I think that's a little bit of a weird way to look at the probabilities. Sure, for a one-off activity I might look at 1 in 7,700,000 and decide that's an acceptable risk. But many people in the US take several car rides per day.

At, say, 4 rides per day, that's about a 1 in 5300 chance of death over a single year. That's still small, but not that small. Someone in a decent-sized town or city could expect to lose someone they know once every few years with those odds.

We know what the rate of deaths are: 1 in 8000; roughly 40,000 over 320,000,000.

Slightly less than the rate of suicide; and slightly more than half the number of fentanyl deaths. And a smaller fraction of medical mistake deaths. (Of course, none of the risk is evenly distributed.)

As a systemic problem, I’m not convinced that cars are the worst. Or outside what we accept in several areas.

The non-even distribution is a key part of it. Fentanyl deaths don’t affect me if I don’t drug, and if 80% (made up number as example) of car fatalities involve drunk driving, it also factors out for most people.

If cars had a random chance to simply explode equivalent to the mortality rate in crashes, people would treat them Very Differently.

I think if you want to make this argument you can go look at the stats. Look at the relative cost of vehicles in the EU over the past 25 years, compare to the cost of vehicles in the US over the past 25 years.

Obviously the lack of difference there wouldn't prove much (if I had to bet I'd bet cars in the US have gotten way more expensive faster than in the EU, just from labor costs), but the lack of a major difference would complicate the theory that new regulations in the past 15 years have massively improved costs, absent a theory that some other thing the EU is doing but the US is not doing is also kicking in to similarly counteract that.

The numbers exist, this isn't in the abstract. Just a question of doing the legwork

I think we should not compare EU vs US costs but rather predict what would be the decrease in costs (relative to EU itself) due to reduced regulations in EU.

Huh, but this is a terrible comparison.. the cars in both unions have been made the same, of course they cost similarly. In other words the US buyers partially pay for the R&D cost to keep to EU standards. And the US population also get the EU regulated-safety requirements (although only partially, since the US also allows Cybertrucks to drive around).

A comparison would be comparing a car that can ensure the survival of their passengers, proven with test crashes, vs e.g. Chinese-made cara for the local market that have terrible crumpling when crash-tested..

A bit off-topic, but lots of the top ranked Euro NCAP crash tests have been chinese-built cars for a few years now. Their industry has evolved insanely fast, that perception of low standards is long gone.

> the cars in both unions have been made the same, of course they cost similarly

I'm really not sure what you mean, many of the most popular cars in the EU aren't even sold in the US (Renault, Dacia, Opel, Peugeot/Citroën although they have taken quite a hit in the last few years) and they are generally cheaper than US cars.

And quite a few US cars aren't available in the EU either (although they can sometimes be imported privately, which bypasses the regulations somewhat) which is the very topic we're discussing.

As for Chinese cars, the recent ones are performing adequately in crash-tests.

Zero pedestrian or cyclist deaths are acceptable just for someone to get a cheaper (or much worse, larger) car. Zero.

There is a vast number of reasons why we need and must reduce private car modality share as much as possible. Making cars more expensive is a feature, not a bug.

Is it ever acceptable to have pedestrian or cyclist deaths to have buses, trains, ambulances, fire trucks?

Buses and trains decrease the number of cars on the road by pooling travellers. Ambulances and fire trucks serve a purpose beyond making individuals travel comfortably. This is a straw man.

A bus is more dangerous than walking. But great that you agree with me the goal is not zero accidents at any cost. It is to balance the benefits of cars (like ambulances etc) with the risks.

What a strange question. The answer is of course 'rather not'. But those are for the most part unavoidable without society paying a (potentially) much higher price. So we have decided to accept those risks.

In this case it is another country trying to impose their 'way of life' on the rest of the world, or in this case, the EU, which has a different set of values.

That doesn't really have anything to do with having buses or trains vs cyclists, it is not a personal decision and there are many alternatives compared to US vehicles that were never designed for European (or Asian, for that matter) traffic in the first place. The USA is very car centric to the point that walking is frowned upon (I got picked up by the police in North Dakota for walking). The EU is simply not like that, and that's fine. The USA should set their own standards for car safety and so should the EU, if that leads to incompatible products I think the mantra is 'let the market sort it out'. The Japanese seem to have figured out how to make vehicles for different markets, there is no reason the USA can not do the same thing.

And most city buses have much better overview of their environments than a random american truck. The bus driver is sitting low down with big windows in all directions and will see cyclists and pedestrians on their side or kids walking in front.

I am not american. I’m from Sweden. The point is it it is silly to claim the goal is zero accients since the only way to achieve that is by removing cars. We all agree they are useful. The goal should be to have as few accidents as possible.

> I am not american. I’m from Sweden.

Being from Sweden or America has no bearing on what I wrote.

