Well, this is kind of embarrassing. On the surface, the D.C. Metro is one of the country’s more modern and efficient transit systems, at least compared to the trains and subways I am used to riding in Philadelphia. And most major U.S. cities don’t have a comprehensive and reliable system like Philadelphia’s, dirty, old, slow, and laden with bad attitude as it is. So it’s embarrassing that not only can we not build the new infrastructure we need to help the economy operate efficiently and grow, we are letting the infrastructure we have fall apart apparently.

Embarrassing though it is, this little ironic piece (which never admits to being irony, and there are actually people online arguing over whether it is real) points out that if safety is really the main concern, to the point that some are suggesting shutting down the D.C. Metro, car and truck travel should also be banned. In fact, shutting down the nation’s most dangerous transit system and forcing people to drive would be statistically certain to kill people.

Since 2009, 14 Metro riders and employees have died in collisions, derailings, and other incidents. On an annual basis, that translates to about 0.48 fatalities per 100,000 weekday riders.*

However, Secretary Foxx noted that this is exceeded by the fatality rate of car crashes in every single American metropolitan area for which data was compiled in a recent report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

In San Francisco, 3.75 people died in automobile crashes per 100,000 residents in 2014, a rate 7.8 times higher than the fatality rate on Metro. In Raleigh, NC, the automobile crash fatality rate was 7.50 per 100,000, or about 15.6 times higher than the fatality rate on Metro. And in Dallas, the automobile crash fatality rate was 12.02 per 100,000, or about 25.0 times higher than the fatality rate on Metro.

It’s not acceptable to have people dying due to negligence and preventable accidents, but this does illustrate the double standard where we accept the commonplace violence on our roads and streets as a necessary evil, assuming it is not preventable. We are also just desensitized to it, whereas the occasional transit accident or plane crash is a shock and gets a lot more media coverage paradoxically because it is not that common.