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I'm annoyed that the taboo thing to say in this discussion is whether increased traffic fatalities is always an inherently bad thing. When you're talking about

I'm annoyed that the taboo thing to say in this discussion is whether increased traffic fatalities is always an inherently bad thing. When you're talking about societal-scale policy, it's impossible to make anything 100% safe; rather, it's about acceptable trade-off in risk. We could make a universal speed limit of 10mph and traffic deaths would probably vanish, but we don't because the impact on transport is too great. People like to brush off this argument with "should someone die just so you can get to work 5 minutes earlier", but if you start multiplying those 5 minutes by millions of people, there is an actual trade-off to consider.

thrownaway2424 12y ago
I hate slippery-slope arguments, but I feel that if you are going to advocate the scenario you seem to have advocated, then you can take it a lot further. For example I feel that anyone whose car stalls while crossing the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge should be banned from driving for life. Because every time someone stalls on the bridge at rush hour there's a traffic jam clear back to Reno.
rtpg 12y ago
The tradeoff for speeding is stupidly small. Average US worker spends 25 minutes on a one-way trip to work. Lets assume an average speed of 60mph (hint: it's slower). If you went at 70 instead of 60, then you'll save a whole 3.5 minutes. Here(http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jWbI1mKY8qgJ:www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/enforce/speed_forum_presentations/ferguson.pdf+&cd=1&hl=fr&ct=clnk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jWbI1mK...) is a link to a NHTSA presentation on speed limit changes and its effects on crashes. Notably, when states were given control of speed limits, we saw raises from 60-65 to 70-75 mph in some situations, and a 35% increase in fatalities. if we do the whole "life is worth $3M dollars" argument, divide by two because I'm trying to make this favorable to you (even though car fatalities disproportionately affect young people), letting people go 70 instead of 60 could still end up causing almost 10k more deaths per year, so there's $15B in lost value per year. At least I'll get to sleep in for 3.5 more minutes.
- rokhayakebe 12y ago
  This is the reason I do not speed. I figured I barely ever drive more than 10-15 miles one way, hence going from 60 to 80 miles per hour is only going to save me a very few minutes and increase my chance at 1) getting a ticket, and 2) wasting 30 minutes when a cop pulls me over.
- Scoundreller 12y ago
  You still haven't shown that the increased risk of danger outweighs the aggregate time savings. It's a big consideration when looking at things like, the value of screening for unlikely outcomes. 3.5 minutes/trip saved * 2 trips/day * 200 working days per year (probably more) = 1400 minutes saved per year per person. working-age population of US (2012) = 243 million. Employment-to-population_ratio = 67%, so 162 million. Let's say that half drive, or 80 million. So, 80m * 1400 minutes = 112 billion minutes a year saved by speeding or 1.9 billion hours. At a wage of $10 per hour, that's $19 billion, which is a bit ahead of the $15b loss of value per your number, but I'm sure our confidence intervals overlap. 112 billion minutes = 213000 person-years of being stuck inside a car saved by speeding. With a US average lifespan of 79, that's 2700 total additional lifespans spent in a car by losing those 3.5 minutes.
  - jacalata 12y ago
    so, 2,700 additional lifespans of time saved in trade for 10,000 people killed, let's pretend each of them was halfway through their lifespan (40) so we lost 5,000 lifespans of time, or net loss of 2,300 lifespans. Sounds like it's not worth the time savings.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  >At least I'll get to sleep in for 3.5 more minutes. Come on, that's not a fair argument. The effects are obviously much bigger than one guy saving 3.5 minutes. To get closer to the meat: If your calculation always outputs numbers that make slower traffic look better, no matter what the starting speed is, then your methodology is wrong. Your method here would make 15mph look better than speeds 20mph or faster, despite a 15mph speed limit being a blatantly terrible idea. (Also doesn't your assumption of an average speed of 60 bias your argument heavily against high speed limits? I would expect saving 4 minutes on a 30mph route to be much safer than saving 4 minutes off a 60mph route. Is my expectation wrong here?)
throwaway5752 12y ago
How much time would we all lose because of the small increased risk of increased traffic accidents and the road closures to clear them? It almost feels like an area of knowledge that I'm clueless about, but someone has spent a lot of time and effort studying.

