As this is my first post to the SDMB please bear with me if I mess things up.
The other day I was wondering (don’t ask me why) what is the safest mode of human transportation. After much thought, I believe it would be travel by elevator.
In my life, I never heard of anyone getting killed (or even injuried) riding an elevator.
What are your thoughts?
Walking.
Hm…the problem with walking is that unless you’re, say, in the middle of a perfectly flat field with no holes, you can trip. Or if you’re walking, say, home from school through a suburb in a state known for it’s insane drivers, you can get hit by a car (happened to me. Nothing too serious, car was only going, like 15 mph or something, but hurt like all hell).
What about escalators? Can’t imagine how you could be harmed, unless you were trying to, say, feed the teeth at the top your finger.
The safest form of transport is in the back of a hurst. You can’t possibly die there.
According to this, “Incidents involving elevators and escalators kill about 30 and seriously injure about 17,100 people each year in the United States.” I couldn’t find anything that separated elevators and escalators.
And you can’t say walking is safe, because it isn’t–a huge issue in intersection and road design right now is pedestrian safety, because it’s not so good. This says that 5,220 pedestrians and 758 bicyclists died in 1998.
According to this, the safest form of transportation in 2002 was…um, pipelines. :dubious:
Okay, so it depends on how you define “transportation.” For a quick-and-dirty answer, using this, I’d say “rapid transit,” which I assume to mean things like metros and subways.
Actually, people get killed or hurt pretty regularly on escalators. Their clothes get caught up in the mechanisms.
I have a technical question, though. What would be the measuring standard for comparing safety? Most horizontal transport safety statistics I see are in “per passenger mile” or something similar. It doesn’t seem a particularly good standard for either elevators or escalators. Per passenger trip any better? Trips on the latter two rarely last more than seconds, so again it doesn’t seem comparable.
Just curious…
Here’s a cite, albeit possibly biased:
http://www.bicyclinglife.com/EffectiveAdvocacy/BicycleMyths.htm
Of the listed forms of transportation, airlines are the safest. That’s in terms of passenger-hours, but since airlines are the fastest, if you convert it to passenger-miles airlines should still be the safest.
School buses are also pretty safe. Cecil’s artilc says only 11 kids a year die in school bus accidents.
I, for one, am terrified of elevators. I’m not particularly claustrophobic or aerophobic, but combine the two and I’m a mess. I’m okay as long as the elevator has a window…but I have been known to take twenty or more flights of stairs just to avoid the elevator.
What about those conveyor belt walkways that are common in airports and largs shopping malls? Unless someone is abusing it (using it to run faster, perhaps, or using it as a treadmill), I can’t imagine anyone getting hurt.
However, the safest mode of human transportation would probably have to be crawling. The wheelchair probably takes a close second.
I never heard anyone getting killed or hurt while riding a zombani (You know that thing at ice hocky games)
Magickly Delicious wrote:
According to this, “Incidents involving elevators and escalators kill about 30 and seriously injure about 17,100 people each year in the United States.” I couldn’t find anything that separated elevators and escalators.
Thanks for the info, but it apprears from the above link that most of those deaths and injuries were to people who were working on the elevators or escalators not the passangers. So they were therefore not actually being transported. I don’t think deaths to repairman should count, like the death of an airline machanic won’t be counted as an airline death.
MannyL wrote:
I never heard anyone getting killed or hurt while riding a zombani (You know that thing at ice hocky games)
True, but IMO the main function of a zombani is not to tranport people from one location to another.
[nitpick]The correct spelling is “hearse.” Hurst is the name of a gearshift manufacturer.[/nitpick]
Falling from a very great height.
Stoping, well, that’s the problem. But the falling is usually quite safe.
Mightn’t trains be in the running? Yeah, derailments aren’t all that uncommon, but train-related deaths have to be way lower than auto, bicycle, walking, boat, and other modes of transportation, no?
I’d go with airplanes as the safest mode of transport. even the body count is high in case of an accident, these accidents really are few and far between.
You beat me too it. If walking wasn’t, we’d have gone extinct by now.
bjohn13 said:
Just last summer I had the dearest cousin fall as she was stepping off the moving walkway at the airport. It banged her up quite a bit. I don’t like them that much either. I feel a little dizzy after I step off.
if walking is ok then i’ll say crawling… otherwise the safest transport would be your mother - when you’re in her womb and you’re generally healthy etc
You might be right, but I think it depends on the train. My impression from watching the news is that Amtrak has a rather poor safety record. On the other hand, France, Germany and Japan have trains that run on special high-speed tracks with very gentle curves and no level crossings. There have been absolutely no fatal accidents on those tracks. The German ICE did have one serious accident which killed 100 passengers, but that occured on an older conventional track.
Still, I’m willing to bet that any train is safer than automobiles. Also trains usually don’t get hijacked. (Though they aren’t immune to terrorist attacks - see the bottom of this page.)
I agree that we should focus on something like “deaths or injuries per kilometer travelled”, or something. That way you could theoretically apply it to elevators as well, only vertically.
I think the general concensus is that travel by airplane is the safest per kilometer (or mile, if you will) traveled. Think of it this way: if I want to go from Amsterdam to Barcelona, what is the safest way to get there? The chances of a car accident for 1,000 trips between Amsterdam and Barcelona are a hell of a lot higher than the chance of a plane crash in 1,000 flights of that distance. I dare say that a train derailment would be more likely than a plane crash, too, in this regard.
Walking the distance 1,000 times will surely result in some sort of accident as well.
scr4, trains get hijacked too, I’m afraid. Scroll down on this page to read about two Dutch train hijacks in the 70’s.
Crawling.
You can’t possibly trip and fall.
It’s not fast, but, hey, you can’t have fast and safe at the same time.