February 19, 2006
How Many Lives Did Dale Earnhardt Save?
Stephen J Dubner and Steven D. Levitt in the New York Times Magazine:
And how many drivers have been killed since his death in 2001?
Zero. In more than six million miles of racing — and many, many miles in practice and qualifying laps, which are plenty dangerous — not a single driver in Nascar's three top divisions has died.
On U.S. roads, meanwhile, roughly 185,000 drivers, passengers and motorcyclists have been killed during this same time frame. Those 185,000 deaths, though, came over the course of nearly 15 trillion miles driven. This translates into one fatality for every 81 million miles driven. Although traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for Americans from ages 3 to 33, this would seem to be a pretty low death rate (especially since it includes motorcycles, which are far more dangerous than cars or trucks). How long might it take one person to drive 81 million miles? Let's say that for a solid year you did nothing but drive, 24 hours a day, at 60 miles per hour. In one year, you'd cover 525,600 miles; to reach 81 million miles, you'd have to drive around the clock for 154 years. In other words, a lot of people die on U.S. roads each year not because driving is so dangerous, but because an awful lot of people are driving an awful lot of miles.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 05:56 PM | Permalink
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U.S. traffic fatalities totaled nearly 43,000 in 2003.
U.S. traffic fatalities are up nearly 9% over the past decade.
http://tinyurl.com/krfu4
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In 2004, 42,636 people were killed in the estimated 6,181,000 police-reported motor vehicle traffic crashes.
2,788,000 people were injured...
http://tinyurl.com/qvttd
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The number of motorcyclists killed on U.S. highways jumped by 348 to 3,592 in 2003, an increase of 11%.
http://tinyurl.com/g3zha
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Where Dubner and Levitt got their 37,000 is beyond me. I thought at first it was minus the motorcycle statistic but that isn't it.
The truth in what they're positing, hiding behind the NASCAR rah-rah - that cars are relatively safe per mile driven - and the implied corollary - "it's okay, keep driving" - is simplistic, and because it's partial, ultimately false and misleading.
The statistic that should be most disturbing is softened and made almost palatable by the "trillion miles" - but the fact that "the leading cause of death for Americans from ages 3 to 33" is car wrecks, no matter how many miles we drive, should have given us pause long ago.
The leading cause of death for children has no Darwinian content whatsoever. It's a random culling.
Sure there's a testimony in those numbers as to how safe we've made life for kids now, but then again it's pretty generally agreed things aren't seeming all that safe for any of us these days.
And one of the main reasons things don't seem safe anymore is - oil. Oil for cars. Oil and the way it's saturated the economies of the world, the way we've become addicted to it, the way it's nearing or at the end of its abundance.
And then there's the heat.
Cars may be killing more children than anything else right now, but the greatest threat to all of us, and especially to children, is the warming planet.
But then that's cars again isn't it?
Posted by: rollo | Feb 20, 2006 12:37:07 AM
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