this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Fuck Cars

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Trolley dilemma (for some people, for some strange reason). The situation is, unfortunately, normalized structural violence.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was going to ask you, but then figured I could do my own research and just ask if you think it's reasonable. According to Our World in Data, the WHO says 4.2 million people die every year from outside pollution. Again according to Our World in Data, road transport accounts for 11.9% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Obviously, that's different to health-affecting pollution, and it might pollute more in places where people live compared to something like electricity generation which would likely be further from population, but it's the best I could come up with. So that would mean we could attribute ~0.5 million deaths per year to road transport. According to Movotiv, there are 1.2 billion vehicles, 70 million daily driving trips, with an average distance of 15 km. That means a total annual distance traveled of ~383.25 billion km. So there's 0.0035 deaths per year per vehicle, or 286 years per death per vehicle, and 1 death per 91,250km. That doesn't sound right, and I blame the Movotiv statistics, unless I made a mistake. 300km/year for the average vehicle sounds ridiculously low, so something's not right. I don't have time to find the issue or better stats right now, but I might have a look later. In the interim, do you think my logic stacks up, or do you have better statistics?