Comment on Is people's attention on their surroundings terrible today?
beliquititious@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
Out of curiosity I searched around for the amount of people killed by buses over time, the classic not-paying-attention death, and it seems like the number has been fairly stable since 2000.
My hypothesis was that if people were getting less good at paying attention that number should rise. One factor I couldn’t control for is people becoming more aware of being hit by a bus and being more alert in that specific situation. That would also explain the stability of the number as the population has risen quite a bit since 2000 but the bus fatality rate has remained the same, which might imply the bus death per 100,000 would actually be going down. I also didn’t look at the rate of injury, so safety technology could be shifting more fatalities to non-fatal injuries.
Either way the bus data does not suggest that people are paying more or less attention than they always have. Further research is required as the results were inconclusive.
bryndos@fedia.io 2 days ago
Interesting, but yes I.'d think (hope) each bus death. or injury changes the driver and bus operating organisation, and municipality in some way. Even if it was the pedestrians 'fault', the bus can probably do things to reduce the risk.
This research should ideally start with a random/representative sample of people exposed to a measurable level of bus death risk.
beliquititious@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
I’d actually say bus fatalities probably isn’t a good data set to use if you wanted to do like actual research about it. There are too many variables that easily accessed public data doesn’t cover. Like you’d want to filter accidents caused by the driver or another vehicle, the number of buses in circulation over time, demographics of the victims, among others.
Someone has that data, but it’s probably specific to a city. Additionally there are entire classes of people with near zero chance of being hit by a bus, such as people living in rural areas and people who mostly travel during hours buses aren’t running, like 3rd shifters in cities with a limited bus program.