3 ms·
That's the death rate per person, which is not really a good measure of how safe the roads are. Better is the death rate per km. The US drives about 62 times a
by tzs 2y ago
That's the death rate per person, which is not really a good measure of how safe the roads are. Better is the death rate per km.
The US drives about 62 times as many km as Sweden does, and has a population about 32 times as big as Sweden, which means the US death rate per person would be expected to be about 1.9 times that of Sweden if the roads were equally safe.
With that correction the US is about 2.6 times as deadly as Sweden rather than 5 times as deadly.
Note: the above numbers are somewhat fuzzy, because when I Googled for population and driving and death data the results weren't always for the same year.
- xracy 2y agoI feel like there are probably diminishing returns on picking your best metric... Like, does it matter if the number is 5x as deadly or 2.5x as deadly when you consider that not adjusted for population we have a ton of traffic deaths in the US? The priority is to not kill as many people with cars. We just convince ourselves that it's reasonable to have a baseline number of deaths based on how big our population is for some reason. It's not better if we're expanding that definition to arbitrarily include some quantity of driving. If driving is causing more deaths, we should probably be trying to limit the amount of driving we do.