So right off the bat, here are some quick statistics on traffic related accidents. Throughout the world there are roughly 1 million fatalities per year with 70 million injuries. For the US there is roughly 40,000 fatalities per year and 2.5 million injuries per year.
After discussing the issue in class and reading over William R. Black's Sustainable Transportation it seems that there are two different ways to try to increase safety. One is to try to prevent automobile deaths and the other is to try to prevent automobile injuries. The difference is while one tries to prevent major accidents in situations that lead to fatalities while the other tries to make cars and systems safer so that when accidents happen, there are less injuries.
Surprisingly enough, much of this decisions on safety are based on cost. There are relatively specific numbers on the cost of an accident and who bares these costs (seen below.) Car companies, legislators, and transportation engineers look at this data to decide what type of safety measures should be taken.
Personally, I think that avoiding death is a much better decision as opposed to avoiding injuries because injuries are going to happen no matter what anyone does. Accidents will happen because many are dependent on human error, which I feel can not be stopped in an economically sustainable way. But fatalities are certainly something that can be reduced both via transportation engineers and automobile manufacturers.
What is your opinion?
After discussing the issue in class and reading over William R. Black's Sustainable Transportation it seems that there are two different ways to try to increase safety. One is to try to prevent automobile deaths and the other is to try to prevent automobile injuries. The difference is while one tries to prevent major accidents in situations that lead to fatalities while the other tries to make cars and systems safer so that when accidents happen, there are less injuries.
Surprisingly enough, much of this decisions on safety are based on cost. There are relatively specific numbers on the cost of an accident and who bares these costs (seen below.) Car companies, legislators, and transportation engineers look at this data to decide what type of safety measures should be taken.
Personally, I think that avoiding death is a much better decision as opposed to avoiding injuries because injuries are going to happen no matter what anyone does. Accidents will happen because many are dependent on human error, which I feel can not be stopped in an economically sustainable way. But fatalities are certainly something that can be reduced both via transportation engineers and automobile manufacturers.
What is your opinion?
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| Cost Break-Down of an accident courtesy of Professor Aly Tawfik |
Injuries may happen no matter what, but not all injuries are equal. I don't think reducing deaths by 1000 only to increase cases of total paralysis by 1000 is progress at all. One would hope an expect that decreasing deaths would naturally lead to a decrease in major injuries, but that isn't always the case. An engineer can find a creative way to do the former at the expense of the latter and if his job is to only care about deaths, he might not even notice or consider the casualties.
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It is interesting to see the breakdown of costs for traffic incidents. Some of the items listed, such as market productivity and travel time, seem to be fundamentally related (if 100 people are stuck in a traffic jam, then there are 100 fewer people that can be working or purchasing goods). These same two categories seem to have very different values, however. Market productivity, I would assume, is measured in dollars. I cannot picture a method by which travel time is quantified other than by total time lost. With a seemingly different set of units for its several components, I feel that this chart is misleading. I feel that if travel time were to be included in this chart, it should be a component of market productivity as oppose to a stand-alone variable.
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