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.