> The point is it it is silly to claim the goal is zero acci[d]ents since the only way to achieve that is by removing cars.

That isn't true either. When you replace one form of transportation with another you will still have accidents. Maybe more, maybe less, maybe different. But they will be there.

> We all agree they are useful. The goal should be to have as few accidents as possible.

Indeed, and that is what TFA is all about. It is emphatically not about 'buses, trains, ambulances, fire trucks' because those do not normally appear in the guise of a 2500 Kg pickup truck with limited visibility for urban deployment. If you wanted to make a reasonable case I would suggest an alternative: a minivan.

To get to zero you must eliminate cars completely and I don't buy into that kind of logic.

That's not what GP said. Zero deaths caused by cheap/large vehicles.

You can eliminate deaths by that cause by eliminating those types of vehicles, not by eliminating all cars.

Not saying that's feasible, but let's not argue against something that nobody said in the first place.

It’s not some mystical thing, but a matter of smart urban design. Oslo and Helsinki have managed to achieve zero road deaths in a year without eliminating vehicles. You don’t need to accept a certain amount of deaths as some sort inevitability or a necessary sacrifice.

Easy to fix. Ban bikes and start throwing people caught riding a bike into jail.

And how exactly fixes that pedestrian deaths? But I know your answer; put people not driving a car into jail too, right? Eliminate sidewalks too, use the space for an additional lane. Exiting your car anywhere except in parking lots and private property should be prohibited!

Sounds like a lovely place for sure.

> Exiting your car anywhere except in parking lots and private property should be prohibited!

Not a bad idea, actually. It might make cities more liveable compared to the European status quo of anti-human cities. A bit too extreme before we get self-driving cars.

The problem is that we make more expensive and more dangerous cars. Cheaper cars from the past were safer for pedestrians and cyclists because they had better visibility, were lower, slower and narrower. It's all for vanity and profit over lives and safe cities.

> penalty faced by consumers in EU with to increased costs due to regulation?

The question works both ways. How can we quantify the penalty faced by consumers in the US due to lax regulation? How much does is each toddler ran over worth, exactly?

The Americans didn’t get cheap cars, they just got very large cars which is obviously detrimental to anyone but perhaps the driver.

The specific regulations here

> EU officials must revisit the hastily agreed trade deal with the US, where the EU stated that it “intends to accept” lower US vehicle standards, say cities – including Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam, and more than 75 civil society organisations. In a letter to European lawmakers, the signatories warn that aligning European standards with laxer rules in the US would undermine the EU’s global leadership in road safety, public health, climate policy and competitiveness.

They point to many things and not only the size of cars - like fewer approvals, lower pollution controls, fewer safety measures.

Some of them increase utility (like people might prefer bigger cars) and others decrease cost.

Have you ever heard of the term "negative externalities"?

yes i'm questioning the extent of the externalities

They are extensive.

Death and suffering by other road users. It should be obvious to anyone with a working moral compass that nobody should die just because someone wants a larger car, or wants to go faster, or wants to drive under the influence – or simply has to drive because there are no better options.

Direct monetary costs to the society caused by said deaths and injuries inflicted.

CO2 emissions rapidly making the entire world a worse place to live for generations to come, with the death toll likely being in tens of millions as a conservative estimate. Climate refugees will number in hundreds of millions if not billions. Traffic emissions are dropping very slowly compared to other big sources, and that's almost entirely because of private cars and the political difficulty to regulate driving anywhere near enough even in less car-brained societies.

Particle emissions, including tire and brake dust. These affect the health of billions of people and cause countless premature deaths annually. Dust is flushed into water bodies, causing ecological damage. EVs are heavy and wear down tires and road surfaces much faster.

Noise emission, which is a real, recognized health hazard and a cause of stress. EVs still have wheel noise, which is a major noise component in urban areas.

Direct healthcare costs to the society caused by inactive sitting-based lifestyle. Car-friendly infrastructure is actively hostile, not just indifferent, to active modes of transport.

Direct costs to the society incurred by dark, paved surfaces and a lack of canopy coverage because cars need space. This can have an alarming effect on urban temperatures, increasing the need for cooling solutions and, in the absence of such, contributing to the hundreds of thousands of annual heat-related hospitalizations and deaths.

The costs of building expensive new car-centric infrastructure are externalized to everybody. Toll roads are rare. Taxes on gasoline are nowhere near high enough to cover all the externalities even in Europe. Driving is subsidized by the society, which is economically incredibly inefficient.

---

While we're at it, let's go over the main opportunity costs as well:

Indirect costs to the society by deaths and injuries in the shape of healthy work-years lost.

Indirect costs to the society caused by inactive lifestyle in the shape of healthy work-years lost. When you count both direct and indirect costs, spending money to encourage people to bike and walk, for example by building safe infrastructure, ends up saving money in the end.

