raised a few generations that cannot have adult discussions about "how much is too much" except in small groups, behind closed doors and off the record (and when such discussions leak the conclusions are always vilified no matter what they were) is going to hamper us for at least the next 70yr at least.

a gasoline car fire? not a peep.

an electric car fire? the media goes crazy.

also nuclear power. Fukushima got a lot of attention, but radiation deaths linked to burning coal are significantly higher but not touched by the media.

This is reminiscent of the Galaxy Notes that were exploding in people's pockets some years ago.

I've owned multiple cars which have had some kind of recall which resulted in a fire risk. Zero of them have been EVs.

Sure, those aren't all starting in the passenger compartment, but a lot of these battery fires aren't always starting in the passenger compartment either.

> a lot of these battery fires aren't always starting in the passenger compartment either

A lot of EVs have batteries under the car which I think was the point. Though I can't see it being a huge issue or I would've heard a lot of stories of people being cooked by now.

Of course they catch fire. what's surprising is that they don't do it more, but that's the result of ~150 years of evolution.

I used to think this was very dumb and irrational. but eventually I came to think that the statistical death toll doesn't capture the full impact of a problem. how people feel about it is just as important, if not moreso.

yes, driving is pretty high on list of dangerous things we do. but in my whole life I've only known two people that died in crashes and one who was lucky to survive. I take appropriate precautions, of course, but it isn't something that I think about every time I get in a car. on the other hand, if a few guys flew another plane into a skyscraper, I'd be thinking about that every time I got on a plane for a while, even though I'd still be way more likely to die on my way to the airport. doesn't really make sense, but that's how humans are.

the things that make us happy, sad, or fearful are pretty arbitrary in the grand scheme of things. it's not unreasonable to optimize for the things people actually care about. or at least it's not less reasonable than a more "scientific" approach. either way, your goal is to improve the lives of a bunch of intelligent apes.

Makes one think, is it just how humans are or is it actually an example of how powerful is professional media?

https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-report...

Every fatal accident is documented. Often in incredible detail. I'm annoyed that this is often overlooked. Particularly in this case.

And yes, drivers get blamed a lot, because drivers are most often at fault. Drugs or alcohol and/or speeding are factors in the majority of fatal accidents. This is already known.

For an article that's attempting to so strenuously walk the high road, the omission of these facts is bizarre to me. How serious can they be?

it's obviously a biased source, but "the war on cars" podcast has an interesting episode with Jessie Singer where she recounts her interviews with traffic engineers. A municipal traffic engineer's only goal is to shield the jurisdiction they work from from liability. as long as the industry standard best practices are implemented faithfully, you probably can't be sued. any attempt to do something different from the status quo opens you up to liability.

In economics, this is called catastrophe aversion: as a society, do we prefer accidental deaths to be "clumped together" or not (the total number of people killed being equal). Though the question is very important in regulating certain industries that can produce major accidents, we don't really know much about social preferences in this regard (the limited studies undertaken so far suggest that Americans and Europeans do not want regulators to adopt catastrophe-averse policies for safety risks). For an approachable introduction to this question, see [1].

[1] https://www.foncsi.org/en/publications/collections/industria...

It is not the same with air or train travel. Those are useful, but not necessary for almost all people.

I think a lot of the deaths are put in the realm of "personal responsibility" - we don't pursue safer options, even for cars, because it's always someone's fault something bad happened, rather than intrinsic to the design of the road.

We create roads where people would feel safe going 65mph down them, then slap a 35-45mph speed limit on it, and call it a day.

