On-road fatalities per vehicle-mile-traveled in the United States have fallen to their lowest level in recorded history (and dropping fast)… so safety advocates must be thrilled with the success, right? Wrong. After all, success is almost more dangerous to a crusade than failure. Luckily for the hand-wringing faction, a study by the National Research Council has re-defined what it means to be safe enough on America’s roads: rather than comparing fatalities to America’s past (which makes the current environment seem great), the key is comparing America’s safety record to completely different countries. Take it away, New York Times:
While France and 15 other high-income nations cut their traffic fatalities by half from 1995 to 2009, the United States showed only a 19 percent reduction over that same time period. Britain dropped the number of fatal accidents by 39 percent over the last 15 years, and Australia by 25 percent.
And what makes the US different than these other countries (other than the fact that we apparently don’t care about traffic deaths)? The problem, it turns out, is our insufficiently intrusive government.
Aye, there’s the rub. The US doesn’t require mandatory driver training, nor does it administer “idiot tests.” Is it any wonder that we aren’t reducing traffic fatalities as quickly? But the report doesn’t even get into driver competence… apparently the cure for our lagging reduction of fatalities is more surveillance and literal intrusion.
The report says that drivers are safer in countries where the national government plays a more prominent role in devising and managing traffic safety initiatives. Wider use of automatic speed limit enforcement in America could save 1,000 to 2,000 lives a year, according to the report, while sustained and frequent sobriety checkpoints could potentially save 1,500 to 3,000 lives a year.
One problem on the face of things: these measures don’t demonstrably make roads any safer. Traffic fatalities actually went up when Australia established speed limits on rural highways, and went down when the US dropped the federal 55 MPH speed limit. Introducing speed cameras in the UK actually caused the rate of decline in road casualties to slow. We could go on, but it’s clear that more government intervention, especially in the areas of speed control and surveillance, don’t consistently improve on-road conditions.
Whether the trade-off of government expansion (and surveillance) troubles you or not, everyone should be able to agree that wasting money on questionably-effective traffic controls is poor policy when rates are already at historically low levels and declining. And comparing conditions to the car-crazed US to safety improvements in countries where driving is generally more restricted doesn’t make the case any stronger.
Isn’t the most meaningful measure deaths and/or injuries per x,000 miles traveled? The rate of reduction doesn’t matter if you started from a lower /x,000. Neither the NYT nor the report it links to show the methodology.
Thanks, exactly what I was going to say. Yet another journalist mailing it in with no attempt at establishing meaningful context. The fact that this acceptable at the NY Times is pathetic.
I was very much involved in this topic while in Europe. What brought fatalities down wasn’t enforcement, it was safer cars. ABS, ESP, etc. Fatalities on no speed limit autobahns are negligible. There was a pocket of nasty accidents, which we dubbed “disco deaths.” Young, inexperienced drivers, four people in the car, going home at night, drunk, ended up in a tree. Their cars were used and older and lacked the gadgets. Tougher tests for the license had no effect. The traffic schools loved them: more business. But no correlation. “Probational” licensing helped a bit. And eventually, the gadgets were handed down into the used car market.
Very interesting — and it makes me wonder what effect Cash for Clunkers will have on that trickle-down gadget effect on this side of the pond.
Just what we need, more government. They could assign a TSA agent to my garage to grope my junk before I drive off each morning. But it needs to be a she, a hot she, maybe Emma Watson.
More speed cameras? They do zilch for safety and study after study shows that. They’re great at collecting profits for camera companies.
I firmly believe that at a higher speed limit you pay attention more, highway hypnosis doesn’t onset as quickly, and tend to be at 10 and 2 on the wheel. Combine that with huge improvement in tire technology, stability control (versus traction control) which can do things that no skilled driver could ever do, like apply brakes to a single wheel to provide a correction while managing the throttle and preventing lock up, ABS brakes, seat belt laws, two-stage airbags, and the valid work the IIHS has done to dramatically improve the “survival space” in vehilcle cabins. Add in HID headlights and overall improvement in lighting, and high technology features like HUDs workin their way into rather common cars. Additionally, much stronger enforcement of trucking regulations and increased big rig safety inspections has gone a long way to improving highway safety.
