>>For the life of me I cant see why there is so much fuss, so much column inches, so much money spent on something that has affected 0.004% of the population.
Well, if someone who has been involved in a very nasty crash can be so philosophical about it, I guess the rest of us should be as well.
www.honestjohn.co.uk/forum/post/index.htm?v=e&t=35...5
I was just thinking about this last night. I've been driving, without great skill, for 20 years - averaging about 15,000 miles per annum. The vehicles I've been driving don't have very good ncap scores. And yet I've never been badly hurt in a car crash, and nor have any of my immediate family.
Statistically speaking, road accident deaths are a minor problem. You can't make them disappear completely. Road safety campaigners (and politicians who try to work on improving the figures) IMHO, lack any sense of proportion.
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Tragic though any road death is, I would like to see the statistics show the reality.
I.e Remove the drunk pedestrians, suicides etc and show fatalities caused by bad/dangerous driving etc. Thats the sort of figures that make sense.
Although 2538 deaths in 2008 is 2538 too many, I wonder how many deaths there were in hospitals due to poor hygiene, or deaths of the elderly due to lack of care facilities etc etc.
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And thats the whole point. You cant make all road deaths disapear, because as is said above you cant remove all the drunks who walk in the road, the drunk cycling home from the pub, the testosterone laden youth on his scooter with more bravery than skill, the mid life crisis biker with more horsepower than ability, and the people, who like I did, from time to time cock things up or dont concentrate.
Given the number of concurrent road users, and the fact that over a ton of metal traveling at over 30mph is a potential killer, I'm staggered that less people get killed on our roads than die in accidents at home. Ok a sudden death is a tragedy, but a road death is no more a tragedy than sudden heart failure (and there are many more of those)
There is no problem, lets stop trying to resolve one.
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The figures for Poland are about 5400 I think, more than double the UK and nearly 16 deaths a day. Nobody seems to care that much. But when the roof of a stadium buckles under the weight of snow and kills 20 spectators, they hold five days of mourning.
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And how many of the road deaths involved a police car for example? At least one of the ones shown in my area was caused by a police car (driver later prosecuted for dangerous driving)
They're carefully worded statistics used for the wrong reasons.
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We don't need a map.
We just need to look at the tree or lamp post with half a ton of rotten flowers lying at its base.
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what i do is drive up a road and say to myself how can you kill yourself there if you were travelling within the speed limit and concentrating on what you were doing,the flowers just show that if we had men with flags in front of cars then we would still have deaths
isadora duncan anyone?
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As others have said, any road death is a personal extinction for the individual & grief for the family. But, I wonder, what's the actual chance of being involved in an injurious or fatal RTA when you compare the amount of time we spend at the activity?
If you compare the number of deaths occurring during time spent at home (an especially dangerous environment it seems), work, leisure activity, hospital etc. it's probably not that great. There may even be a case to say you're safer in a vehicle than many in many of the other places you can be (if that makes sense..).
There are hair-raising fatality/injury statistics associated with the most mundane & innocuous activities, getting dressed/undressed springs to mind; people apparently drop like flies doing this, in statistical terms. Perhaps compulsory nudity should be enforced!
I wonder if ever a totally locked-down 'elf 'n' safety world came about & road accidents became nil, people might not die in huge numbers from boredom or throw themselves from bridges in sheer exasperation.
Edited by woodbines on 16/12/2009 at 13:28
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>>getting dressed/undressed springs to mind; people apparently drop like flies doing this, in statistical terms. Perhaps compulsory nudity should be enforced!
Don't, whatever you do, suggest this to our current government!
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In reply to woodbines:
It doesn't mention how many of those involved a drunk driver, criminal driver, uninsured driver etc.
The Paul Smith (safespeed) analogy is quite helpful:
"Accidents are governed by the rules of probability. Looking at the averages doesn't much illuminate understanding. We need to look at exceptional events.
