I like this article making the (tired, obvious, to at least some of us) point that we hold motor vehicle safety to a much lower standard than public transportation.

For some types of transportation, an incident causing injury or death will trigger an immediate regulatory response, which targets the setting where the incident occurred and other factors. Airplanes and mass transit fall in this camp. The authorities’ job is to ensure the agency in question only offers services if it reaches specific standards of safety…

Apply that same logic to incidents caused by personal vehicles, and you quickly spot the difference. Traffic violence is one of the highest non-disease causes of death in the US; as noted above, the odds of dying in a car crash throughout your lifetime is around one in a hundred. The same analysis from the National Safety Council puts your chances of dying in a plane crash or transit in the same risk zone as being killed by lightning: literally too small to calculate.

Since I haven’t found anyone to tell me definitively why the focus for traffic is on individuals rather than systems that contribute to crashes, here are a few hypotheses. If the operator of the mode in question is an individual, such as the driver of a single-occupancy vehicle, the state assumes responsibility for risk only at its pleasure, and not as a matter of course. Or perhaps what’s at work is a pernicious and baseless idea that transit and aviation systems can be fixed, but vehicle traffic systems–which are also systems whether or not they’re treated that way–center on individuals instead of institutions, and therefore cannot be regulated in the same way a transit system can. Or maybe it’s down to a tendency for large catastrophic events like plane and train crashes to shock us and cause a fear response, while we’ve become desensitized to the regular occurrence of car crashes.

Greater Greater Washington

I think she gets it about right. It’s desensitization to everyday violence leading to assumed helplessness. It’s a century of auto-highway-oil industry propaganda linking cars to individual “freedom” and deemphasizing the massive investment in public infrastructure to support driving and parking. She leaves out the fact that this propaganda is also convenient for anti-city, nominally anti-tax (although they are fine with hidden taxes) politicians who represent mostly empty land but wield massively disproportionate political power, while taking payoffs from the companies that rake in profits from pollution and death. And finally I wouldn’t underestimate the power of inertia and shifting baseline syndrome – most of us have not experienced and can’t imagine a different or better system.

The author’s suggestions are the usual litany of government investment in safe public transportation infrastructure and walkable, bikable urban communities, congestion pricing, etc. This is awesome public policy but does not seem to be workable politics. Maybe a regular tally and pictures of dead and mangled children in the media would do the trick.