Math Forum Discussions

Jimmy

Posts: 2
Registered: 5/20/13

Re: Chinatown bus operator ordered shut down
Posted: May 20, 2013 9:48 PM

Plain Text

John Levine <jo...@iecc.com> wrote:
> The problem is that the Reason Foundation has a habit of making up
> "facts" to support the conclusions they started with. It's certainly
> not worth my time to hunt down all of their sources to figure out what
> they warped or omitted this time.
>
> Nobody seems to deny the cracks and botched repairs that caused Mass.
> to shut down Fung Wah.

Fung Wah's problems are a different issue from the article's claim
about the general safety of "curbside buses". (They couldn't exactly
write an article about companies owned by ethnic Chinese.)

http://reason.com/archives/2013/05/07/government-assault-on-chinatown-bus-indu

I took the article with a grain of salt, considering its source. But
they did make some very good points about the mistakes in the
government report.

It's ridiculous that the NTSB refused to provide the raw accident data
they used to form the conclusion. That alone is reason to refute the
whole report.

The NTSB categorized Greyhound as a curbside carrier, which makes no
sense. They're the antithesis of a low-cost startup competitive bus
company if ever there was one.

They calculated the fatality rate incorrectly. They calculated fatal
accidents per bus for each company, and averaged them together,
*without normalizing for the size of the company*. So when one
company, Sky Horse Bus Tour, had one bus and one accident, it drove up
the entire average.

And there's not enough data for the "seven times more dangerous" claim
to be statistically significant. It's hard to argue with that if you
have any understanding of statistics.

Peer review is a good thing. I hope a respected transportation or
statistics researcher picks up on this flawed report, and makes an
issue out of it.

Jimmy