Related, Americans encountering a traffic circle, presumably for the first time and with their brains turned off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDaQZUzJCNM

I think most of them are probably caused by deferred maintenance, which may either be the result of the owner making poor decisions, or a circumstance forced on them by poverty. In cases where the car is defective as manufactured, I have no sympathy for the company that made it. If that happens, I want the car company to pay for it. Which I believe generally happens. Car airbags blow up in your face because of a detective design? The car company has to pay to fix that. So your question has a false premise; we don't ignore deaths caused by faulty manufacturing. Usually anyway, some car companies seem to get away with more than others..

if a taxi driver crashes, youve got a bad taxi driver somewhere you will probably never interact with. If a self-driving car crashes, you've got possibly hundred of thousands of potential accidents waiting to happen from the same "bad driver"

the regular car accident conversations have all been had. what else is there to say?

Per: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...

US is 7th country on cars / people metric, below New Zealand and just above Poland.

Yet this is upteenth time I read that US is "designed" around cars as if dependance on cars was some unique property of US.

Amount of active insurance policies is slightly below 27 million: https://piu.org.pl/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/ubezpieczenia-...

That would rate us below Canada but before France.

What's also interesting is that Poland is absolutely not designed around cars. Most communist blocks were designed for few times less cars. The main cities are still not fully connected by highways. We have perfect size country for high speed trains.

Americans drive far far more than most other industrialized nations.

https://frontiergroup.org/blogs/blog/fg/fact-file-americans-...

https://www.fastcompany.com/90771003/american-roads-are-desi...

It doesn't really matter when US has 56 times the cars of the first 6 countries combined.

You're comparing San Marino (a small city) with the entirety the US. It's just noise.

Consider also that San Marino, Andorra, Monaco, Liechtenstein and Malta are all very small and rich countries. It is normal for the wealthy to own more cars than necessary. Not so normal for tens of millions of americans who live currently under the threshold of poverty.

I suspect the other countries could do with way less cars, americans would still need more than they have (given the lacking public infrastructure) but can't afford them.

And the relevant metrics would probably be something like miles driven and average speed, not the number of cars per capita. Jay Leno or Jerry Seinfeld may have 1,000 cars each but they can only die in a car accident once. Every in San Marino owning a car doesn't mean anything if they only drive it 15 mph through their city streets which were mostly all designed before the advent of cars.

I disagree on "possibilities cars open up".

If it is optional to use a car basically everywhere, then sure, those are freedom. In the majority of the US you are locked to HAVING to have a car.

They are both a blessing and a curse. Cars let us commute 25 miles to work in any random direction easily, but a lot of times, that also means we are required to commute 25 miles to work in a random direction.

About 19 people in the US have been killed by Takata airbags in the years since 2008, and we've spent $24 billion recalling vehicles for repair, because that's a risk that we don't tolerate.

100 people will die today in cars - probably more than 19 people in the next hour, it's going on rush hour and people will be tired and in a hurry - and it's just another Thursday. Also, close to 19 veterans will commit suicide today. We accept that as normal, and I feel strongly that we shouldn't; consideration of that outcome should enter into the public consciousness as we consider the ethics and justifications of military recruitment and our involvement in conflicts across the globe.

Where the deaths happen doesn't really matter. I think it's more about a human ability to name and blame an antagonist: Takata. 9-11. Firestone. Putin. Covid-19. Katrina. Comparatively, 'car culture', senelescence, social and cultural reintegration, and other issues are diffuse to the point of being pervasive and and human brains have a hard time running the numbers on the risk analysis.

Putin's War shows what happens when you don't have a strong military.

If Ukraine had a large military in 2014, I very much doubt Putin would have invaded Crimea nor would there be Russian troops in the Donbas.

The nature of aviation, where unplanned problems result in unplanned non-optional landings in random locations (instead of just pulling off the side of the road), would rapidly turn aviation into the most dangerous transport mode. Aviation would soon become unsustainable, and available to no one.

How does making it less safe help anything? (note that I'm not discussing the FAA's massive inefficiencies, many of which I'm sure could be improved without compromising safety)

We do though. In America you can build/buy and fly your own airplane with no license, regulation or certification at all. The catch is that it must be a very small airplane; single seat, under 115kg empty, max 5 gallons of fuel, etc, etc. You can buy or build many of them for about the price of a motorcycle or used car.

