NHTSA: Car crashes cost Americans $340B | Hacker News Reader

NHTSA: Car crashes cost Americans $340B

nhtsa.gov

135 pointsdoener182 comments

This blog post is mostly a rephrasing of NHTSA's press release (from January 2023): https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/traffic-crashes-cost-am...

The press release has a link to the full report.

Relevant data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners can be found here[1] as well.

[1] https://content.naic.org/article/naic-releases-2019-2020-aut...

Thanks! changed now - more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36463897

I hate that this article doesn't link to the original report. I found it here: https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/traffic-crashes-cost-am...

Thanks! We changed the URL to that from https://www.thecarconnection.com/news/1138400_nhtsa-car-cras....

Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I have to wonder how much better off American society would be if we had cities designed to be walkable like other parts of the world. Better public health (fewer car accidents, more exercise), less of these costs related to car accidents, less public spending on roads (the constant yearly summer construction season).

Walkable cities are great and that's one way to reduce the impact of car accidents. Another way is to prevent the most catastrophic kinds of accidents from occurring in the first place by manufacturing the cars to be incapable of them.

There's no reason, for example, that a car traveling on an urban street must dutifully obey the command of the buzzed teenager driving it to accelerate to 100 mph. We don't need to wait for full self-driving to make the cars more aware of their surroundings and incapable of doing things that are already illegal and absurdly dangerous.

All new cars manufactured for use on public rights-of-way should immediately be throttled to the nation's highest speed limit on any road (85 mph in the U.S.). The most obvious kinds of awareness capabilities should shortly follow (e.g. am I on an Interstate Highway right now? No? Then I cannot travel at speeds that are only legal on Interstate Highways.)

We don't manufacture any other product with buttons that invoke illegal functions and then spend millions on education and enforcement to persuade people never to press them. It is absurd to allow the manufacture of a product that is designed for breaking the law and that we know with great statistical certainty will used to do so.

Conceptually agree. Although my car and even phone GPS regularly think I’m on a road that I’m not actually on so I don’t think this would execute well.

To give an example, when I’m on a highway bridge it things I’m on a city street below. Or when I’m on a highway it gets confused and thinks I’m on an access road. The difference is legal speed limits can be 40 mph in these cases and I’m not sure what would happen if car was randomly governing my speed based to a lower than expected speed and then bouncing back and forth. There’s probably a lot of situations where the tech we’ve become comfortable with still isn’t quite ready for this. I’m in the camp of believing speed limits aren’t inherently correct/safe except in trying to reduce variation of speed within the population of autos. I feel like this could increase variation.

> Conceptually agree. Although my car and even phone GPS regularly think I’m on a road that I’m not actually on so I don’t think this would execute well.

This is a win in my book. If we can move past the conceptual/philosophical objections, then we can get into implementation details, which is a much better discussion to be having.

Have you considered the unintended consequences of this sort of authoritarian reactionary policy?

Manufacturing a car to travel only at the prevailing speed limit is "authoritarian" and "reactionary?"

Sure, consider what would need to happen for a system like this to actually be implemented. How would the car know what kind of road it is on? How would the car know the appropriate speed? What happens to sports cars and other enthusiast vehicles? What happens with existing vehicles?

All these questions raise privacy and reliability concerns in my mind, not to mention the distinctly weird feeling of some outside party deciding what I can and can not be trusted with. This feels authoritarian to me, and as a proposal feels reactionary in the sense that the solution is simply “ban it”.

Many cars already have speed governors built-in by the manufacturers. It seems reasonable that these limits should be set [at most] to the top speed allowed on US roads.

The car would not need to know why road it's on because he suggested limiting it to the national speed limit, not the speed limit of the road you are currently on.

Existing vehicles would eventually be replaced.

Sports enthusiasts would presumably get some kind of exemption.

I can't imagine what kind of privacy or reliability concerns you are imagining from limiting cars to 85mph.

However... while limiting cars to 85mph is very sensible, the EU has decided to flex their idiot nanny muscles and do something much more stupid.

Continuing in the tradition of the headphone volume and cookie laws they have come up with an extremely annoying law that will achieve none of its goals.

Basically they will use unreliable GPS to figure out the current speed limit, but then it won't actually limit your speed, it will just beep at you annoyingly. You can disable it, but it will re-activate every time you start the car.

Can I get 1000 face palms for the EU? It's almost enough to make you support Brexit.

