Figures don't lie, but liars figure

[unixronin]

Interesting, if brief, reading on highway speed limits from the WSJ:

We now have 10 years of evidence proving that the only "assault" was on the sanctity of the truth.  The nearby table shows that the death, injury and crash rates have fallen sharply since 1995.  Per mile traveled, there were about 5,000 fewer deaths and almost one million fewer injuries in 2005 than in the mid-1990s.  This is all the more remarkable given that a dozen years ago Americans lacked today's distraction of driving while also talking on their cell phones.

(Emphasis mine.)

Comments

Slightly Off-Topic Rant

[bbwoof.livejournal.com]

Even though traffic safety is improving,



we are STILL doing more damage to ourselves EVERY MONTH than SGV* did to us on 9/11/2001. While I am not condoning terrorism in any form, I think that the government's methods of "combating" this terrorism is a symptom of the worst kind of nanny-stating -- you know, the kind called Fascism. If SGV can't do more damage to us than we do to ourselves, then any response that erodes our civil liberties is way out of proportion.

I haven't seen any "War on Automobiles" in the works; have you?


* SGV: The Set of Guilty Villians, as opposed to the set of villians convicted in the court of propaganda, which might or might not be the same group.

Re: Slightly Off-Topic Rant

[beckyzoole.livejournal.com]

The SGV are evil-doers doing evil, while drunken idiots in cars are just folks, dontcha know?

(George W Bush has a history of DUI infractions; 40 years ago our First Lady actually killed a fellow teen when she ran a stop sign at 50 miles an hour.)

Even More Off-Topic Rant

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen any "War on Automobiles" in the works; have you?

Then I suggest that you check out the standard k12 curriculum about how automobiles are destroying our environment. I also recommend Al Gore's latest movie.

This war is not fought with military might, but with extrapolated "facts" in schools and movies. The targets are not adults, who can evaluate information in a meaningful way, but children, who have little or no other data to compare with.

Please note, I am nowhere saying that I disagree with conclusions (because I only disagree in part). I like living on this planet. It beats all the alternatives, hands down! I want my children to be able to live here for a very long time to come. I am certainly not opposed to making reasonable changes to alleviate even hypothetical problems in the future. I just think the way it is presented is "dirty".

[beckyzoole.livejournal.com]

The news of lower death rates is very, very good. The article rightly attributes it to safer cars, safer roads, and the anti-drunk-driving campaign.

However, there is nothing in the facts and figures presented that correlates fatality rates and speed limits. In other words, from what I see in these charts, it is possible that the decline in fatalities would have been even lower if speed limits were lower. And it is certainly possible that speed limits have no significant effect on fatality rates -- it's just that these figures don't address that. I could just as well say that carrying a concealed weapon in one's car has no effect on motor vehicle fatalities. It probably doesn't, but these figures don't address that variable at all.

What I would like to see is how speed affects motor vehicle accident rates, and how it affects fatality rates when there is an accident. I'd like to see that one variable isolated from air-bags, drunkenness, and weather... and then, perhaps, combined with those factors.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I saw an interesting chart some years ago in Car & Driver. It was in an article talking about exactly this. The chart was a plot of annual road fatalities in the US, year by year, with the beginning and end of the 55 limit plotted on it.

It was a very interesting chart, because the trend was so visible. It was basically a straight line, tending downward year by year. Except between the boundaries of the 55 limit, where there was a flat-topped hump. There was a jump in the rate when the 55 limit went in, then it resumed its monotonic decline, parallel to the old line, but a little higher. Then when the 55 limit ended, it fell pretty much back to the old line.

Plotted out that way, that chart all by itself presented a pretty clear argument that far from saving lives, the 55 limit actually cost lives. The bump has been attributed to two main causes. A lesser factor in it is that, with no speed advantage to interstates, people were abandoning the interstates for secondary roads to avoid traffic congestion. But the major factor, as reported by state highway patrols, was "single vehicle accidents due to driver inattention." In other words, out in the big Western states, it was now taking as much as several hours longer to drive from city to city, and drivers were quite simply nodding off at the wheel from sheer boredom and fatigue.

"55. It's not even a good idea. It's just the law."

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

I also saw an article, many years back, about how much safer it is when most cars are traveling close to the same speed. The 55 speed limit is the most disobeyed federal law since prohibition (my opinion, as a driver) producing larger differences in speeds. With the faster speeds, I see dramatically fewer idiots weaving in and out of lanes trying to get through traffic "clumps". (I realize that this is anecdotal, but there it is.)

unixronin has already mentioned single car accidents, especially out west.

The funky thing about statistics is that, if we don't like what they are showing us, there is always something that could be added, so we don't have to accept the conclusions. (I find myself doing that more often that I want to admit.) Statistics is what it is. In this case, I think you are demanding more than statistics can provide.

[bfly.livejournal.com]

Funny, some of us still lack "today's distraction of driving while also talking on their cell phones."

[ossuarian.livejournal.com]

My first impulse is to say that you can't infer causation from correlation.

But, I'll admit one of your comments gave a justification that has the ring of truth. Someone who is driving for two hours at 55 might be more dangerous than someone driving 90 minutes at 75 simply due to being more tired and suffering more road hypnosis.

I've been to Italy, briefly, and it's incredibly striking how people drive. Everyone is constantly looking for a niche to pass through, including the scooters, for whom these niches are everywhere. Everyone seems to be completely fearless about this. It's like you took the impatient wackoes out of the U.S. and made a country of them.

You'd expect this insane style would mean much higher vehicle fatalities, but I've heard it's less than the U.S. The only explanation I can imagine is that everyone is constantly putting all their attention on the road. The drivers I've seen here drive with a goal of using as little of their brain as possible to operate the gears.

Probably, then, the best solution is to create more public transport. If people drive less, they drive more attentively and thus more safely. The Wall Street Journal's ed page would like that less than the 55 speed limit.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

Part of the lower fatality rate in Europe is the intensive training and cost to be able to get a license to drive. In Germany, it costs about $2,000.00 american dollars to get a drivers license (Or did about eight years ago when I was talking to Christoph about getting his license.) It also took over nine months of training and classes. Americans would go nuts if we tried to impose those kinds of fees on driving (and the same level of mastery on our drivers.)

[arasirsul.livejournal.com]

Part of this may be a phenomenon that race drivers have known for quite a while: Speed isn't nearly as dangerous as differences in speed.

Now that the speed limit is 70 in many places, the people who want to stay within N of the speed limit now go faster, and the people who want to drive however fast they want to drive are still driving the same speed: the speeds have gotten closer together.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I think that's a definite factor. Plus the factor that people who are driving faster generally tend to be paying more attention.