They're fairly dangerous to the pilot, but are so small and light they probably don't pose much risk to others. Of course if one crashed straight into you, you'd probably die, but that doesn't happen very often.

These are almost entirely for recreation and not for transportation.

The basic rules limit use to VFR (Visual Flight Rules), so daytime only on nice days, limited range, etc. Wonderful for getting up and enjoying the sky, but highly impractical for transportation. We don't see grocery stores ir office/industrial parks installing short airstrip fields for the shoppers or commuters arriving in Ultralights, but they do install bicycle racks. I'd say a bicycle is far more useful in any practical sense.

So yes, in using aircraft for transportation, we're almost entirely in the regime of high regulation and expense.

I didn't argue for no regulation. I argued for less regulation.

There is regulation that provides almost no safety benefit (because there is already plenty of regulation), while increasing cost noticeably.

You are right in that car accidents don't elicit quite the same reaction as a single mass death, but they aren't being ignored and aren't quite considered a fact of life.

At any given institution rates are usually quite low, and infections a rarity. But when you project that up to every ICU or hospital in the country, you suddenly get something that causes more deaths than drunk driving.

> In Sweden, we have made a fantastic sustainability journey; in the 70's over 1000 people died in traffic every year, now there are a few hundred, but still far too many.

https://www.saferresearch.com/index.php/news/210-people-were...

And this is with a very large increase in car use. In Sweden in the ‘30s-40s we had 200-300 deaths/year/100k cars. Today it is 5 deaths/year/100k cars. Cars are safer, newer, better road infrastructure, etc.

In the US there where 42k deaths in road accidents in 2020, with 290 M vehicles. So about 15 deaths/year/vehicle. 200% more. [1]

[1] https://www.nsc.org/newsroom/motor-vehicle-deaths-2020-estim...

Going back to the beginning, a long term policy is needed. The question in my mind is if such a thing can be implemented without it getting talked about like some conspiracy against the right wing voter who loves their car?

Here is at least a plan for it.

https://www.nsc.org/road/resources/road-to-zero/call-on-pres...

They do that because planes and trains are expensive and owned by big corps/government.

There have been 20 commercial aviation incidents in the last 20 years in the US of any type and size that included any fatalities by any means. 7 of those included jets, with 1 being a 777, one a 767, and everything else 737 or smaller. A 767 costs about 100 million (list price 200, but the internet says you always get discounts..?)

So we'll ridiculously overestimate the per year cost of airplanes at 100 million, assuming fallaciously that these airplanes are always totaled (they're not) and that they're always 767s (they're not).

On the other hand, let's assume (optimistically) that fatal car crashes always total two people per car, and that they all occur in affordable $10,000 cars (the average new car last year cost almost 5x that at 47K). That gets you 10,000*20,000, or 200 million per year in auto costs.

seatbelts, car seats, antilock brakes, medians in dangerous intersections, speedbumps, drunk driving laws etc. Are all to reduce one off deaths.

My summary is different: if thousands of people die because the government specifically puts them in harm's way but doesn't give them the best available protection against harm, particularly when, in retrospect, the government's reasons for putting them in harm's way were, to say the least, somewhat contrived, we take it very seriously and we demand that the government do better.

But if thousands of people die because they individually made serious enough errors of judgment that it ended up killing them, we consider it a fact of life--because it is. No amount of social engineering is going to be able to always protect people from the consequences of their own poor choices. You can't design perfect roads that will magically prevent all accidents.

What we can do as a society is to at least give people the proper incentives. Many people routinely ignore traffic laws (the most common is probably speed limits). Why? Because they can plainly see that many traffic laws are not there to actually improve traffic safety, they are there to give governments additional revenue sources (again speed limits are the most common example). And that means people lose respect for all laws, including those that actually are there to improve safety (such as seat belt laws).

