4 ms·

I sometimes wonder why road fatalities are not measured per-hour of driving instead of per-mile?

• leetcrew 5y ago
  why? miles seem like the natural denominator to me. I don't hop in my car to drive 20 minutes and see where I end up. my goal is to drive to a specific location n miles away.
  • necovek 5y ago
    I believe they would mostly correlate with each other, but doing it per hour driven would better surface things like tiredness playing a part (eg. that 5 mile commute back from work can take either 5 minutes in no traffic at 60mph, or an hour or more in heavy traffic — one has a different risk profile from the other). Still I don't think it'd make for a practical difference as long as all the studies are including enough of both types of driving.
    • Andys 5y ago
      But breaking it down, perhaps there should be stricter speed limit controls in suburbs and cities, and relaxed on inter-city highways?
      • necovek 5y ago
        We've got that in Serbia, so I imagine it's not that unusual elsewhere either (our lawmakers are not the smartest ones and they usually just copy stuff over :)). Basically, speeding up to 10km/h in the urban area is equivalent to speeding up to 20km/h outside cities as far as fines go (and up to 20km/h in the urban area is an equivalent penalty as for up to 40km/h outside urban areas, and so forth...).
  • Andys 5y ago
    Specifically for long trips: if I drive on a long trip (say, 10 hours at the speed limit, on high quality highways), given the fixed distance, how does my risk of a fatality change if I drive 20% faster and thus spend 2 hours less in the car?