> kill by far the largest share of people by any transportation method.
That's only because cars are by far the largest share of transportation period.
When you normalize by looking at the death rate per person-mile, the numbers are very different. If you're trying to decide "what is the safest way to get to work", then the best numbers I could cobble together (which are not great) from a few sources are:
Deaths per 100 million miles:
Car: ~1
Bicycle: ~9
Walking: ~16
Motocycle: ~40
It's very hard to get good numbers here because most car fatality numbers also include fatalities from pedestrians and cyclists who were hit by cars.
Really, there are two different questions to ask:
1. What is the safest way for me to get to work?
2. What is the safest way for all of us to get to work?
You might assume those have the same answer, but they don't. The safest way for all of us to get to work is probably to have everyone walk and/or bike. But if you unilaterally decide to start biking or walking to work in a heavily car-dominated area, you are increasing your own personal risk unless you can find a route that separates you from the cars well.
Transportation safety is fiendishly complex and no one sentence comment on HN will capture it well.
Your statistic is how many people are killed while using the method of transportation, not how many people the method of transportation kills.
Approximately 100% of the walking and cycling deaths and a good portion of the motorcycle deaths are caused by cars. Approximately 0 deaths are caused by walking or cycling.
> When you normalize by looking at the death rate per person-mile, the numbers are very different. If you're trying to decide "what is the safest way to get to work"[...]
This is a strange metric to use though, because you're unlikely to walk (say) 20 miles to work, while you might drive that distance. Unilaterally choosing to walk or bike to work rather than drive in such a situation also typically means moving closer to work.
I think a more useful metric to use when talking about safety for an individual would be a per-trip metric. I might have a 40 minute walk to the office where someone else would have a 40 minute drive to theirs, but they are functionally the same trip.
> This is a strange metric to use though, because you're unlikely to walk (say) 20 miles to work, while you might drive that distance. Unilaterally choosing to walk or bike to work rather than drive in such a situation also typically means moving closer to work.
If the decision you're trying to make right now is how to get to work, then holding the mileage constant is the right way to look at it. If you're trying to decide where to live then, yes, the analysis gets a lot more complex.
Well of course where you live plays into what mode of transportation you'll choose, and the mode of transportation you'd prefer will often drive where you live. For example, I live a long walk from work (or a short bike trip, which is what I do 99% of the time; walking is mostly reserved for nice lazy evenings or blizzards). Yes, the rent is more expensive, but I'm also saving a lot of money on not having to buy/maintain/insure/park a car. And my daily commute is only around 4 miles round trip each day.
So it does make sense to evaluate commuting mortality on a per trip basis, e.g. "what is the mortality associated with day of going to the office". The point of a trip isn't to go X miles, it's to go accomplish Y thing, such as going to work, running an errand, etc. Sparse suburbs shouldn't get "credit" and have their mortality normalized away on distance for everything being spread out. The sparseness itself is a problem in that it's requiring such long mileage for such trivial trips as "going to work" or "getting groceries".
Perhaps, but let me throw in an additional consideration. Per-passenger-mile statistics treat a mile driven within a city (which involves complex interactions with pedestrians/cyclists/other drivers) the same as a mile driven on a freeway (relatively uncomplicated).
If you happen to be in a position right now to be able to walk to work at all, most of your driving is probably intra-city, because you probably both live and work in the same city. However, I suspect per-passenger-mile stats weigh freeway driving more heavily than city driving: on a typical car commute into a city from the suburbs, most of your mileage is not within the city proper, but on the freeways surrounding it.
That's only because cars are by far the largest share of transportation period.
When you normalize by looking at the death rate per person-mile, the numbers are very different. If you're trying to decide "what is the safest way to get to work", then the best numbers I could cobble together (which are not great) from a few sources are:
Deaths per 100 million miles:
It's very hard to get good numbers here because most car fatality numbers also include fatalities from pedestrians and cyclists who were hit by cars.Really, there are two different questions to ask:
1. What is the safest way for me to get to work?
2. What is the safest way for all of us to get to work?
You might assume those have the same answer, but they don't. The safest way for all of us to get to work is probably to have everyone walk and/or bike. But if you unilaterally decide to start biking or walking to work in a heavily car-dominated area, you are increasing your own personal risk unless you can find a route that separates you from the cars well.
Transportation safety is fiendishly complex and no one sentence comment on HN will capture it well.