(no subject)

[stellar_muddle]

Now I like that idea.
(Unfortunately missed the seminars on that yesterday).

Oh, and drive safely over the long weekend - take plenty of breaks to stop and enjoy the scenery. Drive to the conditions (not forecast to be nice on Sat...). Pay attention to the idiots around you, but don't let them stress you, and definitely don't play idiot one-up-manship. Just because they are behaving badly, doesn't mean you need to. You will have far less fun over the weekend if you are dead.

We managed a couple of road crash death free weekends a while back. It would be nice if they could be repeated.

Comments

[mmy-me.livejournal.com]

Snerf. I just came back from Sweden and the road safety is atrocious!

People speed like there's no tomorrow, because apart from the speed cameras (which they have to signpost!) there's no coppers on the roads. With the new EU-systems there's a lot of international truck traffic on the roads, where the truckies are often on speed to be able to drive from Italy to Northern Sweden in 14 hours. And because the Stockholm-based border police are so jealous of their territory, there are hardly any checks at the southern ferries any more. Considering what I think of NZ drivers, it should be telling that I feel safer on the roads here than over there!

I think the "Bullshit" word was used pretty advisedly in that article...

[stellar-muddle.livejournal.com]

Considering what I think of NZ drivers, it should be telling that I feel safer on the roads here than over there!

But unfortunately statistically you aren't :(

In 2006 445 people died on Swedish roads compared to 391 people in NZ. At a time when Sweden's population was about twice ours. They have a far lower death rate than NZ if you look at deaths per 100 000 population or per 10 000 vehicles.

Really need to see a comparison of deaths per distance travelled by people to get a clearer view of the risks involved - as if you have a large population who don't travel, then the first will be missleading, whereas if there are many vehicles owned, but few driven, the second can be missleading.

At the conferences and international talks I have been to, Sweden has been held up as one of the examples of road safety improvements over the past few decades, generally with numbers to prove it. Though apparently the rate of improvement has tailed off in the past couple years (as has been the case in a bunch of developed countries). I don't know if/how that correlates with whatever road safety policies/initiatives have turned up.

I am very curious about the difference in the feel of the roads and traffic situation vs the statistics though....

[mmy-me.livejournal.com]

One thing I'd be very interested to see is a breakdown of how many accidents are people 'killing themselves' vs. people getting killed by others - you know, the Darwin factor...

You'd probably want to see a breakdown of traffic density - there are probably a lot more miles of road per capita in Sweden, just from the sheer size of the place. Plus you could go look at where accidents happen, in densely trafficked areas you probably get more multiple-vehicle accidents?

[stellar-muddle.livejournal.com]

I know that the NZ stats include enough information that we can get an idea of say crashes caused by drunk drivers, who of those were killed themselves (overall totals), how many of their passengers were killed and which other road users were killed. The fact sheets linked off the Ministry of Transport research part of their website have some comparisons like that for Alcohol/drugs, Diverted attention, Fatigue, (sort of) Motorcycles, Speed, Trucks, and Young drivers - navigate via the side bar down the left and you can find the pdfs eventually - it isn't the easiest site to get around unfortunately. There are possibly patterns there wrt who dies under what conditions...

I dodn't know if there are equivalent fact sheets/stats breakdowns for Sweden.

In NZ suicides are not counted in the road toll, as long as they are known to be suicides. Don't know what the case is in Sweden.

One issue is that I don't know the difference in injury rates for each country, since there can be differences in how people count injuries. High density urban traffic situations are more likely to result in injury crashes cf open roads where the higher speeds mean fatalities are more likely.

Time to head off to Folk Festival, but happy to discuss later if you like.

[theuns.livejournal.com]

Absolutes make for good posturing, bad implementation. And, while I appreciate that some of the suggestions might be useful, you don't want to get into an adverserial relationship with your road users - if a rule is needlessly obstructionist, it's also begging to be ignored at any opportunity.

For example, setting the urban speed limit to 30 (in a context where the speed limit is 50, and average speeds are in the 45-65 range) won't necessarily slow drivers down when you're not watching. It will, however, make other cars less predictable...

[And somewhere in there, there's the bit of math which questions how many human-life equivalents you squander over the aggregate by escalating travel time.]

[stellar-muddle.livejournal.com]

So equivalently, the cost of getting to your destination 30 seconds earlier is 3 limbs, one concussion and a cyclist getting doored into the path of a truck - but not necessarily your life. Still happy with the human life equivalents?

Squandering is nearly 400 people dying on the roads each year.

You don't need to have urban limits down to 30km/hr - you need a distribution of driving speeds followed such that 99% of vehicles are not exceeding the limit that is appropriate to the stretch of road, their vehicle and the conditions. Yes, the majority can be piled up at just under the posted limit if the weather and lighting conditions warrant it.

One issue is that one person's definition of "needlessly obstructionist" is say a traffic engineers definition of a minor obsticle that will make the rural traffic stop/pause before crossing the intersection and hence substantially reduce the odds of being fatally t-boned at said intersection at 100 km/h. 20 seconds added on to that leg of the trip, but say a fatality less every 5 years. Your 20 seconds vs someone else's life...

(Sorry for the delay in getting back to the topic - been distracted)

[theuns.livejournal.com]

30 seconds, aggregated over a 3 million people, aggregated over 1000 trips, is a human lifetime. [So is 10 minutes, for 1 million people, for 5 trips - so if I double the time it takes to drive to work in the morning, I've wasted a lifetime every week.] At some point, you have to do the math, and decide which is less wasteful - a 10% chance of one extra person living, or the cost of making it so. There is no such thing as absolute gain - every change has a benefit, and a cost.

I have no problem with measures designed to make driving safer - I have a problem with measures designed to make people feel safer without actually measuring the cost/benefit relation. And, frankly, politicians *suck* at offering things that work rather than make them look good.