So according to this chart, any time I get in a car, I have a 1 in 137,362,637.36264 chance of dying?
That’s a lot better than than I thought. I’ll take those odds.
Every mile you drive you have a 1 in 137,362,637.36264 chance of dying. So if you drive to the sun and .474 of the way back you are guaranteed ti die (if you are bad at probability)
I’ll still take those odds.
I guarantee you will die if you get in whatever car you have and make it even 1% of the way to the sun, regardless of how good you are at probability.
You don’t know what mods I have made to my car
and they refuse to wear helmets.
In what backward country are you not obligated to wear a helmet?
State of Illinois. No helmets required. It is unbelievable.
what’s going on with ferries…
also how much does it change if you take out the Staten Island Ferry?
Quite a few crappy ferries sink weekly in South East Asia, usually overloaded way beyond safety margins.
You’d figure the extra passengers would make the ratio go down you know?
I guess it depends how many billion people were on the ferry when someone died
This chart sucks because you typically put way less miles on a bike, so a single death in 10000 miles, balloons when you try to make it per billion.
I’d like to see total deaths by vehicle type, to contrast the skew
You say it’s bad because it normalizes by distance traveled, but you don’t say why normalizing by distance is bad. It makes perfect sense to me as it treats all modes of transportation equally. It allows you to approximate the answer to, “if I have to travel a set distance to my destination then which mode of transportation is safest?”
Because people don’t take an airplane when traveling 3 miles. It’s really not fair to compare a device designed to haul hundreds of people thousands of miles across oceans with something designed to carry a single person a few blocks. Airplanes and bikes aren’t substitutes for each other.
It’s like comparing my garden trowel with a commercial excavator. Yeah, thr excavator moves more dirt more quickly, but you don’t use one to weed a garden or use a trowel to grade a building site.
I’d still measure both by ability to move dirt if my objective is to move dirt. This chart compares modes of transport; if your purpose for riding a bicycle is pleasure or cost or whatever then you can make your own personal adjustments, but if you want to decide what’s the safest way to do a daily 10 mile commute then this chart will give you that.
You gonna do a 10-mile commute on an airplane?
You use the lines of the chart that are relevant to the kind of journey you want to make. This should not need explaining.
You’re just being argumentative for its own sake.
Not saying bikes aren’t the most dangerous, but comparing against the distance skews this. A plane trip is usually quite a bit longer than any other.
Not sure how else to measure it though, maybe against number of trips traveled?
Number of trips sounds more reasonable. It will show the odds of completing a trip for different means of transport
Hours of travel time would likely be a good fit too.
hours doesn’t come as close to the metric that you’d like though
the purpose of travel is to get from point a to point b, so you want to measure the likelihood of death when travelling the comparable trips
hours doesn’t really work because different modes of transport complete the trip in very different times. distance however is relatively similar
Except that a short trip is less risk exposure than a long trip.
A plane isn’t as versatile though. You can’t go everywhere on a plane, train, or (to a lesser extent) bus, but you can in a car, motorcycle, or if you’re committed, bicycle.
Go go gadget spitball math!
Sources for average transit mode speed
Source 1:
These are the average speeds of some common modes of transportation:
Commercial passenger aircraft: 547 to 575 miles per hour Private jet: 400 to 711 miles per hour Europe high-speed rail: 155 to 217 miles per hour Shinkansen (Japanese bullet trains): 150 to 200 miles per hour Modern cruise ship: 23 to 27 miles per hour Bicycle: 10 to 24 miles per hour Sailboat: 4.5 to 7 miles per hour Walking: 3 miles per hourSource 2:
Source 3:
https://wonderlearning.blog/real-average-speed-us-train-facts
When people think of passenger trains, they often envision swift, efficient travel. However, the operational reality for Amtrak, the primary passenger rail operator in the United States, is far more nuanced. While its locomotives are capable of impressive speeds, the average journey speed for most passengers is surprisingly modest, often hovering between 50 and 60 miles per hour, with long-distance routes averaging even less.
Ok, I’m USAsian, gonna be US-centric, and I’m gonna make some spitball roundings for easier math:
Average Actual Travel Speed:
Motorcycle: 50 mph
Car: 50 mph
Ferry: 25 mph
Train: 50 mph (long/medium distance)
Bus: 25 mph
Subway/Lightrail: 25 mph
Aircraft: 550 mph
Attempt at Conveying Math Proof
So we have:
D = deaths per billion miles. S = speed in miles per hour.
