Republicans Want To Scare You Off Mass Transit. Cars Are Scarier.
Duffy’s argument isn’t subtle: Use mass transit, and you’ll get yourself killed. There’s just one problem: He couldn’t be more wrong. According to one recent study, car travel is 10 times as deadly as travel by mass transit. Another report from the nonprofit National Safety Council finds that, for every 100 million miles travelled by passengers, rates of car deaths were 17 times greater than deaths from train travel, and 50 times greater than deaths from bus travel. The United States boasts a road-traffic fatality rate higher than that of any other high-income country. According to data collected by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 8,055 people died in car crashes in the first three months of 2025. While those numbers have fallen since spiking dramatically in 2020 and 2021, longer-term trends show a troubling and longer-term rise. Between 2013 and 2023, road deaths in the United States increased by nearly 25 percent. Pedestrian traffic fatalities rose by a whopping 56 percent between 2013 and 2022, per the International Transport Forum’s 2024 Annual Road Safety Report.
The dangers aren’t confined to crashes. Roadway crime, such as car theft and road rage-related violence, is also far more prevalent than crimes committed on public transit. As transportation researcher Todd Litman recently pointed out, mass transit is the setting for a tiny proportion of serious crimes committed: “About 1 in 1,000 murders and 1 in 10,000 reported rapes take place in transit stations or vehicles across the US,” Litman wrote. “Travel by car exposes drivers and passengers to a wider range of criminal threats, including vehicle homicide, road rage and carjacking attacks, and robberies and assaults in parking lots, plus vehicle thefts and vandalism.”
Although local news outlets regularly report on deadly car crashes, comparatively rare deaths on public transit inspire specific kinds of terror. Security cameras capture chilling footage of outlandish violence, and bystanders recall blood-curdling sights of people being pushed onto train tracks by strangers. The thousands killed each year in car accidents, meanwhile, mostly die in private. The more public, personalized nature of deaths on mass transit may help explain why they’re so useful to Republicans who want to fearmonger about crime. But it’s not only that. Mass transit is a public good, and the GOP loves to undermine anything that uses local, state, and federal funds to help average people.