Imagine giving every one of the UK's 30 million drivers 22 coins. Every day every driver tosses all 22 coins. On average, every day 7 of them will toss all 22 heads. 7 is about the number involved in a fatal accident each day on UK roads. Being involved in a fatal accident on a particular day isn't likely - it's about 4 million to 1 against - yet every day around 7 are involved. Tossing 22 heads is about the same risk as a fatal accident.
The statisticians and most road safety people would look at "the 11 head average", or they would look very closely look at the individuals who had tossed 22 heads.
Everyone forgets to look at all the people who tossed 21 heads and nearly lost their lives. There's about 143 of them each day. Equally neglected are the 20 heads people who number about 2,861 each day. (We think it's this aspect of probability which causes the ten fold scale on our "ten" page. (click here)).
So here's another view of the tiger, it's the large number of people who narrowly escape the 22 head fate every day.
What would happen if we collected one coin for each of the drivers (leaving 21 coins each) and ruled that 21 heads was the fatal total? Fatal tosses would immediately jump from 7 each day to 14 each day.
In the real world drivers have different skills, experience and attention levels. That's equivalent to having differing numbers of coins or perhaps different "all heads" thresholds. But the sort of probability that governs the coin tossing is exactly the sort of probability that governs fatal accident (and indeed all accidents).
If we've going to change something, we must consider the near miss groups as well as the hit groups. Minute changes could easily tip an extremely unlikely miss into an extremely unlikely hit. "
He also worked out in an injury accident there was a 1 in 113 chance of dying. These odds may have lengthened with improved car design, post crash care etc.
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teabelly,
Yes statistics often illuminate, sometimes clarify, but always seem to confuse.
I'm reminded of research done by a Canadian university when they compared accident rates at an unmanned level crossing. The level crossing in question had a high accident rate (however they defined that) & the local authorities decided something must be done.
They removed lots of the surrounding tree & shrub cover to give longer sight-lines for approaching traffic - viola! The accident rate plummeted, good job all round they thought.
However, in the succeeding months the accident rate regained its former high level, despite all the improvements being maintained etc.
The study found that people habituated to the new 'lower' perceived risk level by driving faster & by doing so had as many collisions as before.
I think much the same happens with driving once a fairly steady 'base line' accident rate is achieved. I think survival rates & rates of no-injury accidents will continue to rise, but guess the actual number of accidents (bar universal 20mph limits on all roads) will remain fairly constant for driver/passenger miles travelled.
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The study found that people habituated to the new 'lower' perceived risk level by driving faster & by doing so had as many collisions as before.
A classic case of regression to the mean too. Whenever you carry out an treatment you have to observe many years before and many years after and allow for changes in traffic levels and patterns to discover whether what you did made the difference. Risk compensation and regression to the mean produce similar results so it is hard to differentiate one from the other. Also if there were more trains using that line or more in peak times then the probability of a driver being involved in a collision would also increase if you changed nothing else.
Any change in the surroundings of the crossing would have altered driver behaviour as most drivers would notice 'something different' and paid more attention. When the 'something different' was no longer 'something different' but 'same as usual' lower attention levels would return.
Stats don't seem to be kept on the proportion of criminal drivers involved in fatalities. I wonder why this is.
Accident risk is also partly down to exposure. The longer you are out on the roads the more opportunity there is to be involved in an accident.
Accident risk per mile driven had been falling consistently until the mid 90s. It's stopped. Hospital stats are the only accurate stats as police stats are under reported so the fall in the KSI figures nationally is largely a myth as the SIs are under reported. Ditto injuries.
To me there seems to be a strong correlation between lack of road deaths falling and the reduction in traffic police numbers leading to more uninsured and generally careless drivers having free reign on our roads. A lot are unregistered so automated enforcement is a complete waste of time. Economic growth is also a driver in miles travelled so in boom times you will generally see rising accident stats. Lack of new road space will be another factor as the more congested the roads the less space, the more frustration which all lead to increased accident potential.
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