Speed is an impact multiplier when the accident happens, but I doubt speed in and of itself is the root cause of most accidents. The article itself points to Speed causing 14% of costs vs. Alcohol + Distraction accounting for 49% of costs. Another study showed speeding was involved in 9% of property-damage-only crashes and 13% of crashes with injuries or fatalities in 2021[1].

I'd rather law enforcement spend their limited time cracking down on drunk driving and all the various distractions that actually tend to lead to accidents, rather than the easy job of "farming" people going 10mph over the limit for steady revenue, or nerfing cars to some arbitrary limit. And not just drunk driving. I took a bus ride the other day and just people-watched into cars, and about 60-80% of drivers were scrolling on their smartphones (in-hand) while driving. If you fined every single one of them $100 every time they picked up their phones, you could probably fully fund your city's public safety budget. Maybe the entire city's budget.

1: https://www.nhtsa.gov/crash-data-systems/crash-report-sampli...

NHTSA says here [0] that it's a factor in 29% of fatalities.

I think there's also reason to suspect that number is underreported. The responding officer has to make the judgement on the scene that speed was a factor and decide to write that down on the accident report.

We should really be doing a lot more tracking of this kind of data using telemetry in the cars themselves (ideally as required by insurance).

[0] https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/speeding

A lot of speed-induced accidents probably happen below the posted speed limit, but above whatever speed is safe given the conditions of the road at that moment (wet, icy, foggy, etc.)

To borrow the form of the GP comment, there is no particular reason a phone should allow itself to be used when its owner is driving a car. Creating some arrangement of sensors and systems that could lock the phones of drivers may not be straight forward and would require buy-in from both phone manufacturers and car manufacturers, but seems possible in principle. The car could scan the drivers' face, then interrogate nearby phones, asking them if the driver's face matches the phone's owner. The phone could then lock itself if it does. There would be technical and privacy hurdles to overcome, but nothing impossible.

Prohibiting the placement of AC and other essential controls onto touch interfaces would probably go a long way as well.

> We don't manufacture any other product with buttons that invoke illegal functions and then spend millions on education and enforcement to persuade people never to press them.

There's one more. Just like cars, misuse of it is also the most prevalent in the USA, more and more are being sold, they're getting bigger and more dangerous, the usual excuse for it is freedom and the license required to operate one is (again, mainly in the USA) granted to basically anyone.

It's like Americans are allergic to public safety...

This is an obvious comparison, but it fails because there is no conceivable way to disable the illegitimate uses of a firearm without impacting the functioning of the allowed uses. If we could invent a gun that would not fire in a bad shooting, but would still function in self-defense, then obviously we should do that! But of course we can’t. (It’s not even just a technological problem. It’s that the problem space is far too fuzzy to imagine doing this even in principle.)

Speed, on the other hand, is discrete, measurable, and discernible. You can prevent a car from exceeding the speed limit without impacting any of its legitimate functionality. Crucially, you would only be disabling behavior that is already illegal.

You can argue the same part for cars. First of all, cars do have speed limiters built into them, but they are a matter of power, not objective speed. It'd be hard for a car on the hardware level to figure out the latter (and there are already many debates as is about software controlling your car's hardware. I'll skip over that for now).

And secondly, that power is why it's hard to make this law: hills. What may be a limited max SPD of 80 on a flat plane can be below 60 on a steep hill, or over 100 going downhill. I believe that is why the compromise for a limiter is more around 120-130 MPH instead of something lower: it wants an average sedan to be able to not stall out going up a hill on a free way.

Now granted, that hasn't been an issue for almost 2 decades. But it still impacts how they limit car speeds.

It'd be nice but is ultimately frutless. the US is the 4th largest country and in top 5 of population, despite being extremely young. As is there is already a large, large amount of fertile land in the US that isn't used nor desirable.

It can be hard to scope out if you haven't live in the US. You can travel for 8-12 hours in a car and still be in the same state. Some singular states are larger than some Eu countries.

I live in the US. Before we transitioned to a car centric society, there were intra-urban railways which connected suburban towns together. There is precedent for better public transit than we have now.

I won't deny there can be better public transportation. But I also understand that the way the US grew in the last century meant that growing out of reasonable public transportation was inevitable.