If we first solve for and find the time taken to travel one billion miles at speed S, we would do:
T = 1,000,000,000 / S
(T is time in hours)
What we want is D / T
D / T = D / ( 1,000,000,000 / S)
->
D / T = (D * S) / 1,000,000,000
So, that’s our rough conversion.
Using (D * S) / 1,000,000,000 , the OP graph becomes:
Deaths per hour of transit, by transit mode, for every billion miles travelled:
Motorcycles: 10,628.5
Car: 364
Ferry: 79.25
Train: 21.5
Subway/Lightrail: 6
Bus: 2.75
Aircraft: 38.5
So… thats basically deaths per billion hours spent using said transit mode.
Notes
You may have noticed that Aircraft are now more dangerous than Buses, Subways, med/long distance Trains, and are only ~2x safer than Ferries, not ~45x times safer, as they are with the OP metric.
One hour of Motorcycles transit, on the other hand, is now ~29x more deadly than an hour of car transit, ~276x more deadly than an hour of aircraft transit…
… as opposed to the OP metric, where a billion miles of motorcycle travel is again ~29x more deadly than a billion miles of car travel, but is ~3039x more deadly than a billion miles of aircraft travel.
tl;dr:
Basically, take travel speed into account, and aircraft become significantly more deadly per hour spent travelling in them, but the ratios between terrestrial and aquatic craft stay pretty similar, due to no one having yet proposed the ikranoplan as a mass transit solution.
(Historically minded readers may note the absence from these numbers of the ‘revolutionary’ hyperloop, as well as monorail, due to basically not fucking existing in real life.)
You may quibble about the actual average speeds of various transit modes as you please.
More Notes
Probably also worth noting that this is only deaths, not injuries, say, requiring hospitalization.
I imagine doing deaths + serious injuries would also change this graph significantly.
Also also, this doesn’t take into account road rage that does not directly involve the vehicle, I don’t think.
It does not include injuries or deaths on some form of public or mass transit where say, you get assaulted by another passenger, or something like that.
That could also tweak things, potentially, but I have no strong instinct about if it would really matter, or how… and, you could again do deaths vs deaths + serious injuries.
My thought exactly, walking per distance is probably the most deadly mode of transport
[X] Doubt
Walking is what we evolved to do. While being a pedestrian in certain parts of cities is dangerous, tons of walking is done away from vehicles.
Maybe depends on where you are living, but you quite probably have the wrong impression.
In my country (Germany), less than 3000 people die each year in traffic overall, while already an estimated 4000 pedestrians die while simply using stairs.
So, “Stairway to Heaven” gains a whole different layer of meaning, as it seems… :-)
Goddamnit.
Yet again, I have to say:
“And people think Germans have no sense of humor.”
… You got an chuckle out of me with that one, goddamnit, hahah!
I would expect that pedestrian walk far less distance than cars drive, so even a twofold difference in absolute numbers will disappear when normalised by distance. For instance there is a general advice of walking 10k paces every day which is about 7km, average car speed in the city should be around 30km/h, so even if we assume 30 minutes of commute every day (and this is too generous, I believe) it will be more than two times the distance people (should) walk
I don’t think people commonly refer to people using the stairs as being pedestrians.
Thread started from ‘walking’, not from being a pedestrian, and stairs usually require exactly walking
stairs usually require exactly walking
Nah, you’re just not creative enough
I’m guilty of that, I admit, there are so many more ways to
get wasteduse stairs
Cool story bro.
There are stairs outdoors though, where they are more likely called pedestrians. Those stairs are also affected by the wearher, such as rain or snow
My guess would be parachuting/skydiving/wing-gliding.
Parachuting/skydiving is incredibly low risk compared to the average person’s perception. The us had 9 deaths last year in 3.8 million skydives.
Wing suit usage has a similar number, IF you don’t include base jumpers, which you shouldn’t, because it’s fundamentally a very, very different sport that happens to use (almost) the same equipment. You wouldn’t include each bump in a nascar race as an accident and lump it into driving statistics, I would hope, nor do the same for people hiking in the woods and people fist fighting bears in the woods.
