From: Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko (sasha1@netcom.com)
Date: Thu Jan 14 1999 - 18:26:25 MST
CNN just published a report "Higher speed limits mean more deaths"
( http://www.cnn.com/US/9901/14/speeding.deaths.ap/ )
from the studies conducted by National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
and insurance companies.
The studies conclude that in the states that raised speed limits, highway
death rates increased by 12 to 15%.
General statistics: "people drove a little more than 2.5 trillion miles
in 1997, and the death rate was 1.6 per 100 million miles traveled - an
all-time low."
I am always suspicious reading statistics from agencies that are financially
interested in the results - in this case, collecting speeding fines and
carrying the price of insurance.
In this case, they seem to forget to take into account that some of the
victims of deadly crashes would, at a slightly lower speed, get "only"
severely maimed, or that there may be something special about the states
that increased the speed limit - like, increasingly congested traffic, or
that some people may now choose to drive through a state that has higher
speed limits, etc.
But I would like to suggest a different statistic.
Let's assume that the death rate rises linearly with speed limit
(looks like the case now). So 10% increase in speed limit would
raise death rates by 0.16 per 100 million miles traveled.
So on average, a person would lose half of their life's worth of
waking time per each incident = 35 years * 365 days * 16 hours * 0.16
= roughly, 33,000 hours per 100 million miles traveled.
But then, the same speed increase would save people time for productive
and pleasant activities, with the savings:
100 million miles / (average) 50 miles per hour * 10% = 200,000 waking
life hours. Which is six times as much.
Note that these hours are current, unlike the hours that will not
be lived in the future, and any reasonable person would consider
younger-age time now more valuable than old-age time later.
As driving is a stressful activity, time saved from it will likely
reduce mortality from other reasons.
Add to this the unaccounted factors mentioned in the beginning of this
message, and also considerations that reliance upon police instead of
common sense is not good for personal development, that it takes more
human life time to pay police expenses for enforcing speed limits,
that people who save time are usually more careful and more productive
than people who speed unreasonably (and don't have to suffer for their
stupidity) - and you will see that *higher speed limits save lives*.
The only problem, they don't save money to insurance companies.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Alexander Chislenko <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html>
<sasha1@netcom.com> <sasha@media.mit.edu>
---------------------------------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:02:50 MST