Since the Supreme Court has ruled that sobriety check points aren’t an illegal warrantless search (Jefferson is turning in his grave) I begrudginly admit there is some value in.
There is a huge reason why safety has vastly improved here; and speed limits, red light cameras, and speed cameras aren’t going to do anything to move the needle. The data supports it.
To quote the late, great Sam Kinson, “GET OFF OF OUR BACKS!!! AHHHH! AHHHHHHHHHH!!!“
But it needs to be a she, a hot she, maybe Emma Watson.
I’m just glad you didn’t write that right after The Sorcerer’s Stone came out.
recommendations
1) spend more!
2) use automated surveillance and ticketing that has been shown to open to misuse/abuse by government
3) hire more people as minders of all you drooling fools!
We can always count on the New York Times to be detached from reality.
We’re broke.
We have no money.
We HATE government and justifiably so given its track record the past two decades.
Please stay in New York City and show us how its done. Perhaps a 10-20 year experiment is called for.
If we were to benchmark European countries on this, we’d probably reach a point where it becomes exponentially more expensive to find any further reductions. The bottom line is we have too many rural areas, with vast expanses of highways, where fatalities are often 10x higher than the average…simply due to longer response times (or nobody around to call 911). I can’t imagine that ever changing–it’s just a part of life in rural areas, combined with low taxes and an inherent suspicion of intrusive monitoring.
The decrease in traffic fatalities is due to many factors — safer cars, better roads, EMTs, trama centers and flight-for-life helicopters. The statistics have been skewed by what is considered a “traffic fatility” — died on the scene or one year later due to complications? We can have 100% road safety, but at infinite cost. Using the deaths per passenger mile statistic, one would have to drive for 35,000 years (15k miles per year) to die in a traffic accident. Too risky? Try flying. You would have to fly about 130,000 years (one transcontinental flight per week) to die in a plane crash.
While there’s no links to the methodology used to get this report, I would think that there is one HUGE mitigating factor between the US numbers and the European numbers: The age of the cars themselves. As Bertel alluded to, in Germany at least, the technology drifted down to older, cheaper cars. Additionally the state mandated scrappage schemes help move the technology along.
But in the US we drive some very old cars, compared to our cousins in Europe. I myself drive a 15 year old car, which I take pains to maintain as roadworthy, but many other folks on the roads here simply don’t. My kid’s 2004 car is worlds ahead of my 1995 car, even though they’re the same model.
I’m surprised that our numbers are as good as they are, just due to the fact that there are antiques competing for road space.
There is no reason to discontinue our efforts to reduce the number of road fatalities. 35,000 annual deaths is still a lot of dead people. The question is what the strategy should be. I agree with Bertel – safer cars are the way to go. As we have seen in other areas of law enforcement experiments such as “three strikes”, “0 tolerance” and mandatory sentencing – over enforcement is an ineffective way of dealing with these problems.
However, to those born again libertarians who are screaming for the government to get out of automotive safety: get a grip. Without the governments continued involvement in auto safety standards we would still be dying on the roads at the murderous rate that motorists died in the 1950s. In the last 15 years alone the per mile death rates have declined by 40% and they would not have done so without government mandated improvements in safety.
The death rate has been declining steadily since the 1920s – long before the federal government phased in safety standards for passenger cars sold here (which began with the 1967 model year).
Here are some links to the numbers in Europe (in French and German):
1) http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Tu%C3%A9s-europe-par-milliard-km.png
2) http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_de_la_route_en_Europe
3) http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verkehrstod
At twotone: according to the above source 3) you have to die within a 30 day limit after an accident to be counted as a fatality.
As source 1) shows there has been a constant decline in traffic fatalities in all European countries (including Germany with no general speed limit on the Autobahn).
I think Bertel is right with his opinion that safer cars are the most effective means to reduce traffic fatalities.