Considering I travel a mile or two, give or take, on each canopy flight when I jump, that’s 9 deaths in ~8 million miles. Wing suits have a much better glide ratio when flying, so that would change things up as well. I’m curious how that would hold up to walking. Using the other feller’s number of 4000 pedestrian deaths (on stairs) in germany, and estimating they walk 3 miles a day in a country of ~83 million, that’s 249 million miles, giving us 1.6x10^-5, while skydiving is 2.4x10^-6.
But really… who would consider those activities as a mode of transport anyway?
Huh, well I am apparently wrong then.
Thanks for the correction!
As to who would consider them a mode of transportation… … James Bond? Ethan Hunt?
lol, it was meant as a joke.
I’m on lemmy…
what’s a joke?
Uh, the US commuter train system?
deleted by creator
Number of cycles (departure to arrival) would be a pretty decent metric.
I feel like measuring this data based on miles is bad. This data would be much more relevant if it was measured in passenger travel hours instead.
A plane can travel like 500 miles in an hour. I feel that this skews the data significantly since its being compared to vehicles that should not typically be covering over 100 miles per hour.
I was thinking the same thing, but if the goal is to get from point a to point b then the real question is what gets you there the safest.
For example, if you wanted to know what the safest way to get from Los Angeles to San Francisco was or what the relative danger of each travel method was, this would be the right way to frame the data. The fact that it takes longer to travel with a car than a plane doesn’t factor into the safety of the travel. You still go the same distance.
This doesn’t work to compare that either, because highway travel has less intersections, where I would think most accidents happen.
TBF, surprise traffic congestion (ie. some more surprising than others) and similar situations wherein humans are likely to get agitated and thus make shitty, abrupt choices… Are right up there with intersections. 🤌🏼
The only logical conclusion is the faster you go the safer you are.
I’ve tried to tell the cops this, and did you know it didn’t work.
No dice on my argument that I’m trying to keep myself warm via air friction like the space shuttle, either.
Given the difference between the first and other places, I don’t believe that switching to time instead of length would actually change the significance of the top placement.
Any other reorder on the list is just shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.
RIP my co worker and friend. It was 2001. You were the OG Bay Area techie. Empty pepsi cans and pizza delivery stacked sloppily on your desk. Smart AF and hard working, always laughing. Earning money loving living .
Riding your slim machine between lanes of SF traffic. Someone opened his car door for Lord knows what reason.
Your girlfriend was inconsolable at your funeral
I’m not crying, you’re crying!
There’s a reason lane-splitting is illegal in many jurisdictions. It’s still a tragic loss, but your friend made the active decision to operate a vehicle that was already more dangerous in an even more dangerous way.
No doubt it was reckless and close to suicide
Only the young are immortal
Until we’re not.
Wondering what our dreams might be worth Learning that we’re only immortal For a limited time
Neil Peart, yet another RIP what is this with data visualization emotions and death
Sorry, what?NM, it’s late. My bad. 🖖🏼
Also, I gotta say: there are few usernames that, if one stumbled into a room where it was being chanted by a circle of schoolchildren, would be a good sign of cult activity in the area. Yours is one of them —to the tune of Duck, Duck, Goose, of course.
There’s a reason that drugs are illegal in many jurisdictions. It’s still a tragic loss, but those junkies made the active decision to operate a needle that is already dangerous in an even more dangerous way.
Dude, take a step back and look at data, not the crappy chain of thought you call logic. Accidents involving injuries go down when lane splitting is made legal.
Oh, my bad. I wasn’t aware that lane splitting was addictive, a symptom of depression, and a vector for the exploitation of vulnerable people.
Exactly right. Lane splitting, when legalized and regulated, is safer, more efficient, and frowned at by the general populace because they refuse to listen to the experts on it. Sounds a lot like our regulations on ‘illegal substances,’ doesn’t it?
“…lane splitting is made legal.”
Your vehicle doesn’t make you special; follow the same rules as everyone else on the road.
follow the same rules as everyone else on the road
Yaaaaaawn. I suppose bicycles should have seat belts then, aye? California, montana, utah, and other places have made lane splitting legal. They are following the same rules.
What about death of people other than passengers?
