this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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Fuck Cars
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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
I ride as well and I apply this method to driving my car too.
I ride daily, also skateboard and work in transport, my local political rep came past the other week and all I could say was "can we get those phone cameras every 200m on every road in the country? It's the only way we'll get the fuckers off their phones."
Hope she took it on board tbh.
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.
Is this per accident? or pee accidents that didn't happen with motorcycliats not on phones? People reading phone while driving are just selfish asaholes. Bluetooth exiats, talk to text exists, ok google, ok siri and yet...assholes
It's per mile driven...
Motorcycles are exponentially more dangerous than cars, or are you going to blame pedestrians and imply they died because they were on their phones and not listening to obnoxious exhaust despite the Doppler effect meaning you don't hear it till you've been run over?
What i mean is it it only counting miles for vehicles that struck a person, or killed driver, because how do you have stats on vehicles that never report an incident. like i had 60 000 km on bike, no incident, who gathers that for averages, otherwise it is the survivor bias problem
Jesus....
The people who did the peer reviewed academic study I quoted...
It ain't easy, that's why it's not done often and by the time it's published their data set is already 5+ years old....
You might not like the results, but you that doesn't matter.
It has nothing to do with the results it is a "survivor" biased stat article. It says based on accident fatalities so does not account for all miles driven per vehicle type(not in an accident), only those actually hitting somebody. So you don't get a proper per mile look at the data. it is like that helmet stat from decades ago that said wearing a helmet is more likely to result in a neck injury, becauae they left out the people who died...since dead people weren't counted as injuries. I have no issue with busses and motorcycles killing more people struck than cars, the article presents as if it includes all vehicles on the road,but if you ran a study on deatha by vehicle type there would be less for motorcycle because there are just way less on the road to start with, even science writers like to skew things if they want to prove something a certain way so saying per mile driven while excluding all milages from non accidents is misleading stats
I see what you're trying to say here, but the study gets its mileage data from the US Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA) 2002 highway statistics, so it's an estimate of the total number of miles driven by each category of vehicle. I think the bigger problem with using this study to say that motorcycles are worse than cars is that the "3.77x more likely to kill a child per mile" is based on 4 deaths caused by motorcycles that year. We're dealing with numbers so small that one accident caused or prevented could swing the "probabilities" wildly in different directions.
Here's a link to the full study if you're interested. You're right that it doesn't seem to cover injuries though.
Yeah, it skews badly based on tiny sample you mentioned and not includimg injury rate is disingenous. As you understand already we are missing accident to death/injury ratio. P.s. Thanks for the link
And more people die on the toilet than playing Russian roulette, doesn't mean taking a shit is more dangerous.
That's why you can't just look at total deaths.
I'm sorry I couldn't find a way to explain this that you could understand
Lol, no I understand it, I just hate bad science when their goal is publishing, not helping. It reminds me of the Autism study, their test was asking people who came into a corner srore if they wanted the drink(cup) they bought to be upsized for same price. Their assumptive split was a regular "normal" person would upsize for better value, those that said no had autism--because they were attached to cup size or didn't underatand dollar per oz value system. Just junk science, since people way have a small cupholder in the car or not want so much drink...but they get notoriety and granta for publishing even if it is useless
Hey I think you missed this extremely important part of your quoted source:
Hey I think you have never taken a statistics or logical reasoning course.
Yes in total number cars and light trucks kill the most pedestrians. That's not what is being discussed.
Per mile driven, motorcycles are more than 4x more likely to kill a pedestrian. If motorcycles were used the same amount as cars and light trucks, the total number of deaths per year from them would be almost 20,000 people
Motorcyclist are statistically more dangerous drivers to pedestrians.
“If motorcycles were used the same amount…”
They aren’t, so who cares?
Sure!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
I am glad to see you made an attempt to identify your error, but that's the wrong logical fallacy.
What you did is:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring
Hey. I think you don't understand average or what the phrase "per mile driven" means.
There's a shit ton more cars and trucks than motorcycles.
But per mile while you're operating a motor vehicle, motorcycles kill more pedestrians
Does that make sense?
If not, can you clarify what in this sentence is causing your confusion?
Don't be so condescending.