A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
sources:
https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/111974118192304899
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692324000267
Image description:
A bar chart titled "Deaths from Wars & Cars" the Leftmost bar is WW2 at 78M, followed by Cars 72M, Mongols 39M, Taiping 25M, Ming Qing 25M, 2nd CN-JP 20M, and finally WW1 19M. A note at the bottom states "Showing estimate midpoints"
I... Don't think you can compare those. Wars tend to be a lot shorter than the existence of cars, and I'd wager that more people have interacted with a car than people have been part of WW2.
Might want to do one with planes, trains, or really any other kind of transportation. That should paint roughly the same image, just with contextual relevance.
But statistic make brain feel good! Car bad!
Woah woah, mind your language! We say "fuck cars" here!
Yeah, the deaths from cars will continue to go up because people still use cars, but WW2 is over so the death toll will stay the same.
If you were to compare with planes or trains it would probably have to be a per capita or deaths per mile traveled comparison to be of any use.
Plane and train deaths are much, much lower than car deaths, even if you start from their inventions to present.
The death rate per 100 million passenger miles for passenger vehicles increased for the second consecutive year, increasing 1.8% to 0.57 in 2021. Passenger vehicles are by far the most dangerous motorized transportation option compared. Over the last 10 years, passenger vehicle death rate per 100,000,000 passenger miles was over 20 times higher than for buses, 17 times higher than for passenger trains, and 595 times higher than for scheduled airlines. Other comparisons are possible based on passenger trips, vehicle miles, or vehicle trips, but passenger miles is the most commonly used basis for comparing the safety of various modes of travel.
Source: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode
Yes, that's what I wrote, but thank you for finding a source to back it up.
Plus, I think you'd need to look at comparative population densities for the locations and periods measured. Like, sure cars killed more people than Mongols, but have cars ever been responsible for killing 11% of the global population comparative to when the accident count is taken?
The Mongols were objectively more deadly I think.
wars tend to be a lot shorter than the existence of cars
Yeah but depends on how you define wars. For example the mongol conquests is up there and that lasted a good 60 years. You could say thats multiple wars tied up in a single cause or crisis.
These events can be on a spectrum between the thirty years war, to the crisis of the third century and the three kingdoms period, each around 60 years, to the hundred years war. The longer it gets the more it goes from being about discrete battles in a war, to discrete conflicts in a war, to discrete wars in greater war/crisis.
Either way on the ground these crisis look the same for the common people. Armies repeatedly going back and forth over your land, looting, raping, killing and spreading disease and making your life miserable and after a few decades this becomes normalized. In this sense cars could be a good comparison, a persistent normalized threat constantly killing people.
The casualties for cars even in this context look greater. The three kingdoms period, probably the deadliest of these crisis, caused 30 million deaths. Why it doesn't compare well though is that was half the population of China, whereas 70 million is probably only a couple of percent of the people who live in car centric countries.
Still not a bad metric to consider. The goal with vehicles is transportation and war obviously was subjugation. Deaths being a high metric when that's not the intended purpose is alarming to say the least.
I do agree though the timeframe should be considered, and we should see the comparisons from different modes of transportation.
Now imagine how many people have died of forks in history.
Quite a bit more than WW2 or cars for that matter.
You've got me curious of the actual value regarding fork deaths lol
Like salad forks?
Pitch forks
This is what is called inflammatory.
To legitimately compare the two, you'd have to combine all of the war deaths into one bar and use a set time frame, like others have noted.
How far back in time do you think we have to go until war has killed more people than traffic has?
1950 as far as I can tell. Every year since then, traffic has killed more people than wars.
I dislike car oriented urban design, car oriented laws, car prioritising people, and cars as a symbol of social status...
I don't hate cars themselves.
Same. I consider them a marvel of engineering and an extremely useful tool. But, like any tool, they can be used incorrectly and cause damage.
I don’t hate cars themselves.
I do
Is that for the same timeframe? Worldwide? Can only see the article abstract, and it says "since their invention". I mean it is a bit apples and oranges, I get what its meant to say but nowadays we have more car deaths than war deaths (or not?) because there is less war and more cars.
If we're doing stuff "since their invention", it should stack the sum of people that died in every war to every car death so far.
But this is just a bad post someone thought would get cheap validation on a niche community.
You know it's not. 6 years for war and I assume close to 100 years for the car.
It's a dumb post
This is certainly a take...
A lot of European cities that were built for cars were rebuilt after being destroyed in WWII. The US destroyed cities, leveled cultural artifacts that can never be replaced, and did so to itself. The US feels like it's been through a war, but it's just been cars the whole time.
Death from old age kills exponentially more. Let's focus on that?
There isn't something like "death from old age", everyone dies because of something, like a cardiac arrest, organ dysfunction or an undiscovered tumor.
That is at best a hypothesis, though I agree with you. Until we start really caring about death and doing proper autopsies, we can't be sure. Today, there are still a lot of death certificates where the cause of death is listed as "dude just old".
Because it doesn't matter. Wasting time on finding out if grandma had a tumor, cardiac arrest, organ failure, or a seizure ultimately doesn't matter because if it wasn't X, it would've been Y, or Z. The organs don't grow back the same quality, and it detotiates every time, so at some point you are frail, and all your organs are failing, and it's gonna get you sooner or later.
Wasting manpower to find it out for statistics sake is just plain dumb. Also nobody wants doctors to cut their 90 year old gramps just for the sake of statistics.
That data could point to where we need research. Imagine you could have another two years with grandpa, every grandpa, and all it took was more data.
I understand that more time with your relatives is always a plus, but not everyone is enjoying life climbing down a flight of stairs for 15 minutes, taking 5 different meds every day, and fearing everying illness having you go to the hospital. Life is not always enjoyable when old, and keeping grandpa on life support could be viewed as cruel from them. Speaking from experience.
Life has a 100% mortality rate.
*so far
People are working on it. A good start is trying to live as long as you can. I would advise avoiding sugar, processed food.
I found a video interview of someone aged 82 who looked and moved like someone less than half that age. A beef farmer. They seem on the right track. They don't eat anything they don't grow or hunt
I wanna see the overlap of deaths by cars during wartime as weapons. Cuz if you think about it, a tank is just a big car with a gun on it.
Why is there no NGO campaigning against Mongols running over children? They're relentless, it seems
What if Mongols had cars instead of horses...?
They would have lost. They drank mares milk and a primary food source. Their ride was their food basically.
Oh. Yeah. Motor oil and gasoline doesn't make for a very good diet.
If the Mongols did that much on their own, how much did all motorcycle gangs do combined?
