alt Hacker NewsPer government data, San Francisco Muni bus pedestrian fatalities are roughly 2 per 100 million miles, while general motor vehicle pedestrian fatalities are a fraction of that, about 0.4 per 100 million miles.
Even if you limit strictly to surface streets, Muni buses remain 2-3x more likely to be involved in a pedestrian fatality per mile driven than general vehicles
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What matters is not the number of miles.
What matters is the number of people killed.
A steady miles per fatality means more people die as more miles are driven.
And more miles driven is the trend.
How about by hour?
Cars are not causing a lot of pedestrian fatalities driving on the freeway between Nowhere and Flyover, but they rack up the miles there.
They also tend to be carrying 5-25x more people than cars, so there are far fewer of them. They also tend to be driving in the city on the busiest streets, whereas arbitrary cars are more often driving on vacant streets and highways.
so try the comparison using (miles x flow) instead of miles if you're measuring safety, and if you're measuring worthwhile risk, multiply that by passenger-miles. If you're talking about pedestrian safety, you'll probably have to square the (miles x flow) because pedestrians are also less safe the busier a street is.
That makes sense, given that the median car mile probably isn’t in a dense urban core. The more accurate comparison would require us to know pedestrian fatalities per mile in urban areas.