Hacker News Reader

Comment by gknoy | Hacker News Reader

Do you have suggestions on how I might find information about the _total_ numbers of traffic related fatalities in LA during similar times? (I'm interesting in knowing what fraction of car-related deaths are due to street racing.)

For example, 2016 had 260 deaths from car accidents from one source [0], and only 11 of those were from street racing, less than 5%. (It's possible that the article I linked counted deaths differently than the data you were working with, though, so it's hard to compare the two.) Street racing related deaths are tragic (especially as half of them are _not the drivers_), but I wonder if we are spending proportionally similar amounts to prevent the larger pie-slice of automotive deaths.

Good grief, I feel so callous even asking this kind of question. :-/

0: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-2016-traffic-dea...

View on HN

I don't think it's callous at all. In fact, it's a sort of higher order empathy. If the goal is to save as many lives as possible, then this is exactly the right way to think about these things.

It's like how most Americans are more likely to die from obesity related diseases than terrorism, but we spend orders of magnitude more resources trying to prevent terrorism.

That is a bad comparison. My weight is under my control, and I don't want the government to interfere. Preventing terrorists from getting in the country and committing attacks is something I expect the government to do.

I think it is highly unlikely to be true, but it could be that the money spent fighting terrorism saves millions of lives every year. That would make it a bargain.

Similarly, if there were no attempt to stop street racing (not even speed limits), we _might_ see thousands more deads due to street racing every year.

If that were true you can compare back to when we didn't spend money on fighting terrorism. Has it changed much? No not really. Terrorism is not a (major) problem in the world if looking at major causes of human loss of life.

Neither is street racing.

Also, I didn’t argue that; I just pointed out that “few people die today, so we shouldn’t spend much money fighting it” isn’t a valid argument because the truth could be “few people die today because we spend so much money fighting it”.

Not callous at all. We all have a limited amount of attention to pay to things, and as a society we have a limited amount of political and monetary capital to direct at problems. So we should focus on those problems that yield the biggest bang for the buck.

The media is frequently a bad actor in this. Since humans aren't generally good at assessing risk, value propositions like "How to keep your kid from being struck by lightning! Film at 11!" are actively counterproductive. I believe media has an ethical responsibility to allocate their resources and grab eyeballs in line with the magnitude and tractability of the problems they cover, but that's not what sells ad spots. :-(

There's a state database compiled by CHP called SWITRS that tracks traffic accidents. You can find it here. http://iswitrs.chp.ca.gov/Reports/jsp/userLogin.jsp

We don't call it out by name in the story, but it's the kind of existing government system that could be expanded to provide a better, official count of street racing deaths.

Our Los Angeles Times team has mined SWITRS in the past for other stories, like these:

http://graphics.latimes.com/la-pedestrians/

http://graphics.latimes.com/la-bike-hit-and-runs/

AP style guidance prefers ‘crash’ to ‘accident’ jfyi

In deaths per mile driven, even a single victim every few years would make street racing the low hanging fruit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com