Shhh, don’t wake them!
Didn’t realise deaths were so frequent on ferries.
My guess is part of what’s throwing that statistic off is the relatively short journeys of most ferries.
Maybe per hours of travel would be better? It would also make airplanes less of an outlier.
Airplanes should then be split to “general aviation” and “commercial aviation” to assuage people’s fears. General aviation is a lot riskier than flying commercial.
The ferries in the Mediterranean are know for their insecurity.
bruh
If you’ve seen Steven Spielberg’s ‘War of the Worlds’, you’ll know ferries can be quite perilous.
They would have been safer with Spiderman around!
probably ppl falling off or cars on board catching fire
It might even include medical emergencies while on board.
What country? Why is bicycle missing?
America, because nobody else has nearly the fatality rate per mile. SEA has more fatalities per capita, but that’s because they have 100x more bikes per capita.
The average american motorcyclist only rides as a hobby, they drive a car the rest of the time, and they’re either driving a racing bike or a 900 lb Harley. This isn’t a recipe for competent riding.
I guess because it’s insignificant or the graph only includes motored vehicles.
It would be interesting to see different motorcycle stats. Those 100+ horsepower beasts are probably in another ballpark than regular commuter bikes (e.g. 125cc).
Other vehicles on the roads and not wearing helmets are the two biggest dangers for motorcyclists.
How essential wearing a helmet is to these bikes is one of the only thing that keeps me from using it. I’ll wear a lightweight road bicycle helmet reluctantly but the kind of helmet you need to ride a motorcycle is so uncomfortable to me, and represents the danger, that I’d rather just drive.
If you cannot stand a helmet then not riding is certainly a good choice.
Modern motorcycle helmets are way more comfortable than they were a couple decades ago though.
I cannot stand wearing a motorcycle helmet. I don’t even like wearing a bicycle helmet that isn’t light weight costing $70+ minimum.
I’d recommend to try a few helmets. I once bought the cheapest helmet the store had to offer … only to return it next day.
Please … don’t buy a helmet on Amazon. Try it out, find one that fits, take it for a test drive.
I bought a helmet from Amazon… Idk if it fits
Silverado running a red light smears both equally
Fairies are 3rd on the list.
Shhh! They prefer Fey-Folk.
And this is why I will never get on one. I love biking, and I love going fast, so a motorcycle seems like a great choice… until I watch around me. I’ve seen countless accidents involving motorcycles, the majority caused by inattentive drivers of cars and trucks. Then there’s the asshole motorcyclists who do dangerous maneuvers that make up the rest. I value my life more than thrills.
On a separate note: do we know why the “train” category is bolded?
the majority caused by inattentive drivers of cars and trucks.
Are there statistics to back this up? Anecdotally, I see 10 motorcycles racing, illegally riding side-by-side in one lane, not signaling, speeding, and swerving around vehicles across multiple lanes for every 1 that I see driving safely.
I should have stated that my comment was definitely anecdotal. I’m only speaking on accidents I’ve witnessed involving motorcyclists. While yes, the majority of motorcyclists I’ve seen drive like complete assholes, the majority of accidents I’ve seen have been caused by inattentive drivers. When I say majority it’s probably 60/40. Every time I’ve had the opportunity to see the car driver involved where I’d say(in my completely unqualified opinion; I’m no cop or insurance adjuster) that the car was at fault, they’ve been on or looking at a phone.
On the other hand, when I’ve seen accidents where I’d say the motorcyclist is at fault they’ve ALWAYS been doing that wild shit that you mentioned.
I used to work at an office complex that was on a very high-traffic main road at a very busy intersection, one block from the freeway on-ramp with a crystal clear view of about 4 blocks of the main roadway and a bit of the freeway from my desk. So almost all of my anecdotal evidence is from one area in one city. I didn’t intend to make it sound like I have statistics to back up what I’m saying and should probably have been more clear about my lack of actual data.
Good stuff, thanks for the info.
Not a problem.
Comparing US statistics to Dutch ones makes no sense. Their roads are several times more deadly than European ones regardless of vehicle.
Furthermore not all of their states have mandatory helmets (!) whereas over here it’s rare to see someone missing something other than pants. Except scooters, scooter riders are under the impression that they don’t ride a motorcycle and that flip-flops are appropriate apparel.
