(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

[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.