265
They don’t understand probability
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
265 points (98.2% liked)
Fuck Cars
13659 readers
103 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No data but this is common concern among my social circle too (Toronto). More with people who don't use transit but also with those who use it to a lesser extent. The economic conditions produced a drastic increase in homelessness over the last decade. It spills over into the public transit system as people seek warmth during the deadly winter cold. While people tend to ignore the problem, as the unhoused population grows, random attacks become a thing. That goes on the news, people see it on their daily commutes, and here we are. It's not a transit problem.
I do think part of the issue is that you might not see actual violence on a train, but you might see some behaviour which makes you feel uncomfortable. Because you're in a carriage with maybe 100 other people, then the likelihood is less that you're in any actual danger, and far more that you've witnessed an incident which makes you wary. Meanwhile, there are several car accidents daily, but it's witnessed by maybe 20 odd people, and most people only see a slowdown of the road.
In TO there's definitely violence that's been seen on trains and street cars, but it's rare. As you said, uncomfortable situations are the common case.
You're 100% right about the exposure to such inicdents vs car accidents. And that's amplified by how it's covered. One's still rare, the other has been commonplace for decades in the news. So yeah. The material conditions produce these results without much intervention.
There was a parent who didn't correctly park her pram on a train platform, and sadly the pram went onto the train line, and one of the children and her husband died. This was a major news story, harrowing CCTV footage, a community in mourning. There was discussion on changing platforms to be safer, etc.
Similar story with an SUV which reversed over a pram. No CCTV, the story was barely reported, largely local news. Similar scale of tragedy, and sadly the SUV story is probably more common, but the fact that it's common also makes it an invisible story.
100%. "Accidents" with cars are so common and normalized, they're not major news even if many more people get killed or maimed in aggregate.
You hit the nail on the head. The ultimate cause is homelessness due to profit being necessary to live in a home -- when shelter is a basic right at all.
It isn't just that; most of the developed world refuses to build the kind of housing that poor people need to put a roof over their heads. Studios and dorms used to be far more common units of housing.
Having lived in a studio, I think it's not exactly a solution - it does solve the housing crisis to an extent, but not to the extent of comfort. Adequate housing can and should be affordable. Here the left-wing parties have been pretty active in building more of those, eg by building apartments, modal construction, and the like.
They also have worked on reducing energy bills. Something the right wing parties haven't.
If we're at a point where millions are sleeping on streets, I'd rather prioritize housing over housing with space.
If the housing is easily expandable, eg modular, sure.