> Going from 0 in 1946 to 1 million in 1999 with nothing but a linear increase would of course be 500k per year on average. My number was more than 20% below that. It was intentionally an extremely conservative estimate.

Here's another example of why these extrapolations are useless without real data.

1. There is absolutely nothing that would allow you to say with any confidence whatsoever what the growth curve looked like. Maybe it was quadratic and there were only a million from 1946 to 1998. From looking at the history of the original Wisconsin Ducks, it looks like they operated with only a handful of DUKWs for decades. Maybe they stayed small until bigger companies got involved and spread to multiple cities in only a few years before 1999? You don't know, which is why trying to use numbers before 1999 is useless.

Exponential growth is a very likely explanation for the appearance of an increase in fatalities over the last 20 years (Vehicle aging and easier access to modern records are others)

2. The 1 million number you keep quoting was for all amphibious tourist vehicles, not only DUKWs. There were other amphibious vehicles in operation in 1999, and there are more now. There is no breakdown for the number of riders by vehicle type. Given that newer purpose built vehicles are more expensive, they are more likely to be used in high traffic areas thus they are likely to carry a higher than expected proportion of the total riders.

3. These vehicles are now over 70 years old. It is entirely possible that there are fewer of them in operation than there were in 1999.

>I do not believe that you believe that organizations such as the LA Times and NY Times are incapable of digging up incident reports in the decades before 1999 - that's cognitive dissonance.

Do you think there were zero safety incidents involving DUKWs before 1999? You stated they included recent traffic incidents. If they were going back through 70 years of records, why didn't they include any previous traffic incidents? The most likely explanation is that they found the low hanging fruit and didn't bother going back any further.

There were 4 days between the incident and the report you mention. What kind of world are you living in where a newspaper has the resources to comb through 70 years of local news reports and accident reports from every relevant municipality for 1 article in 4 under days.

>crazy assumptions like pretending these things never existed before 1999

This is absurd. We clearly lack data to make accurate estimations from before 1999. We can try to look at the fatality rate over the last 20 years, or we can spend time arguing over why we can't find 70 year old accident reports from a small hamlet in Wisconsin over the internet.

> Reality is rather friendlier, meaning these numbers are going to go from "okayish" to something substantially better...I'm not sure what level of accident rate does make one start pondering a ban, but we're obviously not even in the remotely right ballpark for that sort of discussion.

I think that 26 times deadlier per hour than UK passenger boats warrants looking into it, but I'm not the expert. The experts issued a report though. And it recommended banning unmodified DUKWs.

>grossly sensationalistic and emotional

I think you're the one projecting here. The NTSB called for a ban on unmodified vehicles. Newspaper reporters parroting the NTSB experts can hardly be called sensational.

>more safe

Your misreading of the NTSB report is incredibly frustrating. The NTSB issued a recommendation that operators immediately make heavy modifications. They then made recommendations to state governments that they ban unmodified vehicles. If you read the report they sent communications back and forth with dozens of individual operators begging them to make these modifications.

Here's an excerpt: "THE AMPHIBIOUS VESSELS ARE SUBJECT TO SINKING AND A TRAGEDY LIKE THE ONE THAT OCCURRED IN ARKANSAS COULD BE REPEATED. ACCORDINGLY, THE SAFETY BOARD REQUESTS THAT THE WISCONSIN DUCKS RECONSIDER THEIR POSITION ON THIS MATTER AND CONSIDER TAKING THE REQUESTED ACTION. PENDING FURTHER REPLY FROM THE WISCONSIN DUCKS, M-00-5 HAS BEEN CLASSIFIED "OPEN--UNACCEPTABLE RESPONSE." IN THE INTEREST OF ACCURACY, YOUR LETTER REFLECTS PERCEPTIONS OF THE EXPERIENCE LEVEL OF OUR MARINE STAFF AND SAFETY BOARD - U.S. COAST GUARD RELATIONS THAT ARE NOT FACTUAL. SHOULD WISCONSIN DUCKS WISH TO DISCUSS THESE ISSUES, MY MARINE STAFF CAN BE CONTACTED AT (202) 314-6450."

Nothing about the report or subsequent communication is indicative of an opinion that the boats are safe but that they could be made "more safe." A reasonable, rational person would read the NTSB be report as a proclamation that unmodified DUKWs are unsafe.

The mental gymnastics you have to go through to read that report and take from it that these vehicles are safe for passengers is truly, spectacularly, amazing.