Bah, that isn't the fear of the unknown vs. the fear of the known. It is immediate, physical fear (in thirty seconds those gang members are going to mug me) vs. eventual, abstract fear (in twenty years, something might go wrong inside me).
(I survived an ascending aortic dissection in Aug 09.)
To be clear, when I say "abstract threats" I mean things we cannot properly think about. We know what it feels like to get punched, and we have some idea what it feels like to be stabbed, but we have no idea how to assign fear to something like chemotherapy until it happens to us. We know it is Bad(tm), but not the same way we know getting cut with a knife is bad.
My goal is to safely get from Point A to Point B, and I don't want to spend a lot of time waiting around at Point A, or sitting and waiting on the way to Point B.
We have three goals here, in order of importance. Let's call them safety, convenience, and speed.
Taking a bus with a bunch of drunken hooligans doesn't help much with that first, and most important, goal. I want my transportation to be safe, and the high crime rates on public transportation in the US speak for themselves.
Interesting experiences are great. Getting mugged isn't, and while I'm not a prime target (muggers don't usually pick on two-hundred-pound guys that spend a lot of time in the gym), five loud, drunk people in a gang is not the sort of situation I want to be around regularly.
Especially if I'm carrying a $1500 laptop and a $600 smartphone.
Convenience, at least here in SF, is also pretty miserable. I have not once had a bus arrive on-time. The trains are usually on-schedule, but conveniently frequent only during peak hours, and they only cover a small portion of the greater Bay Area. Don't even get me started on CalTrain.
If I want to meet somebody and I need to take a bus, I need to add an extra half-hour window around my journey. If you assume a normal tech-person salary, that lost half-hour makes it cheaper to take a taxi for most journeys.
Speed is good for trains; busses, on the other hand, live at the whim of traffic.
Japan gets all of these right in its major cities. I have never once felt threatened on a train, and delays are few and far between.
The tradeoff they make is in manpower -- station employees are everywhere. We tend to not like hiring lots of people in the US, and so public transit stations might have one or two visible employees, and certainly not visible, uniformed personnel at every platform.
This is why cars are as popular as they are. In SF, if I want to go from Pacific Heights to the Inner Sunset, a journey by bus-and-train pushes about an hour. By car, it's about fifteen minutes.
In my car, I have a stereo, air conditioning, and a clean, comfortable seat. Public transit, on the other hand, is pretty filthy here in SF, and for some odd reason they jack the heat up enough so that I need to do a little striptease whenever I get on a train.
All minor inconveniences, sure, but it adds up quickly, and what do I get in return? I'm late, have lost money in the long run, and arrive more often than not in a worse mood than when I started.
I really want working public transit here in the US, but the way things are going, I don't see that happening for at least another decade.
As well, transit is only good for getting you around in the cities. Once you get out to "inaka", a car is all but a requirement, much like in North America.
This "world without cars" is a nice pipe dream, but the reality is that no matter how good your transit system, it's still a huge time sink to use it. The only time it becomes faster than a car is if you live in a dense city with poor traffic flow, and that accounts for a tiny percentage of the world population. That's also why it's only the pampered urbanites who dream of a carless world.
That's false. Most of the world's population now lives in cities. Deciding what percentage of those fall below the threshold of "poor" traffic-flow wise is difficult, but it's not "tiny". (http://www.gizmag.com/go/7613/)
Cars beget cars. The reason people need cars in a lot of the US is because they moved somewhere that they need a car to get to. People talk about the amount of time that things take without a car forgetting that said problem was created by cars in the first place. In places where most folks don't have cars you have a small grocery store every few blocks rather than a large one every few miles. The demographics of public transit differ from society at large because the well-off drive cars.
I grew up in American suburbia and have lived in Europe for the last decade. The amount of time required to say, go shopping, or commute to work has remained broadly similar in the half-dozen areas I've lived in, though the distances have not.
Progressively moving away from cars is largely a cultural rather than technological problem. Some well-done urban planning (including structuring energy prices to favor more efficient means) and a few decades to execute it could drastically shift the balance to where we have far fewer cars.
Cars are used because they are versatile. Every other form of transport has far more narrow use cases.
According to http://www.transit-safety.volpe.dot.gov/publications/sso/CRS... , commuter rail kills .09 people per 10 million passenger miles.
According to http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx , cars kill 1.14 people per 100 million passenger miles - or .114 people per 10 million passenger miles.
That's not a huge difference - I actually wonder if the more direct routing and door-to-door service allowed by cars could make up that difference entirely.