Then there’s a lot you can do as a motorcyclist to mitigate risk. Riding safely is one (not everyone seems capable of that, there’s quite a spread in riding behaviors, but also an obvious bias in which ones you’ll remember seeing on your commute). A strict no-alcohol policy is another, and not riding at night on weekends. You can also wear extra safety gear such as a high-vis airbag.
Also licensing requirements. Oh and American motorcycles don’t have to be equipped with ABS. They be crazy over there.
No, I’m in the US; that’s what I see here. I just use a Dutch instance.
Interestly, its not really inattentive car drivers that make motorcycling so dangerous.
Because of their small size, single headlight and rapidly changing speed, the human brain can’t accurate identify, and track them. Especially at night or in adverse weather conditions. So drivers cut them off all the time because the brain does not process the information correctly.
Combine that with the average aggressive driving, speeding, tailgating, and other dumbass dangerous behaviors that I see motorcyclist do daily and the death rate is shockingly low in my opinion.
I spend a lot of time driving and have seen around 20 motorcycle accidents happen over the years. Only one was another drivers fault and not caused by the absolute stupidity of the motorcyclist.
In the Netherlands, bicyclists were always second place in deaths just behind people in cars. Most accidents which causes death are between a car and a bicycle. When the e-bike got trendy. We’ve seen a big spike in bicycle deaths in 2023 causing it to be the nr 1 cause of death in traffic. The Fat-bike is a big problem here. Its trendy among kids and realy easy to disable speed limiters. Percentage wise I couldn’t find anything this fast but it does look like people in cars just don’t see them or pay attention to them as the drive faster. I think cameras checking the surroundings is the best hope in getting those numbers down.
This is really sad, I don’t want to drive a tin can of death just so I am more protected from others driving tin cans of death :(
At least I don’t drive e-bike and use bike lanes ¯\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Thanks for the information. In crashes where phones weren’t a factor I can see how these things would be true. I’ve had some near misses myself, usually with the asshats. Surely still true with a phone involved, but anyone looking at a phone while driving loses any and all other considerations in my book.
They sure are fun though. Sometimes the risk is worth it.
To each their own. 😆
What percentage of plane deaths are snake related?
Nearly all of them.
Just fly on a weekend. It’s typically worse on Monday to Friday planes.
I wonder how these stats would change if there weren’t cars on the road. I mean its pretty obvious if a car and a motorcycle crash the motorcycle’s gonna have it worst.
The numbers would go down by half, which is meaningful, but also way less than you’d want it to. I can’t be arsed to pull up the NHTSA data url right now, but I use the factoid all the time when I talk to people about my riding: give or take 54% of motorcycle deaths are single vehicle accidents. Of those, the vast majority involve alcohol or speeding. So if I avoid alcohol I cut my chances by a large factor.
Speeding is slightly fuzzier, because the statistics are built from crash reports by police, and you can never know if they take the word of a witness that a motorcycle passed at a 4mph difference in speed, which, c’mon, is not the same as someone whizzing down a canyon road at 20mph or more over the limit.
but I use the factoid all the time
My favorite “factoid” is that the -oid part originally means “resembling,” like a humanoid is something that only looks human, so technically a factoid would be something that only resembles fact. However, I’m not a dirty prescriptivist and I understood perfectly what you meant, so please carry on.
Presciptivism is where it’s at, broseidon! I use factoid for when something seems like a fact, but you can’t verify it right then. I know the internet often uses it for something quoted so much that people take it as fact even though it’s false.
Wikipedia just hates us all. I don’t want it to be a brief truth, waaah!
I hate the concept of “brief truth”. The Germans probably have a word for it. things can stop being true. Everything is a brief truth on a long enough timeline. By this definition “the moon exists” is a factoid because very briefly from now (on a cosmological timeline) that’s practically already false. Bah!
motorcycle vs. motorcycle is gonna be like medieval jousting
Didn’t you know? This is what me and my buddies get up to on Saturday nights.
Motorcycle cops think they’re hot shit because they can weave between a bunch of cones. Amateurs. Lets see you try to work the throttle, brake, and clutch on a dirtbike while also wielding a 10’ long piece of PVC pipe with a boxing glove on the end of it.
Or an average day in south east asia