The economic percent loss of value due to car accidents, per capita is likely the same around the world. What stands out is the extraordinary rate of vehicular deaths and serious accidents in the US. [1] [2] Yes, everyone knows it's high. But, 5x the traffic accident and fatality rate of other comparable developed countries is unforgivable.

Now high car crash numbers are bad enough, but their breakdown is even worse. It is the primary driver of child death [3]. Cars don't just kill other car-drivers. They kill every type of road user, while the others barely register, even when normalized per capita. [4] [5]

Ironically, bigger and safer cars make both the driver and the roads a lot less safe as the prisoners dilemma means everyone loses. [6][7]

And these are just the numbers. There are insidious cultural patterns that appear when cars are the only way to travel. The US has a shocking cultural acceptance of DUI. I don't blame them. If the only way to party is to go downtown 20 miles away, and an uber is 75$ each way, then people start making dumb decisions. No one follows the speed limit, frequently exceeding it by 100% in slow neighborhoods. [8] Stop signs are considered optional across the country and the assumption is always that 'might makes right'. I have learnt to never engage with a pick-up truck on a road, and never to trust a car to stop just because you have the right of way as a cyclist/pedestrian. Old people, sick people, the sleep-deprived, 15 year olds, and the soon-to-be-blind all drive in the US, no matter how suited for it. Because the other options are so much worse. Ofc they're out there running over people. What did you expect would happen?

The article tries to quantify the damage done by cars with the least relevant metric : "$$". As bad as those numbers look, the economic damage is in fact the most charitable way to look at damage done by car culture in this country.

[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fk7HavRaYAMRa_w?format=jpg&name=...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4igbmr3Qj30

[3] https://twitter.com/buttermilk1/status/1446513576559194118?c...

[4] https://twitter.com/ETSC_EU/status/1461356632042979339?cxt=H...

[5] https://twitter.com/fietsprofessor/status/138004836808543027...

[6] https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1568797893888249858?cxt=...

[7] https://twitter.com/jdavey_2/status/1533865942731526146?cxt=...

[8] https://twitter.com/WarrenJWells/status/1501638281573777408?...

P.S: This is not arbitrary link spam. These are carefully curated links I have accumulated over years of this being my proverbial hobby horse. I am a broken record. I know that.

> Ironically, bigger and safer cars make both the driver and the roads a lot less safe as the prisoners dilemma means everyone loses. [6][7]

You can have safer cars, like cars with emergency braking, without having bigger cars. Americans have just been severely been marketed to to make horrible financial and social decisions on cars: how many people do you see buying giant SUVs the moment they have a kid and save zero dollar for their college? Absurd.

The prisoner’s dilemma I believe refers to the fact that bigger cars often total smaller ones, so others are now forced to adapt by buying a bigger car, which increases the number of big cars, which then creates a cycle.

> bigger cars often total smaller ones

And if you have the misfortune of getting hit by a bigger car while not being in a car yourself, you are likely to be critically injured, permanently disabled, or dead. The way to adapt is to drive more, or avoid places with motor traffic. All of these add to the risk and economic cost.

can't cheat the inelastic collision math

Part of the reason is we underfund infrastructure: for roads and public transport.

E.g., we constantly tax road users to "fund" other schemes and infrastructure (but even those ending needing even more money magically)

Example: https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/bridge-toll-hik...

That's a wild take considering how much general (not user) revenues are shoveled into projects for cars.

> That's a wild take considering how much general (not user) revenues are shoveled into projects for cars.

Source?

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

Federal spending on transportation is just at 2% compared to Social Security (15%), Medicare (12%), Income Security (14%), etc.

That 2% includes spending on all forms of transportation.

Do we complain users of other modes of transport or social goods benefit from taxes? Why single out cars?

What is wild is that these arguments only consider gas tax and forget DMV fees, sales taxes on cars, tolls, etc.

US - build roads everywhere whether it makes sense or not.

US - build houses such that every individual needs a car.

US - build everything far away from each other so that each road gets a ton of mileage.

......

Also US - ours roads are crumbling and underfunded !

An obese man who eats 10000 calories a day will feel underfed if they don't get all 10000. But the lack of food is hardly the problem....

Which part of the very large country would you move all the people to, in order to achieve the density required to reduce the need for roads?

80% of our population lives in 3% of the land area. So no need to move anybody.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/08/rural-america....

