People die horribly - including the specific example of "being burnt to death" - in both methods of getting places, in fairly low numbers per million passenger miles.
Murders happen on and off the subway. Some in cars! Some using cars! Most are horrible. Plenty include fire.
More people take the subway each day than total residents of some entire states. No one says “avoid Wyoming” over one murder, but it only has 500k people. The subway has millions.
There's plenty of people that die because of cost cutting/saving a buck with vehicles/roads. Just those intentional... sorry, I mean, acceptable deaths are just fine with society.
Whereas I agree with the general thrust of your point, I am not sure cars cause crime. Perhaps their drivers do; perhaps the cars are accessories. But the cars are not causing the crime.
The justice system is entirely our own creation and we have arbitrarily decided who and what is to blame when driving causes the significant amount of violence that it causes every day. If we didn’t place the blame on the XYZ for XYZ reasons, or if we didn’t have no-fault accidents, then driving would be functionally and practically illegal. So we make up methods of keeping it legal to the level that we’ve deemed necessary or desirable. Does it matter whether a person chops up another person vs a car decapitates another person? Functionally no. The person is still dead, their family is still grieving, and their contributions to their community are still gone. But we’ve decided that one of those is a crime while the other is an “accident.”
Coincidentally, a group of highly influential and rich car manufacturers have also lobbied trillions of dollars to “encourage” that decision.
More seriously, though, I'd very much like to see civil liability for the car manufacturers for deliberately making cars bigger and more dangerous for pedestrians over the last few decades. (https://www.npr.org/2024/12/10/nx-s1-5222277/taller-vehicles...)
> It's the latest study to find that taller vehicles are more dangerous for pedestrians. The majority of vehicles sold in the U.S. are now SUVs and light trucks, which can have front ends that are often 40 inches or taller. Safety advocates say that's one reason why pedestrian fatalities are up more than 75% since reaching their lowest point in 2009.
