Sunday, September 25, 2011

Cars - Dramatically more deadly than war

From an interview by NPR's Scott Simon of Mike Hawley, formerly of MIT's Media Lab and Principal Engineer on the NeXT computer with Steve Jobs:
Hawley: Well, let's just put a number on it, a sort of a glib number. The grand total of U.S. automotive fatalities from 1975 to the present, about one and a half million people. Now, the grand total of U.S. fatalities from 1775 to the present in every military conflict we've had is 1.3 million. So in other words, in the last roughly 35 years we've killed more people with cars than we have in more than 300 years of warfare.
Just in case the death toll from automobiles wasn't bad enough, we are at war to keep the things on the road with cheap gas. What are we thinking here?



I'm thinking we could do well to encourage more of these to hit the road and reduce the number of cars.

3 comments:

  1. Scary stats. Helps to keep me focused. At least keeps me aware.

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  2. Interesting indeed.

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  3. Ride a bike and really give power to the people!

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