1. 3% of the 4th largest country is still a lot of area, almost the size of many European countries (and those still have a lot of roads for rural transport last time I checked)

2. The other 20% don't matter?

The US still has terrible public transport and densification in cities well suited for it.

SF, Atlanta and Seattle grew rapidly in the last few decades. None of them have taken advantage of this demand to build transit or transit suitable housing. Instead, new sprawling suburbs are the only form of infrastructure that gets funded. All while the central arterial roads (101, 280, i5, i90 etc) get more and more crowded.

Existing dense cities also have subpar public transit. The NYC metro area falls short of metro areas of Tokyo, Paris or London. Boston, Philly, DC and Miami can't make it to the leaderboard when compared to any peer European city of similar density. Not even going to mention China whose tier 2 cities embarrass tier 1 American cities.

> The other 20% don't matter?

Only as much as rural areas anywhere in the world. Just because you have to use cars in rural areas, doesn't mean there should be a red carpet highway dropping cars to the middle of Manhattan. These are different worlds. Changing 1 doesn't affect the other.

Perfect, lets build a train track or bus route to every house! In your world, do disabled folks, children, elderly not exist?

> An obese man who eats 10000 calories a day will feel underfed if they don't get all 10000. But the lack of food is hardly the problem....

Great insight and source of data. Let me also provide some data.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

Federal spending on transportation is just at 2% compared to Social Security (15%), Medicare (12%), Income Security (14%), etc.

That 2% includes spending on all forms of transportation.

Random thought:

> But, 5x the traffic accident and fatality rate of other comparable developed countries

Are there actually other comparable countries in terms of the quantity of roads and the car & driving culture of the US?

I don’t know nor experienced of another country (developed or not) where a majority of people have cars and where road-trips are a thing. Most places live more densely and have fantastic public transit.

Maybe the quantity of accidents reflects what actually happens with car culture at scale.

There was a recent story about how big trucks in the US don't have basic safety features seen in say Europe like stopping cars from ending up under them.

Other countries are comparable in being rich and having safe cars. I don’t know what your experience abroad was like but plenty of developed countries do not have sufficient infrastructure for people to avoid cars. In Western Europe, for example you’ll find car ownership is high except for the cities where it is not necessary, much like you’ll find that car ownership is high in America outside of (central) New York and a few other places.[1]

One big difference is Americans tend to drive bigger heavier cars that perform poorly in collisions. I am not confident about other differences (rates of texting, drink driving, road design, etc). A commonly made claim is that Americans drive more. This is true[2] but I don’t think the degree is high enough to explain the difference, though there are lots of things one could say are lost in that data.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1013213/passenger-kilome... (remember to divide by population) or https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar4.htm (very old!)

Pedantic point. Central New York, is the area around Syracuse, NY. I think you mean Manhattan + Bronx + downtown Brooklyn in New York City when you say (Central) New York.

> Are there actually other comparable countries in terms of the quantity of roads and the car & driving culture of the US?

Just north of the border in Canada?

> While U.S. road deaths rose 19 percent between 2010 and 2020, the Canadian figure fell at almost the same pace. That means that around 118 in every million Americans died in a crash in 2020, 2.5 times more than the 46 of every million Canadians who died in the same year.

* https://www.carscoops.com/2022/07/why-do-canadian-traffic-de...

> While US road deaths are skyrocketing (including the fastest increase on record in 2021), virtually all other developed countries have seen a decline. In France, for example, traffic fatalities are now just a third of the US per capita rate. As Urban Institute researcher Yonah Freemark recently told me, 30 years ago the streets of France were more dangerous than those in the US, but “today the average French person is 40% safer than the average American.”

> It might seem easy to dismiss transportation comparisons between the US and France, a country smaller than the state of Texas where many streets were designed centuries before the automobile arrived. But what about looking at a North American cousin — Canada, a sprawling, car-oriented nation whose cities are comparably young and similarly configured?

* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-01/why-canad...

Canada has more deaths per mile driven at 5.1, than the US at 1.5.

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit...

Your other comment about “accidents and deaths per mile driven.” is likely the right metric of the idea I was trying to convey!

Canada is 5.1 deaths per billion km.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic...

USA is 1.5 deaths per 100 million miles from your link. That's about 9.3 deaths per billion km.

Other comparable countries would be Australia and New Zealand which have 5.2 and 7.2 deaths per billion km respectively.

USA is still well behind on that metric.