thrownaway2424 12y ago

I hate slippery-slope arguments, but I feel that if you are going to advocate the scenario you seem to have advocated, then you can take it a lot further. For example I feel that anyone whose car stalls while crossing the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge should be banned from driving for life. Because every time someone stalls on the bridge at rush hour there's a traffic jam clear back to Reno.

rtpg 12y ago

The tradeoff for speeding is stupidly small. Average US worker spends 25 minutes on a one-way trip to work. Lets assume an average speed of 60mph (hint: it's slower). If you went at 70 instead of 60, then you'll save a whole 3.5 minutes. Here(http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jWbI1mKY8qgJ:www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/enforce/speed_forum_presentations/ferguson.pdf+&cd=1&hl=fr&ct=clnk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jWbI1mK...) is a link to a NHTSA presentation on speed limit changes and its effects on crashes. Notably, when states were given control of speed limits, we saw raises from 60-65 to 70-75 mph in some situations, and a 35% increase in fatalities. if we do the whole "life is worth $3M dollars" argument, divide by two because I'm trying to make this favorable to you (even though car fatalities disproportionately affect young people), letting people go 70 instead of 60 could still end up causing almost 10k more deaths per year, so there's $15B in lost value per year. At least I'll get to sleep in for 3.5 more minutes.

rokhayakebe 12y ago
This is the reason I do not speed. I figured I barely ever drive more than 10-15 miles one way, hence going from 60 to 80 miles per hour is only going to save me a very few minutes and increase my chance at 1) getting a ticket, and 2) wasting 30 minutes when a cop pulls me over.
Scoundreller 12y ago
You still haven't shown that the increased risk of danger outweighs the aggregate time savings. It's a big consideration when looking at things like, the value of screening for unlikely outcomes. 3.5 minutes/trip saved * 2 trips/day * 200 working days per year (probably more) = 1400 minutes saved per year per person. working-age population of US (2012) = 243 million. Employment-to-population_ratio = 67%, so 162 million. Let's say that half drive, or 80 million. So, 80m * 1400 minutes = 112 billion minutes a year saved by speeding or 1.9 billion hours. At a wage of $10 per hour, that's $19 billion, which is a bit ahead of the $15b loss of value per your number, but I'm sure our confidence intervals overlap. 112 billion minutes = 213000 person-years of being stuck inside a car saved by speeding. With a US average lifespan of 79, that's 2700 total additional lifespans spent in a car by losing those 3.5 minutes.
- jacalata 12y ago
  so, 2,700 additional lifespans of time saved in trade for 10,000 people killed, let's pretend each of them was halfway through their lifespan (40) so we lost 5,000 lifespans of time, or net loss of 2,300 lifespans. Sounds like it's not worth the time savings.
Dylan16807 12y ago
>At least I'll get to sleep in for 3.5 more minutes. Come on, that's not a fair argument. The effects are obviously much bigger than one guy saving 3.5 minutes. To get closer to the meat: If your calculation always outputs numbers that make slower traffic look better, no matter what the starting speed is, then your methodology is wrong. Your method here would make 15mph look better than speeds 20mph or faster, despite a 15mph speed limit being a blatantly terrible idea. (Also doesn't your assumption of an average speed of 60 bias your argument heavily against high speed limits? I would expect saving 4 minutes on a 30mph route to be much safer than saving 4 minutes off a 60mph route. Is my expectation wrong here?)

throwaway5752 12y ago

How much time would we all lose because of the small increased risk of increased traffic accidents and the road closures to clear them? It almost feels like an area of knowledge that I'm clueless about, but someone has spent a lot of time and effort studying.