It’s not an opinion, it’s a fact. We literally studied it to death at Vokswagen. I had to write the keynote speech for a VW honcho for the annual conference on traffic fatalities, and in the end we ran out of dead bodies. I had to resort to “each death on the roads is one death too many” rhetoric.
There is one thing to keep in mind: As trends change, interest groups, budgets and industries are imperiled. Just like many aid organizations want people to remain poor, I can imagine that certain circles get alarmed about the undead, because they threaten the existence of interest groups.
BTW, in our work, we found one aspect that can vastly reduce accidents: True driver training. Not in traffic school. In a pretty aggressive and fun setting that hones reaction, that trains you how to make the new gadgets work for you (some people still get scared when the ABS starts sounding like a machine gun, and take their foot off the brake – push it down hard and leave it there) and how to make some counter-intuitive moves: Don’t look at what you are trying to avoid, you’ll run into it that way. Look where you want to go, and you’ll magically go there. Sometimes, the gas is better than the brake. You want to extract yourself from an accident, not end up in it. We had a quite successful training program at VW, usually on unused airport runways (your peace dividend at work). I think the program died from a lack of funding.
Just like many aid organizations want people to remain poor, I can imagine that certain circles get alarmed about the undead, because they threaten the existence of interest groups.
This is why I try to read everything Bertel writes. I’m looking forward to the next chapter of the Autobiography.
German Autobahn fatalities are almost non-existant…How do the government-loving parasitic/Keynesian brats at the NY Slimes explain that? Hint- It has nothing to do with “Driver Training”…And feeble-minded public school twit can figure out how to drive on it’s own…It really is not hard at all! Seriously! You Americans can’t be as stupid and useless infants like the Gray Hag/Pravda-on-the-Hudson says you are…Right?
Obviously the answer you’re looking for is “Universal healthcare” :D
If you live in the US, throughout your lifetime, you have about a 1-in-100 chance of dying in a car accident. I don’t think this is “safe enough,” but I guess other people do.
Here are the numbers for 2007:
Heart disease: 616,067
Cancer: 562,875
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 135,952
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 127,924
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 123,706
Alzheimer’s disease: 74,632
Diabetes: 71,382
Influenza and Pneumonia: 52,717
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 46,448
Septicemia: 34,828
In other words, you’re 17 times more likely to die of heart disease than of an auto accident. So should we ban bacon-cheesburgers? The question isn’t whether we should reduce the number of fatalities; the question is how much will each incremental reduction cost?
@segfault: I went through the numbers the last time you posted something about this and it actually ends up being more like 1 in 130 or better. We keep making more people, and you were rounding off the US population a little too sharply.
How you present statistics is a tricky game. There are about 265 million vehicles in the US, and the fatality rate is around 112 per day. So your chances of dying in a vehicle on any given day are only four ten thousandths of one percent. I bet most people would consider that safe enough.
M 1:
Your chances of dying of anything on a single given day are extremely small, but that doesn’t mean we should forget about reducing that chance.
If you live in the US, throughout your lifetime, you have about a 1-in-1 chance of dying . . . of something. I don’t think that is “safe enough,” but there’s not a whole lot of wiggle room, or so I understand.
@segfault
+1
Even if it’s one in 130 it’s a considerable chance. Given the high toll on young people, auto accidents are very prominent in statistics of years of potential life lost.
http://longevity.about.com/od/longevity101/g/potential_life.htm
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/8/4/383.abstract
While the Israeli study is old and the country is not known for its traffic safety, the high place of auto accidents in this statistic is secure.
This appears to be a great of example of the hoary old principle: “figures don’t lie, but liars figure.”
Having checked both the linked NYT story and the press release upon which the story is based, I see that neither one talks about what should be the meaningful figure — the number of fatalities per passenger-mile (or kilometer as the case may be). Rather, they talk about the rate of change as being that which is deficient.
Who cares if France’s rate of change is greater than the US, if the US is still safer on a per passenger mile traveled basis?
I’m not saying that the US is safer on a per-passenger mile basis (because I don’t know what the numbers are) but what I will say is that the fatalities per passenger mile is the only figure that should concern the rest of us.