The way to fix all that is, first, to stop penalizing people that haven't caused harm. If I'm speeding, but I don't cause an accident, a cop should not be able to give me a ticket and force me to either pay a fine or go to court. (Not to mention that, during the time the cop has me pulled over just for being X mph over the speed limit, event though I haven't caused harm or even been driving outside the normal flow of traffic, how many other drivers that were doing the same thing have gone whizzing by? Obviously enforcement of such laws is going to be random, which just makes the incentive problem worse.) Even if I'm driving recklessly, or under the influence, but I don't cause an accident, a cop should not be able to give me a ticket and force me to either pay a fine or go to court.

A cop should be able to stop someone who, in their judgment, is driving in a way that endangers other drivers. "Stop" here means pull them over, just as they would now, and, if in the cop's judgment that person is, at that time, not capable of driving safely (for example, if they fail a breathalyzer), don't allow them to drive. Ask them if there is someone they know who can come pick them up. If necessary, lock their car and take them to the police station and let them contact someone from there. But don't force them to pay a fine or go to court if they haven't caused harm.

Second, many of the proper incentives can be better enforced by private entities. For example, I mentioned seat belt laws (and another poster, a former cop, mentioned them also). What if, instead of having seat belt laws, your car insurance policy had a rider that, if you were in an accident and were found to not be wearing your seat belt, either your deductible becomes much higher (say $10,000 instead of $1,000), or your coverage is denied altogether? What if, instead of DUI laws, there were a similar rider for having an accident if you were found to be under the influence? That would give exactly the right incentive, for people to not cause harm due to those kinds of errors of judgment. Even the law itself could be written the same way: no penalty for simply not wearing a seat belt or driving under the influence, but if you cause an accident and you are found to not be wearing a seat belt or driving under the influence, you are presumed to be at fault and you can suffer increased penalties.

In short: put the responsibility for individual accidents where it belongs: on the individuals that actually cause harm.

The risk of dying in a car accident isn’t enough to stop some people from driving recklessly. Why would a penalty that only applies to the rare occasion when someone causes harm be any better of an incentive for people who seem to already assume they’re not going to cause harm by their behavior?

Uninsured drivers who can pay compensation if they cause harm aren't the problem. The problem is uninsured drivers who are judgment proof, i.e., who have no significant assets with which to pay compensation. The way that problem is currently handled for driving is for auto insurance policies to include coverage if you get hit by an uninsured driver who can't pay compensation.

But, you say, what if I get killed by that uninsured driver? The answer is that you're already at risk from that today, because someone that reckless isn't going to be deterred by anything, since they're not reasonable people to begin with. In other words, the basic problem you point out, that some people aren't deterred by reasonable incentives against reckless actions, is a valid problem, but can't be solved by social engineering. Your only defense against drivers like that is to drive defensively so that you aren't the one that ends up being their victim. And more generally, your only defense against people who genuinely aren't deterred by reasonable incentives against reckless behavior is to avoid them.

Design of separation can dramatically help. Isolate pedestrians and low-barrier low mass slow motor devices from higher mass, higher speed, vehicles.

Dense cities should have an (or many) isolated vehicles only layer(s), completely separated from pedestrians.

Supposing at least some drunk drivers are aware they are drunk but fully convinced they will not harm anyone, this improves their worst case scenario substantially. Before, losing their license; now, getting even closer to home before calling a ride. Does this incentivize drunk driving among people unable to evaluate the danger they present to others (e.g., drunks)?

Obviously, this falls apart somewhat because those same people probably drive drunk today thinking they won't get caught. Nonetheless, the common consensus is that certainty of punishment is the primary deterrent against criminal activity. Certain non-punishment will change some of the calculus.

There is no such thing as "certainty of punishment". There isn't even "certainty of punishment if you get caught", since our society is not a sane society in this respect and lets people who do cause harm, up to and including murder, off the hook for all manner of insane ideological reasons.