The entirety of Canada has the population similar to that of California -- a single US state. Probably has the road miles equivalent of the western United States.

One problem is that alternate transportation services are not profitable, and if they're not profitable, people don't think it should exist.

But that's just short-sighted thinking. If you ensure every drunk person has a ride home, that alone would save millions in costs caused by drunk driver accidents.

We don't do public transit in the US, even where it makes sense.

Even where we do, we don't. For example, the trains in Salt Lake City stop running an hour or two before bars close.

It's also with mentioning that speed limits are their own problem: they are a baldfaced lie that pits believers against disbelievers; endangering everyone in the process. The reality of speed limits put into practice accomplish nothing except to violently clot traffic flow. Drivers who aren't convinced to slow down are vilified, while the system itself continues, perpetually immune to the blame it deserves.

We can do better, but only if we are willing to recognize the issues present in the system itself, instead of blaming human disobedience in a country that celebrates it.

It's not actually a prisoner's dilemma, that's a very specific game theory thought experiment that almost never happens in real life. I guess you could call it an arms race.

One way it’s closer to the prisoner’s dilemma than an arms race is that everyone would be safer (the ostensible point of larger vehicles) whereas in an arms race if your goal is victory you don’t care that everyone is safer if you all give up your guns — the point is exactly to harm your enemy without them harming you.

You can’t looks at accidents and deaths per capita, you need to look at accidents and deaths per mile driven.

The US is actually pretty good at 1.5 versus UK (5.3), Denmark (7.2), France (5.8).

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic...

The right metric is traffic deaths per capita, because that means so-and-so many families have lost a relative in a car crash. If you use traffic deaths per mile driven you begin to excuse excessive commutes when what you want to do lower fatalities.

If you spend more time driving, of course you're risking more.

If no-one left their house, there would be less casualties for many outdoor activities.

You have to account for per-mile.

Reducing the risk per mile driven would reduce deaths, but so would reducing miles driven. More public transportation would achieve that.

Higher-density housing wouldn't be the worst idea, especially higher-density housing near light railway when combined with public parks. The suburban paradises are plainly incompatible with public transport.

By that same logic we could avoid surgery deaths by not doing surgery.

But then you're ignoring the benefit.

The correct analogy: avoid surgery with preventative healthcare and lifestyle changes.

How do you call this paradox where mortality increases at a hospital because simple cases are diverted to outpatient clinic and only the severe cases are seen at the inpatient facility?

Adverse selection.

By that reasoning, traffic safety is increased by moving the bar from downtown to 30 minutes down the road when in fact it should be at the corner, so people can walk and leave the car at home. Good to have the misconception cleared up.

Sure, but no-one was arguing that.

Let's all start a fund to build bars closer?

Congrats on that break-through.

I disagree. Per Capita is the right metric. Per mile doesn't equalize everyone because we have to drive so much than everyone else to get around. When talking about social costs, per Capita makes the most sense.

You're comparing numbers in different units.

USA is in deaths per 100 million miles. The rest are in deaths per billion km. USA is 9.3 deaths per billion km if you do the conversion.

Fun one I read recently... In the U.S. an average of 11 our of 100 drivers having a car in their name have an at-fault accident on their record. Do you know what's the brand where, on average, the owners that have an at-fault accident is at the lowest for any brand, with only 8.62 out of 100 drivers having an at-fault accident?

It's... Drumroll... Porsche.

This makes sense because Porsches aren't daily drivers for disproportionately large percentage of their owners. This needs to be normalized by miles driven to be meaningful.

I found the source and the stat sorta accounts for that in a different way, because it reports any at-fault accident in the driver's history, regardless of whether or not it was with that particular car. Thus, even if the Porsche isn't a daily driver, the owner's past accidents would still count.

That said, I'm not sure how I feel about this methodology overall. It's based on insurance applications submitted by the drivers themselves, and I'm not sure what they do to check applicants' actual history. Perhaps Porsche drivers are more inclined to lie about their accident histories?

> To apply for car insurance, drivers input personal and vehicle information, including the make and model of the car they drive, their license plate number, and whether or not they have caused an accident in the past. To create the list below, the Insurify data science team compared the number of car owners with a prior at-fault accident against the total number of drivers for each make and model, determining the proportion of drivers with an at-fault accident on record.

Source: https://insurify.com/insights/auto-brands-most-car-accidents...

