Trolley dilemma (for some people, for some strange reason). The situation is, unfortunately, normalized structural violence.
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
58 points (95.3% liked)
Fuck Cars
9629 readers
469 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
All bathtubs can kill people. All cars do kill people. I'm an environmental scientist. The PM pollution from cars will contribute to a death if you drive one through a residential area. It won't be your fault alone, but you'll share the blame.
Stop driving your car.
I was going to ask you, but then figured I could do my own research and just ask if you think it's reasonable. According to Our World in Data, the WHO says 4.2 million people die every year from outside pollution. Again according to Our World in Data, road transport accounts for 11.9% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Obviously, that's different to health-affecting pollution, and it might pollute more in places where people live compared to something like electricity generation which would likely be further from population, but it's the best I could come up with. So that would mean we could attribute ~0.5 million deaths per year to road transport. According to Movotiv, there are 1.2 billion vehicles, 70 million daily driving trips, with an average distance of 15 km. That means a total annual distance traveled of ~383.25 billion km. So there's 0.0035 deaths per year per vehicle, or 286 years per death per vehicle, and 1 death per 91,250km. That doesn't sound right, and I blame the Movotiv statistics, unless I made a mistake. 300km/year for the average vehicle sounds ridiculously low, so something's not right. I don't have time to find the issue or better stats right now, but I might have a look later. In the interim, do you think my logic stacks up, or do you have better statistics?