That said, I didn't say we shouldn't punish people who actually cause harm. The scenario I was describing was a person who is, for example, driving drunk, but hasn't caused harm, and gets stopped by a cop. Should the cop be able to ticket them? Or just prevent them from driving until they are sober? If they haven't caused harm, I would say the latter.

My little thought experiment supposes a person who is drunk evaluates, before deciding to get in the car, the potential outcomes of drunk drive, while entirely convinced they won't harm someone. (I suspect most drunk drives are entirely convinced they won't harm someone, although it is obvious to anybody else there is at least a _chance_ they will.) Today, getting caught with whatever nonzero probability results in a punishment of some severity. By the model we're assuming above, this produces a nonzero amount of deterrence. If we shift away from punishing drunk drivers, the severity drops to zero. If a drunk's options are to call for a ride from the bar or try to drive home, and getting caught at the latter only mean they'll have to call for a ride from some location between the bar and home, driving is the rational choice after all, _so long as they are convinced they won't hurt anybody_.

I was being too circumspect. The point of my scenario is to highlight that decriminalizing drunk driving will likely increase the amount of drunk driving, at least among the population of drunk drivers who are overconfident in their abilities. That in turn will increase the danger drunk drivers present to the rest of us.

I gather you think reaction is morally preferable to prevention in such cases. Is that a fair assertion? In general, I bet we agree there is some amount of risk to myself that I must tolerate to afford others their freedoms, and have just landed at different risk tolerances. I try to take need into account when drawing my line in the sand. "Does anybody _need_ to drive drunk?". Since it's a situation drunk drivers make for themselves I'm happy to punish it. How do you draw your line?

And just that last clause makes it clear that, at least at that time and place, that person is not going to be deterred by reasonable incentives against reckless behavior, because their judgment is impaired.

Basically, your solution (which is also, as you point out, the solution in place in our current society), is to put unreasonable incentives in place--unreasonable from the point of view of the person, because, in your hypothetical, they're 100% convinced they won't harm anyone, so to them this whole "don't drive drunk" thing seems like an unreasonable restriction. It might be reasonable from the point of view of society, but that very view of "society" is not really compatible with a free society of free and responsible adults. More on that below.

> I gather you think reaction is morally preferable to prevention in such cases. Is that a fair assertion?

The only moral principle I have stated is that one should not impose punishments on people who have not caused actual harm. But I did imply a corresponding moral responsibility for the people themselves: that they should exercise reasonable judgment when making choices. People who either will not or cannot take on that responsibility are not going to be deterrable by the kinds of reasonable incentives I am proposing.

Your position seems to be, basically, that in our current society, most people fall into the latter category: they either will not or cannot take responsibility for exercising reasonable judgment--for example, by making it an ironclad rule for themselves that if they are going to go someplace where they might get drunk, they have a plan in place in advance to get home without having to drive. If most citizens of our supposedly free society can't meet that standard, we have a much worse problem than drunk driving.

> Since it's a situation drunk drivers make for themselves I'm happy to punish it.

I don't disagree that being in a situation where you "need" to drive drunk is self-inflicted; I basically said the same thing just above. My point is broader: that our society seems to assume that most adult citizens, if not prevented by various nanny-state laws, will make such errors of judgment frequently enough for it to be a problem. Either that assumption is false, in which case our society is imposing huge restrictions on people that are not justified; or, even worse, that assumption is true, in which case I think our society is doomed.

But isn't the risk of death a harm? That's what I'm driving at here. It's about where the line is drawn.

Should it be legal for someone to take shots at you as long as they miss? Drunk driving is the tip of an iceberg here.

> My point is broader: that our society seems to assume that most adult citizens, if not prevented by various nanny-state laws, will make such errors of judgment frequently enough for it to be a problem. Either that assumption is false, in which case our society is imposing huge restrictions on people that are not justified; or, even worse, that assumption is true, in which case I think our society is doomed.