Could you explain how this is 'fun'? I think it more or less just makes sense as a fact.

This is honestly a good reason in my opinion why having everything be so car centric in the US is such a bad idea. If there are other transportation s than driving then you can gate keep driving more with more strict drivers license requirements and pull licenses from bad drivers more easily, but as it stands in the US you need to be able to drive to function as a member of society so if someone has a DUI pulling their license is almost as bad as giving that person house arrest for the rest of their life.

Obviously cars are still the best form of transportation in a wide variety of situations but it really wouldn’t kill to have a functional bus system that doesn’t take 10x the time to get somewhere as driving

> in the US you need to be able to drive to function as a member of society so if someone has a DUI pulling their license is almost as bad as giving that person house arrest for the rest of their life.

Another way of looking at this is, if driving is so important to participating in American society, then it is a privilege you should show the greatest respect for, and make sure you are driving safely and legally.

Driving recklessly and endangering not only your license to drive, but the lives of others, carries a high cost that you will have to pay when it goes wrong. That’s an individual choice. Of all the countries I’ve driven, the US drivers seem to have a particularly low regard for law and safety.

That’s one other potential viewpoint and maybe it should be adopted more, but that’s not how it works in practice. If penalties for driving drunk and/or recklessly were higher, people would probably feel that way more.

Run the per-mile numbers instead and see the difference.

What are the chances that the Porsche drivers have better lawyers and generally don't get found "at fault" as often as people who drive Toyota Corollas or Ford Escorts?

Odds are they are lawyers.

Given that not everybody drives a Porsche for practical or cost reasons and it’s only 2.38 points away from average, I would say that’s pretty high.

Like others have said, it would be best to see it normalized on a mileage basis to get a better view.

Porsche drivers can afford better lawyers than the average American car owner. They are more likely to dodge responsibility for their crashes.

Do Porsche owners have fewer accidents even while driving other vehicles? That would make a huge difference. But either way, Porsche drivers probably don't drive in rush hour traffic or on interstate highways, in any vehicle, period.

Also, another important question: What counts as an "at-fault accident"? If you back your car into a traffic cone, does that show up in these statistics?

Likely because, as a whole, they are a lot older?

Have a feeling that pushing security as priority is not trivial task. Even in cars: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=glmcMeTVIIQ&pp=ygUbdGhlIGZpZ2h...

Question for economists here:

"These losses include medical costs, lost productivity, legal and court costs, emergency service costs, insurance administration costs, congestion costs, property damage, and workplace losses. These figures include both police‐reported and unreported crashes. "

So it costs $340 billion... but then that 'cost' also counts as GDP. It pays for insurance companies, cops, medical staff, repair shops, lawyers, etc. Right? So in a perverse way, there are people who care benefiting economically, and helps with flow of money.

If traffic crashes were to go down to 0 and the cost goes down to $0, has anyone calculated what the total impact would be?

the ecconomy is not a zero sum game so you cannot calculate anything. We can however say with confidence that without that cost of money people would buy other things instead, and so would be better off.

I don't have a direct answer to your question but I believe the broken window fallacy applies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

I'm not an economist, but this sort of situation has been considered since the 1800's and is sometimes known as the broken window fallacy:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Basically, society is better off using that money for something actually productive, rather than just repairing damage.

> Whence we arrive at this unexpected conclusion: "Society loses the value of things which are uselessly destroyed;" and we must assent to a maxim which will make the hair of protectionists stand on end – To break, to spoil, to waste, is not to encourage national labour; or, more briefly, "destruction is not profit."

I buy groceries. I try to buy what I need so I have enough but I'm not wasting anything. Having enough is more important than not wasting anything. So, there is always a non zero amount of food I have to throw out as it didn't get eaten.

I could optimize this to zero, but it would likely cost me _more_ to do that than the return would be _worth_. I suspect the same would be true here.

The interesting question for me is if self driving type tech will be able to fix this. I mean things along the lines of Tesla fsd are probably worse than humans at the moment but improving in an exponential manner year on year and if they get 50% better each year in terms of miles between accidents then within a decade they'll be much safer than humans.

You wouldn't have to have self drive on but it could still break etc if you looked like hitting something.

Probably also the tech will get cheaper and become widespread. It'll be interesting to see.

From what I read it sounds like Americans repair their cars more thoroughly than Europeans.

