Amtrak passengers are about 58 times as likely to get injured as train riders in France, but American trains are still much safer Than many alternatives:
Automobiles are one of the most deadly ways to get from Point A to Point B, with 7.28 deaths for every billion passenger miles.
This fatality rate was 17 times as high as the rate for trains, which stood at 0.43 deaths per billion miles. Subways, buses and planes are even safer still.[…]
“A motorcyclist who traveled 15 miles every day for a year, had an astonishing 1 in 860 chance of dying,” Savage wrote. “The rate per passenger mile was 29 times that for automobiles and light trucks.” By contrast, “A person who took a 500 mile flight every single day for a year would have a fatality risk of 1 in 85,000.”
When I can get from my driveway to the office and back any time I choose in a train or a plane, it will be an apples-to-apples comparison.
Liberty is risky… and worth it.
A motorcyclist with a 1 in 860 chance of dying is truly astonishing. Most people have a 1 in 1 chance of dying.
Antiplanner has pointed out that Buses carry more passengers between cities in the BosWash corridor than Amtrack does.
Antiplanner is semi-retired now, but his blog is still up, and it has a treasure lode of transportation information:
https://ti.org/antiplanner/
Harry, yes, absolutely.
This makes me think about how we’re constantly being scolded about not using mass transportation, in much the same way that we’re constantly scolded about our carbon emissions.
What do they want me to do about it? If there was a train that ran anywhere close to a route that was even remotely adjacent to “from my home to my work” you can bet your ass I’d be on it.
Scold me about driving to work all you want, I have no other option for most of the year. I ride my bike the 24 miles round trip as often as I can, but at these northern lattitudes, that gives me a couple of months at best during the not-freezing and not-blazing times of the year. It’s also impractical, I do it for the exercize, not for the practicality.
Same with my carbon emissions. Energy is expensive. I promise I’m not making any more than I already have to, what more would you like me to do?
Scold me all you want, alternatives to my current lifestyle simply do not exist.
DJB: “A motorcyclist with a 1 in 860 chance of dying is truly astonishing. Most people have a 1 in 1 chance of dying.”
lol