Secondly, you have to wonder about the source of the improvements in these other countries. Northern European countries have been very aggressive in traffic enforcement – including DWI — for decades. Could it be that the smaller vehicles favored in Europe have finally gotten more crash-worthy . . . or could it be that European vehicles have actually gotten larger (in relative terms) over time, and therefore more crashworthy?
The correllation between vehicle size (at least going from subcompact to compact to midsize) and likelihood and severity of injury is pretty obvious if you look at the insurance company figures of the Highway Loss Data Institute http://www.iihs.org/research/hldi/composite_intro.html . This applies event for the newest cars.
It seems to me that we are spending more and more money on safety for fewer and fewer returns. At some point were going to get to at point where the only way driving will be safer is if we just don’t do it. Why not stop at this point and try to maintain? Driving will never be 100% safe.
At what point can we say that cars are safe enough and reverse some of the automotive safety standards and get back to lighter, more agile and fun to drive cars? I find it ridiculous that a 1200cc sportbike is somehow safe enough for me to drive on a public road, but subcompacts can weigh 3000 lbs or more to meet automotive crash test standards.
No to mention lighter cars can get the same performance out of a smaller engine and get better mileage even with the same size engine.
That’s a very good point. We need to start working on better safety standards for motorcycles.
Normally I agree- let the market decide. However, how is the public going to become informed on how to evaluate safety? Nobody pretends a bike is safe, but everyone thinks cars are safe. Maybe it should be like tobacco. If it doesn’t meet the standards, it gets a big jolly roger on the sticker. It’d also be nice to see some real numbers on the sticker for injury data instead of stars or “good”. It should be an objective rating that doesn’t change. 0=0 chance of injury and it goes up from there.
informedforlife.org attempts to do this.
Still, I think there should be the option of designing cars that don’t meet the standards, for the benefit of special purpose sports cars, EVs, etc. That way you don’t wind up with unintended consequences, like the Aptera using a dangerous 3-wheel configuration to get around the regs.
Eventually, when highways become automated, I think we can begin to see crashworthiness greatly turned down to save weight. If we can reduce the number of crashes, it wouldn’t really matter how a car could hold up to one.
It’ll be like “Demolition Man”, where they’re on autodrive on most high traffic streets, and then you drive ityourself in rural, non-automated areas.
I still think cars like the GM ultralite of 1992 are the way of the future. Too bad GM didn’t follow up and pursue any of that lightweight tech.
I was living in Colorado when the interstates went to 75 mph outside of the cities. At the time the usual media stories and the police were claiming that more children were going to die! “Oh my!” I recall about ten years later reading in the Denver Post that accidents and death rates actually went down. The reasons was that traffic flowed better at more of a consistent speed and that the roads were able to handle more cars.
Safe is never safe enough…since when do bureaucrats ever put themselves out of business?
They will constantly find new things to regulate unless their funding is cut off–with all the recent headlines about our out of control spending and the resulting deficits, this seems like an excellent time to take the scalpel to the clowns at the NHTSA.
Yeah, we only lost ten times as many people to traffic accidents last year as were killed in the 9/11 attacks. Our work is done!
Even if no more design progress was made, fatalities would continue to drop as there as still millions of old cars still o the road. As these cars hit the yard, they will be replaced by newer models which are inherently safer. But at some point there will be no more progress unless better standards are mandated. But the cost for those extra lives saved will cost more and more per life. Worse, the call for more safety will result in more intrusiveness. Some of this is no big deal, say mandating real annual safety checks. But other items such as surveillance is far more troubling. And I have to add, I believe that extra mass alone is overrated in regards to safety. I’ll take better design over mindless weight any day.
Actually, the most dangerous activity is to stay at home.
45.99% of fatal accidents happen in the home.
33.04% of fatal accidents happen in a motor vehicle
The safest place? Go to work:
2.16% of fatal accidents happen at work. As long as your job is safe, you are safe. Unemployment can lead to massive amounts of deaths.
This is why wearing a helmet should be made mandatory for everyone outside the bed.
Sort of like the three year old I saw on her tricycle the other day. Helmet, elbow-pads, and knee pads.