There are vastly more economically sane uses for all the extra space that cars need in urban environments where land is valuable, including a wasteful number and width of lanes, streetside parking, parking lots, and parking garages.

Vast amounts of money have been, are being, and will be spent on road infrastructure that could be used on vastly more efficient modes of transport such as rail-based transit.

Making cars 2x as expensive would massively improve safety simply by reducing the number of cars. And it would make cities much nicer places to exist in general.

Why not just ban cars in the cities instead? The problem is those who need cars the most are those who can't afford to live in the city centers, so it often ends up being an extra tax in the less affluent.

For some reason we decided to put a great deal of jobs in the city centers. Commuting to the edge of a city and then taking public transport to office doesn't really work, unless massive amounts of money are pumped into trains, busses and trams.

There's this weird perception that Europe has excellent public transport, while in reality it only works, sort of, in a few larger cities. Everywhere else functioning in society really requires a car or assumes that you're living within biking distance of work and daycare.

People that need cars don't tend to have large cars, unless there's some tax benefits (someone in the village has one of those 5 seater dumper trucks because they can write it off as a business expense but can't write off a Toyota Aygo or Citroen C1 which would far more sensible)

That doesn't align with my experience. I grew up in Belgium, in a place where you'd be lucky to have a bus an hour. The closest place to get groceries, by foot, was half an hour away, most of it 5% uphill on the way back.

If you need a car, then you need it for everything. You need to be able to fit the two kids you picked at school, the gear for the sport activity you'll drop them at, the mom you picked at the train station after work, and the weekly groceries you picked from the supermarket on your way back. From experience, you aren't doing all of that in a Hyundai i10.

Now I live in the Randstad. Groceries get delivered, mom rides the bus for 8 minutes to come back home, and I pick the kid by bike. The car is optional and pure convenience, so I can get away with a small one.

A bus an hour, surely you mean a bus a week?

We have two cars, one 1.6m, one 1.7m, and handle all that. A Hyundai i10 is 1.68m wide.

A Range Rover is 2 metres wide. Ridiculous size and completely unnecessary in rural areas, I assume they are needed in towns.

A Range Rover is conspicuous consumption, not transportation.

The problem with these sorts of things is that they discriminate against lower-income folks. In cities with good public transit and affordable housing (such that people can live near their jobs) this is maybe not such a problem, but that unfortunately describes precious little of the US. I bet it could work in many places in the EU, though.

Getting rid of lower income folks would ALSO improve most statistics.

But we’ve seen where that leads.

I'm coming around to the idea that the high income folks are actually the problem.

Things are a problem because we say they're a problem. But who's doing the saying? Not the low income folks, they have much more pressing problems they'd rather talk about.

Seems like eliminating the high income folks from the discourse would result in a redirection of focus toward more serious issues.

Unironically this used to be a "self-solving" problem because the high-income and low-income would self-segregate and deal with their own problems in their own areas.

But modern liberal democracy kind of insists that those differences "don't really exist" and so we try to force everything together.

A better solution would be to make taxes and parking cost relative to vehicle size/weight. Want a big SUV? Pay 4x the taxes and hefty parking fees. Drive a small, electric commuter vehicle? Half the tax, reduced parking.

That’s the same flawed reasoning Kirk flaunted when discussing gun laws. It ultimately proved to be wrong; as in it’s all fine and “Vulcanian Logical” until you or your close ones become the statistic

With the huge hoods these things have the driver has a hard time seeing what is right in front of them, and when they hit a pedestrian (kid or adult) they are much more likely to die.

https://www.carscoops.com/2024/12/suvs-and-pickup-trucks-2-3...

> How can we quantify the penalty faced by consumers in EU with to increased costs due to regulation?

I really hate that everything has to be seen from the consumers' lens, especially the consumer of luxury goods (I'm talking SUVs and the like, cheap cars exist in Europe).

What if we didn't just look at it from the POV from people who buy or want cars? I don't own a car, nor do I plan to. I have to pay for roads, which I understand to an extent. But why should my life be at risk from people wanting to buy SUVs cheaper?

Edit: Also, looking at "cars" without distinction really just obfuscates the real issue. The most dangerous cars (for pedestrians) are the biggest (and sometimes the fastest) ones. Plus most pedestrians die in cities, not on a Highway. So yeah, if you want to drive an SUV in a dense city, then I'm all for making it 10x more expensive for you, because it makes no sense (to me) and puts me in danger :)

I agree with everything you said but

> But why should my life be at risk from people wanting to buy SUVs cheaper?

What if the risk is not that much greater? That's what I'm questioning.

But it is much greater - more than double the odds of killing a kid in a collision, for instance.

what if reducing the size of a ball point pen by half reduces the rate of death by ball point pens by 50%.

