Private transit*. Uber and Waymo are private transit.
Something to note is that actual public transit (buses and trains) has something like 10x fewer annual deaths than private vehicles, because fatal accidents almost never happen in them.
Personal safety is a much less statistically relevant concern compared to personal injury.
The fundamental problem with public transit in most of the US that has it is that it's not the best option. And when it's not the best option, you get a selection bias towards passengers that most passengers wouldn't want to ride with. Which encourages more people to take other options. Rinse repeat.
I like BART. It's actually really convenient, connecting where I live, where I work, and where a bunch of my friends live. Unfortunately, I have a negative experience upwards of half the time I ride it. Sometimes, it's minor, just some person talking nonsense to themselves in the corner. Whatever, puts me on edge because I lose confidence that this person won't transgress social norms in more extreme ways, but I can live with it. Sometimes the entire car smells like a latrine. Sometimes it's a dude laying across the aisle pleasuring himself. Also not going to kill me, but also is something I'd rather avoid, and absolutely can by not riding public transit.
Uber, by contrast, I only have to worry about the driver making me uncomfortable, and that's relatively rare. Maybe 1 in 10 rides will involve a driver either driving like a maniac, or reeking of BO.
With Waymo, there are none of those issues. Hop in a vehicle, it's clean, it drives safely, and there's no naked lunatics.
Waymo has still not proven to be as safe as a public bus. It can get into a crash just like any other vehicle. It can (e.g.) be hit by a drunk driver in ways that are likely to be much more injurious to the passengers than if the same situation happened to a bus. Buses have far more inertia than the vehicles around them, they're more visible, and they are driven by professional, trained drivers. Waymo has not provided enough specific data that points to their vehicles being safer than public transit or their driving skill outperforming a trained professional driver (not just a random person with a license off the street like Uber uses). I'm skeptical considering how death rates are a full 10X lower on public transit compared to automobiles. Even if Waymo is twice as safe as a human-operated automobile, that still makes it 5x less safe than public transit.
Most of this country is a sprawling mess that does not lend itself to traditional mass transit options. Yet those same spaces have an abundance of well-maintained roads. At a certain point we need to accept we are not Europe and we need transit solution suited to our multi-trillion dollar pre-built infrastructure. Self-driving cars are likely to be a big part of that.
Yeah, but public transit is socialist and helps the poor and minorities so we can't have that in the states beyond the massive cities that more or less force the issue.
The distinction is absolutely important between public and private transit. However to most folks they'll be the same thing in the end. Maybe local governments can buy cars for private public transit, which could be nice depending on funding and all that.
Are the concerns rooted in statistical fact or just fear? Most people in the United States basically can’t imagine an alternative to car-first infrastructure.
If somebody is too afraid to ride the bus because they think they'll get raped, does the facts really matter? Or their feelings of physical insecurity?
>If somebody is too afraid to ride the bus because they think they'll get raped, does the facts really matter?
on a micro level, no. On a macro level, yes. People have individual fears, but those individual fears shouldn't influence the decision of multi billion dollar transport budgets. As cold as it sounds, injury or harm is built into the costs of such transportation.
With all that said, LA has indeed gotten much less safe, and public transportation has never really been "good", per se. On a micro level, I literally could not get within 2 miles of work from bus schedules one way, and 5 miles the other after work (back when work was in town). It wasted enough time that it would have been worth considering biking 15 miles a day instead of using a bus. If I wasn't in such poor shape it'd take almost the same time (which was double my driving commute).
> Something to note is that actual public transit (buses and trains) has something like 10x fewer annual deaths than private vehicles, because fatal accidents almost never happen in them.
I've never had a fent zombie wave a knife in my face on private transit, but it has happened a couple of times on public transit. I get that it is technically "safer", but we have a long way to go before normal people will feel safe on it (in the states, other countries obviously do this better by not allowing their buses and light rail to be turned into roving day centers).
Did you get injured or die? 30,000 people die of car crashes every year, about half resulting from a much more common and legal drug.
How many people die of assaults on public transit every year? I’ll let you look that one up.
Fear isn’t the same as risk. Lots of people are afraid of planes. Not a single passenger died of as a result of a commercial airline incident last year in the United States.
That article also lists out recent violence on public transit in my city (like the guy hitting people with a hammer on the train). In comparison, 36 people were killed in car crashes in 2022, 28 in 2023.
I'm not saying that it wasn't dangerous, I'm saying that the statistical probability of the situation you were in happening and resulting in an injury or death is lower than the probability of injury or death in a motor vehicle.
You might feel like you have more control over your fate when you're driving, but as the say in the deep bowels American political culture, "facts don't care about your feelings." The same factually-incorrect risk evaluation is used by people who prefer driving over flying on a commercial airliner.
31% of all fatal crashes in 2021 involved drunk drivers, a much more common drug which is 100% legal. You don't have control over your fate in a car when other drivers on the road make up all of the moving objects that you can run into.
Not to mention the fact that crime can still happen to you while you are driving, a common example being carjacking. [1]
Your own numbers that you provided tell us the opposite story that you want to tell. The very first transit death this year just happened almost 3 months into the year. Meanwhile, 28-36 yearly car crash deaths in Seattle averages out to over 2 deaths every single month. That means by the time someone died on transit, something like 6 people had already died in car crashes in the Seattle area.
Obviously, more people are driving than taking transit, but still, in Seattle almost half of all trips downtown involve public transit.
Most DUI crashes happen at night, when public transportation is going to be even less useful, and Uber/waymo are important in making things better. Carjackings don’t happen here, although they do happen south of here (a poor girl got shot dead in tukwila a few weeks ago). KiaBoyz are a problem, especially with our non pursuit law (the girl was killed by kids who were let go by Seattle police earlier in the day because they couldn’t chase them).
I always take transit downtown despite the risks, it’s just too convenient, but that’s just occasionally. My wife takes it also, a lot more, and it’s a completely different fear factor for a woman traveling alone. However, that’s all we really use it for, for anything else we drive. This is in contrast to my experience living outside the states, where I could actually live without a car.
All of transit’s safety issues are actually preventable by just being more strict about what people can get away with on buses (eg no smoking fent on the bus) and enforcing fares (not for the revenue, but people who don’t pay fares are more likely to cause other problems). I’m pretty sure if anyone tried these things in Lausanne, multiple swat teams would be on them quickly (heck, I’ve seen that happen for just not paying fares, don’t mess with Swiss police or even Swiss transit police). If Seattle wants us to use transit more, they need to take safety more seriously. Other countries do that, they get better results. Otherwise, we will lean more heavily on private transit like Waymo.
Some of my most terrifying moments in life have been in cars on the road. I've had a few dicey moments on public transit, which I use constantly, but nothing as truly life-threatening as the near misses I've experienced on the freeway.
All of my scary moments in a car were on long road trips where public transit doesn't really apply, and with pedestrians walking out in front of my car on green lights (probably fent related also).