This bit about a doomed society interests me. Why must society be doomed if it needs "nanny-state" laws to function? If society needs those to function and it makes them (society produces its own laws, after all), isn't that the look of a society that is succeeding? A society that regulation and fails to self-regulate is doomed, for sure.

Now then, the bit about 'most' adults needing such help doesn't come from anywhere. I agree it's a few. But if most adults don't need government incentive to drive sober, regulation preventing drunk driving abrogates a 'right' _they won't exercise_. Are their freedoms limited in that case? Or are laws against drunk driving highly targeted, impacting only the people who are driving drunk, getting them off the roads before they hurt someone?

No. It's a risk. Death itself is a harm, but risk of harm is not the same as actual harm.

> Should it be legal for someone to take shots at you as long as they miss?

If they're taking shots at you with the intent of harming you, that's already a crime; in most jurisdictions it's called assault with a deadly weapon or something similar. The basis for such laws is that having someone intentionally shoot at you, even if they miss, is a harm in and of itself. But that theory does not generalize to any action that carries a risk of causing harm.

If they don't realize you're in the path of the shots and they miss, there is no crime, but there is certainly a very good reason to keep that person as far away from you as possible. And if everyone did that with people who do obviously reckless and dangerous things, those people would find it impossible to survive and would pay the price of their recklessness. I'd be fine with that.

> Why must society be doomed if it needs "nanny-state" laws to function?

Because if it actually needs nanny state laws to function, that means its citizens are not responsible adults. And a society whose citizens are not responsible adults is doomed.

> I agree it's a few.

If it's only a few, why is it a serious problem that requires nanny state laws to fix? Why can't all of us who are responsible adults just, as I said above, refuse to associate with the few who are not responsible adults? Oh, you want a drink at my bar (or my private party, or just hanging out with me)? Are you going to drive? Sorry, I can't give you a drink if you're going to drive. And so on.

In other words, a society in which all but a few people are responsible adults does not need nanny state laws for the few who are not, because everyone else, as responsible adults, will regulate the behavior of the non-responsible few anyway. Nanny state laws are only needed if many citizens are not responsible adults. But you've said you don't think that's the case. So why don't you, as (presumably) a responsible adult, just do what responsible adults are supposed to do when dealing with the few who aren't responsible?

> are laws against drunk driving highly targeted, impacting only the people who are driving drunk, getting them off the roads before they hurt someone?

I already described a scenario in which a cop does exactly this with a drunk driver who doesn't cause harm, without imposing any punishment. So your implicit assumption that the only way to get drunk drivers off the roads is to punish them for violating a nanny state law is incorrect. In other words, in my proposed scenario, the cop, a responsible adult, regulates the behavior of one of the few who is not responsible. He can do that without needing any nanny-state laws to justify it. His simple duty to keep the roads safe is enough. That duty already empowers him to get drunk drivers off the road. He can do that just fine without imposing any punishments.

> regulation preventing drunk driving abrogates a 'right' _they won't exercise_

In this particular case, perhaps. But giving the government power to enact such nanny state regulations will abrogate other rights that responsible adults will want to exercise. There is no such thing as a government that only imposes just those nanny state laws that are needed to restrain the irresponsible few and never imposes any that unjustifiably restrain the responsible many. I already gave one counterexample: speed limit laws. There are many others.

You can't lean on the argument that the harmless act of shooting and missing is a already a crime while simultaneously arguing that drunk driving should not be a crime unless the driver connects. You really need to decide what amount of reckless disregard for another life constitutes a 'harm' and should be criminalized.

Sure you can. They are called cycle roads, for bikes. Cars kill people, bikes don't. If American cities were designed with bicycle and train transport in mind, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

You lost me at the part where this was supposed to not be describing every roadway funded in whole or part by state or federal governments, contingent upon following lethal design standards required by the same.

What are you referring to?