I'm not sure why you're responding to a measured, factual rate of death with some random weird thing that you just made up.

So ok, I'll do it too: what if reducing the size of a ball point pen by half reduces the rate of death by ball point pens by 0.01%? (Answer: you don't do it, because the benefit to doing so is low, and that measured effect could be well within the margin of error anyway.)

(And my weird made-up number sounds a lot more likely than your weird made-up number.)

The reason I brought it up was because it is not meaningful to only compare relative decrease of deaths without understanding the extent of how many deaths they are responsible for.

If only a few people die due to car accidents and one is much more likely to die of other causes than cars, is it worth making cars that much more expensive to decrease the deaths by a bit?

The regulations in my opinion add up to 20-30% of the car price. And likelihood of death due to a car at an individual level decreases by .01% (maybe).

Imagine you were given two options:

- Car A at $45k USD

- Car B at $35k USD

And you are less likely to die with Car A. Is it super obvious that you will buy Car A? If so why doesn't everyone flock to Volvo cars which lead to ~45% fewer fatalities?

Why is this so obvious to you that this regulation is a good thing? The sibling is implying that I'm trolling or whatever but this is a legitimate question.

“ And likelihood of death due to a car at an individual level decreases by .01% (maybe).”

This is made up out of thin air.

Maybe I'm wrong but can you explain why people don't flock and buy only Volvo cars when (I fact checked this) they are 40% more safe than other cars?

Look at injurious car crashes as a fraction of the population rather than in raw numbers. Therein lies the answer.

(And the answer is not to screech about how people are stupid because they don't share your values, prioritization or risk assessment. I shouldn't have to say this, but I feel like I do considering the subject matter)

>Look at injurious car crashes as a fraction of the population rather than in raw numbers. Therein lies the answer.

Elaborate? Are you suggesting that car accidents are not that high to begin with relatively, so it is not worth as much to increase safety only in cars because it may not translate to overall safety to a person?

More or less. The average person isn't gonna get injured in a car crash in their life, let alone in the time they own a particular car. Hence why it's treated as a "nice to have" that people only consider for a purchasing decisions once their other criteria are met. Which is also why you see it most touted when people are buying something that's handily doing what they need and more (SUV for 1 kid, car car for A to B commuting where just about anything will do, etc). People aren't gonna compromise a key requirement for half a star on a rating for something they're unlikely to need.

that's what i have been trying to say!! so why is it so obvious that people should accept increase in car prices with regulations when they don't behave that way when buying cars?

They're doing that all the time, check comment history.

If the ball point pen was responsible for ~40,000 deaths per year (in the USA), and reducing its size by half did not meaningfully diminish its function as a pen for most users… I’d rather not kill an extra 20,000 people a year just to have a bigger pen.

But how many of the 40k deaths are directly attributable to the characteristics being discussed? We can’t go from “twice as likely to kill a kid” to “half of the 40k deaths are kids killed by this thing” without examining the evidence.

(Apparently 30% of th fatalities involve alcohol but we already tried banning that once …)

I agree if this is true

> and reducing its size by half did not meaningfully diminish its function as a pen for most users

Makes sense. And I'm glad I don't have to make that choice. But as mentioned in my edit, I think that the "low hanging fruit" are still plentiful, so we won't have to think about this for a while (talking about pedestrian deaths).

Those numbers are for occupants. Not bystanders. And also do not include the injury adjusted lifetime rates as they say a lot more.

I'm not going to argue the cost numbers are they are so far out of the ballpark it's not even funny.

Making cars more expensive disincentives car use, which is a good thing.

The fewer cars, the better.

It's worth the cost if it's your child or relative being killed by a car, these regulations don't make a car 2x costlier than the USA so it's ludicrous to start with that assumption.

Volvo cars are 40% safer. Then why don't people buy only those cars and choose to buy more unsafe cars at the same price?

Could be that other marques have better advertising. Could be that other marques have more attractive design. Or could be that people don't know that Volvos are 40% safer. Could be that demand outpaces production, so people can't buy them. Could be that people are suicidal and want less safe cars (funnily enough leading to fewer safe cars).

Could be people don’t want marginal increase in safety by paying more?

> What if cars got 2x costlier in EU due to the regulations to give you a .01% increased chance in safety?

Ah, yes, the old "what if [totally absurd scenario]" argument. That's not what anyone is talking about.

Why isn't everyone buying Volvo cars if they are 40% more safe?

Part of the issue is that larger vehicles are “safer” for the person driving them, so long as their crash partner is smaller. Larger vehicles are more likely to “win” crashes versus smaller vehicles and pedestrians, at the expense of being more likely to be involved in crashes and more likely to cause fatalities when they do.

It’s not just about how safe it is for the driver or passengers of the vehicle, it’s about the impact of those design choices on the safety of everyone else on the road.