Brendan Smialowski for The New York TimesIn case you haven’t heard, an accident on the Washington metro claimed nine lives last week. But then again, chances are you have heard, as the crash got wide coverage over the airwaves, on the net, and in the papers (by my count, at least five articles appeared in The Times). This is usually the case when trains or planes are involved in deadly disasters.
But what the media very rarely mention is that the carnage on our roads makes these much-hyped accidents look almost trivial. Nine lives is nine too many, but there were 39,800 motor vehicle traffic fatalities in 2008 alone (and that was a good year). At that rate, between the time of the accident, June 22, and the time you are reading this, on average about 1,000 Americans died on our roadways. Yet this rarely merits a mention by the press.
Why the disparity in coverage? I don’t think it has anything to do with any particular animus toward transit; on the contrary, I personally think the press has a pretty strong pro-transit slant.
Instead, a number of factors are probably at play. A flood of simultaneous deaths seems to titillate us more than a steady drip (and let’s not forget that we are being titillated here, or the media wouldn’t be serving these stories up). There’s probably a threshold effect at work, as a certain plateau of deaths triggers the dispatch of reporters. Perhaps crashes involving larger vehicles are more “photogenic.”
And I think there is one more key dynamic. Heavy rail (the mode in the Washington crash) is a lot safer than car travel; in 2006 (the last year for which I have data) autos were responsible for five times more fatalities per passenger mile. (See here for auto fatalities per year, here for transit fatalities, and here for passenger miles traveled by mode.
In 2007 and 2008 there was not a single fatal accident associated with a major commercial airline. This year has seen 60 deaths (most from a single crash), but that still makes commercial air travel vastly safer than driving. Even in 2001, the year of a (hopefully) freak disaster on 9/11, commercial air travel had a per-passenger mile fatality rate about one eighth that of driving (see here for air fatalities).
The relative rarity of air and rail disasters makes them novel, and hence news. Car crashes bite man, and rail and air crashes bite dog. Intensive coverage of the few air and rail accidents that do occur in turn promotes the widespread — and erroneous — inference that planes and trains are unsafe. In an unfair irony, in transportation perhaps too much safety can be a dangerous thing.
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Oops, #5 and #7 didn’t appear on my screen while I was writing #8. They had it first.
I think this has more to do with the number of lives snuffed out at once, since bus crashes also get coverage, and airplanes that carry just a couple of people happen frequently with little coverage.
Perhaps if our cars and motorcycles went 550 mph and carried 100 passengers at a knick, there would be equity in the disaster-coverage department.
It has nothing to do with who has control.
This is a well-studied psychological phenemona called “the availibility heurisitc.” People will always believe that certain things happen more often if they are more available in their memory based on the news, media, etc. This is the same reason that parents are always worried about child kidnapping when in fact, it occurs very rarely but is on the news too often.
The article and it’s statistics are referring to accident and casualty rates in the USA, not globally. That’s why Air France and Yemenia aren’t taken into consideration.
I always thought that if the newspaper wrote about every single death by auto describing the details ( type of car, seat belt, alcohol or drugs, sad story about the surviving family, etc.) as some do about Iraq American war dead, there would be a huge outcry about this (since there are so many more a day, and the stories would be often just as sad), and car safety, road safety, DUIs, etc. would be fought for even more. It would put things ( such as number of war dead, number killed in trains and planes) in perspective.
I’ve talked about this same point to others in the past. The rate of car crash deaths in the USA is equivalent to two full jumbo jets going down EVERY WEEK, and yet it gets only local coverage unless it’s someone famous or above a quantity threshold, like a van full of kids.
1) Rapid transit trains, such as those in DC, are light rail trains, not heavy rail.
2) It has always fascinated me that a light plane crash which kills 2 to 6 persons receives widespread national media attention (including the New York Times) while automobile collisions involving similar numbers of casualties rarely are mentioned except locally.
what about Marx’s point that “the masses having nothing to lose but their lives.” Individuals die every day, but only certain people are acknowleged at death. There is something about large numbers of people dying simultaneously that makes death seem different, unusual or out of the ordinary. I wonder if the same principle applies with the economy. We heard about all the wealthy people who lost their money with Madoff– But what about all the ordinary people whose money was lost in homes that they invested in that are now worth less than the original investment or in the stock market because greedy money managers offered poor advice. So I wonder whether or not Madoff was really a scapegoat for the sins of others (just on a different scale). This brings me to a question that I have been struggling with myself– Obama’s plans to boulster our economy. How much of it involved the use of real knowledge of what will really repair the situation and how much appearance. I moved into a house that looking at it now, after 3 years, was made to look good on the surface. I inherited bank stock that went up recently apparently due to a surge in optimism coming from Obama’s winning the election and the bail out money it received, but not due to real optimism coming from real changes in the ways the bank does business. I am awaiting such real changes. Must we experience tragedy on a large scale for such changes to be introduced. I hope not. I don’t think it can be “business as usual” any more.