this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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Fuck Cars
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Your hub for collection of materials that contribute to a world with less car ownership. Including buses, motorcycles, bicycles, skateboards, longboards, scooters, hoverboards, e-scooters, pedestrians, walking, running
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I drive a motorcycle regularly. I make it a habit to check where people ahead of me are looking (by looking into their side mirrors) so I can predict whether they'll merge into me.
About 1/3 of drivers are on their phones, not looking at the road at any given time
Yeah, but do you actually wear high vis?
Vest and helmet cover?
Or are you one of those people that say noise is the only indicator completely disregarding the advances in car sound proofing that only makes loud bikes an annoyance to pedestrians?
Did you know by mile driven, motorcycles kill more pedestrians than cars or trucks?
https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/11/4/232
Literally 3.77x more likely to kill a child per mile than a car, and you're focusing on peeping in windows as you zip by?
So can you please stop trying to see how many car drivers are on the phone while you ride one of the most dangerous vehicles possible for you and people minding their own business walking around?
Your hobby isn't more important than people's lives, even if it makes you feel better about other shortcomings you may be dealing with and can't change.
Note the publication year of the article, and the year of the data collected. 2005 and 2002, respectively. Trucks and SUVs are demonstrably larger and more prevalent on the roads in the last twenty years in the US, and those were pre smartphone.
And plenty of us ride motorcycles for commuting and economic reasons, they're not only toys... Even if it is a vehicle that attracts a bunch of assholes, which I'll clearly admit
Oh ok. I'll wait for your updated data then before dismissing mine.
In 2022, of all pedestrian fatalities where the striking vehicle body type was known, approximately 40% involved a passenger car as the striking vehicle, while 30% involved an SUV and 18% involved a pickup (Table 9)
From page 25 of that pdf.
Which, if you then wanted to combine it with vehicle miles traveled from something like this, you'd get:
If you find a source that breaks down vehicle miles traveled by specific vehicle type let me know, otherwise this is probably the best you're going to get.
That link is average miles driven per vehicle...
You're skipping the amount of vehicles that drive those average miles...
Like, your formatted it nicely, but the math doesn't make any sense at all.
You took the average miles traveled, total pedestrian fatalities, and then claimed that answer meant anything at all?
Like, A for effort, but you didnt accomplish anything that means anything...
I see my mistake now, those are millions of vehicle miles driven. But they're definitely not average miles driven per vehicle like you're assuming.
I took the total urban and rural miles traveled and matched them up to the pedestrian fatalities of the corresponding vehicle types. The vehicle miles traveled data doesn't break the vehicles down into smaller categories like the pedestrian fatality data does.
Wait...
So you think the effort into that peer reviewed research paper took more effort than just looking at two PDFs and finding the rate between two sets of numbers?!
Crazy man.
What are you talking about? When did I ever say publishing a paper was easy? You asked for someone to provide updated studies compared to the 20 year old one you linked. It's certainly not perfect, but now you have some more up to date numbers to look at.
No, you took two numbers you didn't understand and declared that as in depth as the study....
The only numbers I'd trust you to calculate is the number of motorcycles you own, but I wouldn't trust you to report that accurately here.
Have fun tho, that's apparently what matters, not dead children
I was pretty transparent with what I was doing and never claimed to be as thorough as a proper study would be. But 20 years is a very long time, you can't assume the numbers from back then are still accurate to today's world.
I don't own a motorcycle.
If you care about dead children, maybe you should care a little more about the 6,000 killed by cars, trucks and SUVs rather than the 42 killed by motorcycles. Why are you on this crusade against motorcycles in the first place? It seems weird and unnecessarily hostile. (Edit: the 6,000 and 42 are all pedestrians killed, I don't know how many of those are children)
I wasn't dismissing the data! I was reading it because it's intriguing, and was surprising, and felt compelled to highlight the age of the data given the relevance to the discussion about smartphone usage.
Likewise the change in vehicle size in the twenty years since the study is worth considering, IMHO. The stats you provided aren't to be dismissed, through their context is important.