So one in every 10,000 people gets hit by a car while walking every year.
Hm. 1 in 10k. I’m trying to think about how that squares with my expectation that “actual” is much less “intuition”.
I’ll pretty roughly approximate the number of “close calls” my intuition expects a person to encounter as something like 5-10 a year. Let’s say 5. And I’ll also guesstimate that for a given “close call”, there’s a 9⁄10 chance either you jump out of the way or the driver swerves out of the way, so only a 1⁄10 chance you actually get killed.
That’d mean that in a given year there’s a 1 - (0.9)^5 ~ 0.41 probability of a given person dying, so 4,100 in every 10,000 rather than 1 in every 10,000.
I feel like I might be missing or misunderstanding something though.
I haven’t experienced anything like 5-10 close calls per year. I’ve experienced about 3-5 in my life so far. I’d expect about 1 in 100 or so of incidents as close or closer to be actual hits, and that may be overestimating. In every case that I can remember, there were at least two factors that (narrowly, but quite definitely) prevented being hit. Even if they had, none of the incidents were likely to have been fatal and probably not even very injurious.
The only pedestrian-car collision I’ve ever personally seen was a child running directly across a road in front of a speeding car from between parked cars on their side of the road.
If the child wasn’t running, the driver would likely have had time to swerve. If there were no parked cars, they would likely have seen the child approaching the road. If the car was being driven at a normal speed for the road, the driver may have had more time to stop or evade. Fortunately the child suffered no injuries beyond abrasions and bruises.
The stats I could find were for reported injuries, so maybe a decent proportion of “actually hit by a car” doesn’t cause serious enough injuries to report?
Also the stats were for everyone in US. You might also be overestimating how often normal people walk places. I’d guess we’re both outliers in how much we walk places. And some of the people included in the stats are extremely old people and babies.
Hm. 1 in 10k. I’m trying to think about how that squares with my expectation that “actual” is much less “intuition”.
I’ll pretty roughly approximate the number of “close calls” my intuition expects a person to encounter as something like 5-10 a year. Let’s say 5. And I’ll also guesstimate that for a given “close call”, there’s a 9⁄10 chance either you jump out of the way or the driver swerves out of the way, so only a 1⁄10 chance you actually get killed.
That’d mean that in a given year there’s a
1 - (0.9)^5 ~ 0.41probability of a given person dying, so 4,100 in every 10,000 rather than 1 in every 10,000.I feel like I might be missing or misunderstanding something though.
I haven’t experienced anything like 5-10 close calls per year. I’ve experienced about 3-5 in my life so far. I’d expect about 1 in 100 or so of incidents as close or closer to be actual hits, and that may be overestimating. In every case that I can remember, there were at least two factors that (narrowly, but quite definitely) prevented being hit. Even if they had, none of the incidents were likely to have been fatal and probably not even very injurious.
The only pedestrian-car collision I’ve ever personally seen was a child running directly across a road in front of a speeding car from between parked cars on their side of the road.
If the child wasn’t running, the driver would likely have had time to swerve. If there were no parked cars, they would likely have seen the child approaching the road. If the car was being driven at a normal speed for the road, the driver may have had more time to stop or evade. Fortunately the child suffered no injuries beyond abrasions and bruises.
The stats I could find were for reported injuries, so maybe a decent proportion of “actually hit by a car” doesn’t cause serious enough injuries to report?
Also the stats were for everyone in US. You might also be overestimating how often normal people walk places. I’d guess we’re both outliers in how much we walk places. And some of the people included in the stats are extremely old people and babies.