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Why Buses Need to Be More Dangerous

posted by cmn32480 on Saturday March 19 2016, @11:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the get-on-the-bus-gus dept.

HughPickens.com writes:

Is there such a thing as being too safe? Jeff Kaufman writes that buses are much safer than cars, by about a factor of 67 but buses are not very popular and one of the main reasons is that if you look at situations where people who can afford private transit take mass transit instead, speed is the main factor. According to Kauffman, we should look at ways to make buses faster so more people will ride them, even if this means making them somewhat more dangerous. Kauffman presents some ideas, roughly in order from "we should definitely do this" to "this is crazy, but it would probably still reduce deaths overall when you take into account that more people would ride the bus": Suggestions include not to require buses to stop and open their doors at railroad crossings, allow the driver to start while someone is still at the front paying, allow buses to drive 25mph on the shoulder of the highway in traffic jams where the main lanes are averaging below 10mph, and leave (city) bus doors open, allowing people to get on and off any time at their own risk. "If we made buses more dangerous by the same percentage that motorcycles are more dangerous than cars," concludes Kauffman, "they would still be more than twice as safe as cars."

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 19 2016, @04:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 19 2016, @04:08PM (#320457)

    This site is exactly the same except the here articles are posted about a day or two later and posting a comment causes you to go through two page loads instead of happening inline with where you were reading. For a site that was supposed to be better than Slashdot, it didn't make it. For a site that was going to be better than Slashdot Beta, it is, but beta is dead now, so this site no longer needs to exist.

  • (Score: 2) by rondon on Monday March 21 2016, @06:54PM

    by rondon (5167) on Monday March 21 2016, @06:54PM (#321196)

    So I have this funny story...

    AC says that /. is better than SN! He uses arguments such as page loads and posting speed to prove his point beyond a shadow of a doubt! But then, surprise of surprises, AC the troll completely forgets to mention the differences in privacy, advertising, and community that represent SN as a much better place for a person to comment on a news story.

    So I guess the big reveal in my funny story is that I should mod AC as a troll instead of refuting his superficial and meaningless arguments :/