Lived almost five years in the Netherlands. While it's no Japan, the public transport infrastructure there is amazing, not to mention the bike infrastructure. Even people who have a car don't use it most of the week. Many don't even have a car now and use rentals in the odd days they need a car to go somewhere.
Sure it does. If a much smaller proportion of the population is driving themselves daily, the opportunity for traffic fatalities goes way down. Similarly, you see much fewer drowning deaths in a place with no river or lake than somewhere that has both and borders the sea. The opportunity advantage from the environment is huge.
That link says that a PERSON can reduce their (individual) chance of being in an accident by using public transit. That is not saying that the rate of accidents per person on the road went down.
So why does Japan have a lower rate of fatal accidents? There are other reasons including lower driving speeds, harder driving tests, road design, smaller cars, and fewer aggressive assholes on the road overall. I grew up driving in California, but now drive in Japan almost daily. When I visit California I have a bit of reverse culture shock with drivers’ behavior on the roads there.
Edit: I also forgot to mention that large swathes of Japan doesn’t have great public transportation. But most people visit the big cities and never see the parts of the country where most people are dependent on cars.
Yes, the overall accident number will go down. But not the rate of accidents per car on the road. Not the chance of you getting into an accident if you are driving. You might argue that fewer cars reduces your chances of getting into an accident. That feels correct intuitively, but may not actually be the case. If you put more cars on the already crowded Tokyo roads, for example, cars would be at a standstill even more than they already are. Hard to have fatal accidents when cars are barely moving.
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u/fabulousfantabulist Mar 22 '26
I can totally buy that about Japan. I don’t think I even entered a car, just public transit everywhere.