Most people I know unless they have a particularly fancy car just leave the little scratches, dents, dings etc and do functional repairs only.

Spending thousands on a paint job is car enthusiast territory.

I feel there's a huge amount of status put into cars in America too. Perhaps due to extremely effective marketing.

There is just a lot of shaming going on even today.

There's an Instagram story I just saw where some influencer was making fun of software developers showing how the apartments of typical software developers who make USD 100k, 200k, 300k, and 400k make and they were a. twin mattress on the floor, b. two twin mattresses side by side on the floor, c. full size mattress of the floor, d. full size mattress with fitted sheet on the floor. I mean ok, what's wrong with that? If someone has a mattress on the floor what does it hurt?

It is made to look like organic "content" but I am positive it is boosted by some marketing firm somewhere if I saw it even though I don't follow the influencer. Point is, there are a lot of really smart people working really hard to separate Americans from their money.

Full disclosure: I, too, had a mattress on the floor a few years back so maybe I am taking it too seriously.

My mattress is on the floor right now, but it has a fitted sheet.

It’s just typical consumerism. Most people in Western culture are brought up to believe you need to have stuff to be happy. Especially in America. You need to live in a big house with way more space than you need, then you need to fill that space with stuff. Then that stuff gets old so it needs to be replaced with new stuff every few years. The more this is perpetuated via mocking people who don’t have stuff, the better it is for companies who make stuff.

A bed frame is the perfect example of stuff. The average western person believes this is a necessity even though it has no function. Especially the ones without storage. Yet if you sleep on the floor you will be mocked. People will scoff. “You’re an adult you need to buy a bed frame”. Why? Why would I spend money and consume resources on something that has absolutely zero benefit?

> A bed frame is the perfect example of stuff. The average western person believes this is a necessity even though it has no function.

There is a function. Having sex with no bed frame or headboard is awful.

Serious answer? Pests and drafts. We raise beds off floors for good reasons. I only recently learned that even headboards have a reason to exist: drafts flow down to the floor rather than over the sleeper.

Sort of like my friend who feels no need for drapes. One of my stranger conversations. He thinks they're pointless entirely. But besides privacy and the fact that most people can't sleep in full sunlight, they also reduce noise and improve thermal control.

Us nerdy types are often iconoclastic about convention and tradition but sometimes things are done a certain way for reasons that make good sense. And you'll be thought anywhere from odd to clueless if you decide to go against the grain. Or worse, kinda lazy.

No judgement or anything. My mattress was on the floor for most of my 20s.

For myself, I'd rather have a pest free home than compensate with an elevated bed. Historically headboards may have served a purpose of insulating and protecting from drafts. In a modern dwelling with adequate heating and insulation a headboard is merely decorative.

>what's wrong with that?

Nothing. There is something wrong (or at least ill advised) with wasting time watching “Instagram influencer videos” if your goal is to ascertain right or wrong (or optimal or suboptimal).

Maybe the content strikes a chord? I’d absolutely judge a six-figure earner with a mattress on the floor.

I won’t bother you about it, but I’m judging internally if I see that.

I think the joke is generally that it is the basic necessity and one would generally expect people to create a more homely environment (eg furniture for guests or eating, storage for clothes, maybe bookshelves with books or photographs or whatever). The joke is not ‘floor mattress bad’ it’s ‘no furniture nor decoration despite ample means = weird’. The thing you saw was just a derivative of the original meme which was a single mattress on the floor next to a phone charger.

I don’t really think the thing you saw was really trying to get people to be more consumerist.

Also lower disposable income in Europe.

There's a huge amount of status put into your house too, even though there is effectively zero marketing done in the housing market.

Cars are used to communicate status because:

* They are expensive. For most Americans a car is in their top 5 most expensive possessions.

* You can demonstrate some personality in choice. Which model, which type, which color.

* They go everywhere you go.

* People get a lot of utility from their car.

Mercedes did a LOT of this over the decades in the US ; *'Constraint of product category availability"* - whereby you go to any other country and there were TONS CHEAP little mercedes trucks, trikes, pickups, box-trucks, desert crawlers, etc etc etc...

But they dont sell those in the US, as it allows them to keep *"luxury brand"* marketing hype to sieve money from the unsuspecting US consumer market.

I thought it was due to import duties?

What if mercedes "lobbied" to have those put in place for brand price bloating?