The non-suicide number is quite a bit lower, though, by (probably) an order of magnitude. Pedestrians on the tracks in an area they aren't supposed to be, who are struck and killed by trains, are classified in the bucket category of "trespasser" fatalities. Unless they left a note or something it's usually impossible to conclusively say that they were suicides, but the assumption is that the vast majority of trespasser fatalities are suicides, because the number of people struck while trying to steal things or take illegal shortcuts is relatively small. And, trespasser fatalities account for 88% of total commuter-rail fatalities (p. 13 in that report). All other commuter-rail fatalities (passengers, collisions with automobiles, etc.) add up to 0.011 people per 10 million passenger miles.
I'm not sure it matters. The automobile statistics seem to include various methods of suicide involving cars. If rail inspires suicide, that's a safety problem.
I'm not sure they include them equally, though. The most obvious way of killing yourself on train tracks is standing in front of a train, but the most obvious way of killing yourself on a road usually does not involve a car, but involves jumping from a bridge (which doesn't get counted as an automobile fatality).
> If rail inspires suicide, that's a safety problem.
I'm not too sure about that one. If there are a significant number of people who, absent trains, wouldn't kill themselves, that would be significant. But I would guess a larger proportion are just choosing a suicide modality, and if it weren't trains, it'd be jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, taking pills, etc. It's hard to come up with any real data for that counterfactual, though. I suppose a blunt correlational approach would be to see if there's any correlation between availability of commuter rail and suicide rates, after controlling for other confounding variables. I would guess that there isn't one, but could be wrong.
http://www.fra.dot.gov/downloads/safety/tdreport_final.pdf
is a Federal Railroad Administration report that breaks down the cause of trespasser fatalities. This isn't 100% comparable to the previous report, but it does claim that 23% of trespasser fatalities are suicides.
Appendix H breaks down the reported fatalities - it looks like walking and sleeping (drunk?) on tracks each claim more lives than suicide.
One really interesting story is the massive increase in car safety. Deaths per 100M vehicle miles have dropped from 1.73 in 1994 to about 1.09 in 2010.
Fundamentally, I'm not sure any of this matters. We're talking a very small difference in safety - to the point where convenience is probably more important to most people.
This isn't because riding on a shared, public vehicle turns people into hooligans. If you catch public transport in the US, you see a cross-section of people who are too young, old, poor or mentally ill to own a car. Naturally, there will be more crime.
On public transport, you can read the news, write mails, write docs, read a book, do other things as you please, while still arriving at the location you want to go to, albeit probably a little slower (as you have to wait for the train/bus/tram and possibly have to walk to/from the station etc.).
I have never been to the US, so i cannot comment on the comparative part, though.
We've put up with crime for so long in the USA we've forgotten places actually exist without most of it. We've gotten so used to it we think it's normal to "avoid dark alleys" to "pull out your car stereo and don't leave anything visible, even a jacket or risk getting your car broken into" to "don't go to those parts of town"
None of those apply to certain countries.
now watch the defensive replies :(
in japan, i've been to plenty of dark alleys during night time, visibly carrying cameras etc. and i've yet to be encounter anything bad. i think it is fairly safe to say, that japan is a LOT saver than most parts of the world.
It is clear that man prefers to travel with privacy or cars would never have succeeded where alternatives exist. The convenience factor is huge too.
I prefer the freedom to go wherever, whenever and without some crazy person screaming at me on some bus or subway somewhere.
I used to catch a bus every day through the city, and there were a lot of strange people on those trips. Gangs of 9 year old gangster kids drunk up the back. Little old ladies muttering racist slurs at asian students. A guy who hadn't showered in so long his clothes had gone partially transparent from the grease. I don't think I was ever in any danger, but it sure was uncomfortable sometimes. I work pretty close to home now (in fact, mostly at home), so it's not really an issue anymore. But strangely, I find myself missing that chance to interact with people who I didn't choose to interact with.
It seems like every time we get more power (like by inventing an engine that can move us around) we use it to get more control (now I can encase myself in a metal shield that prevents any accidental congress with the outside world).
A bunch of technology has gone the same way. Efficient worldwide shipping and postage means you don't need to go outside to shop. Communication moving online means you can block people you don't like rather than have to deal with them. OKCupid means you can pre-screen your dates to avoid accidentally meeting someone unpalatable. You can GPS track your kids so they won't ever end up lost or at the wrong sort of party.
And those are all good things that give you more control over your environment. But they also isolate you. Unknown experiences are fundamentally scary; so scary that we feel more afraid of walking in a dark alley than we do of heart disease. Like every generation before us, we strike out against danger with the power of our tools. But our dangers are, at this point, largely invented. We're getting to a point where instead of being safe, we'll just be cocooned in a real-world filter bubble, where we never have to fear the unknown, uncontrollable, unsanitised real world that gets forced on us when we get on a bus or walk around a city. I suspect, for all our newfound safety, we'll just feel a bit unsatisfied.
I guess I've just argued myself out of believing that the future without cars is ever really going to happen. Maybe there'll be a virtual bus MMO.