That’s an absurd theory. Why would Mercedes lobby to increase the taxes they pay. They could have just put the price up and taken the difference as profit. The point of the import duties was to advantage domestic manufacturers (I think there were some general U.S. Europe trade disagreements at the time)

Not Arguing WITH "Absurd Theory" -- It was just a wierd one that popped in my head - I am NOT saying I think this - just thought a fun angle...

I really enjoy just playing "what-if" in every category

Or you can choose not to do so, but why?

Usually the way one plays what-if is by coming up with a bunch of ideas and then thinking about whether they make sense or not, and then tossing out the ones that don’t make sense. Often when someone writes ‘what if X?’ What they really mean is that they think X and either think it is plainly obvious or know it is a controversial/conspiratorial theory, which is the tone I wrongly read in what you wrote. I hope you won’t be too put off from writing down your weird ideas in future.

somewhere around 20% of cars in the US are leased, so if you don’t repair damage you end up paying for it eventually

average car loan is also $40k… so there’s a good amount of emphasis of resale value too… my experience in europe is that more people drive their cars until they fall apart (maybe anecdotal)

Responsibility and cost for restoring vehicles to condition is born by insurance companies. There is little-to-no governance over cost in this arrangement.

Actually... the bigger insurance companies have arrangements, and even an ownership stake, in repair facilities. When I smacked a deer in my car, it got taken to a shop specified by the insurance company.

You have the option to disregard your insurance company's recommendation: https://wilshirelawfirm.com/blog/personal-injury-law/can-i-c...

Good to know. At the time, I was like "whatever." The car was pretty smashed up.

You can also choose which repairs to do. Years ago we got the insurance payout for hail damage and decided to only replace the hood and sunroof, taking the other $2k or so out for other expenses.

Yup, that happened after the car was repaired from the deer strike. A few years later it got hail damage, the insurance company wrote us a check, and we pocketed it. The hail damage wasn't noticeable to our eyes, and the car should probably not have been on insurance in the first place.

Leases are a large part of the market, and the simple fact that americans drive on average double the distance as europeans (just because the country is so spread out) makes the car a large part of americans life.

Obviously it's also a status symbol for many.

At first glance, this seems like a drop in the bucket compared to USA's 23.32tn GDP.

But if you look at savings, US savings rate is 3.4%. That's $792 billion. Suddenly blowing away $340B a year on car crashes doesn't seem so insignificant.

If we had data on the median insurance cost per person - I know I pay a lot more than $1035/year - we could hypothetically have a rough estimate of how much the uninsured cost everyone else.

I'd be more interested for insurance of total paid in - total paid out. I bet a few companies make out like bandits.

What? Insurance companies are famous for their generous payouts and not at all using scummy tactics and wording to void claims! /s

They seem to have pretty low profit margins.

that's not necessarily a good guide. Let's say you make a lot of money. You can pay your executives millions, have lush offices with swimming pools and tennis courts, company jets etc and report razor thin "profits". Not that they're doing that - but you can creative accounting your way out of reporting profits.

For instance, the star wars movies, forrest gump, lord of the rings, men in black and harry potter are all still not technically "in profit": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

That's why money in - money out is a better barometer for insurance and people with star power negotiate different terms these days like percentage of "dollars in". I made a video a couple years ago with a writer friend who is now on strike about this.

(I'm cutting out the first 5 minutes of chit-chat and it's processing on youtube, but if you see this after that happens, just go to the beginning) https://youtu.be/QZBqjZS3hZA?t=296

Profit margin is money in minus money out.

Movie studios and their individual accounting for individual movies are not comparable to accounting for an entire audited and publicly listed business subject to regulations, since those are explicitly not accurate portrayals of an entire businesses ins and outs.

There is no reason a business’s owners, and in a publicly listed company’s case, shareholders, are okay with executives paying themselves lavishly just to report smaller profit margins and leave the business owners with less.

I certainly would not be.

And in most cases where they are profitable, it's a result of the float that they can invest in the time frame between when they collect premiums and pay out claims. Some insurance companies actually collect less than they pay out, and make up the difference on the interest from float.

I think it's actually incredible and very unappreciated that society can insure against so much risk for the price of nothing more than the time value of money.

Plus, the insurance company takes the risk of interest rate movement. If you were to self insure, you'd be exposed to that risk. In the last year as interest rates have climbed, this effect has been very visible. Allstate for random example is in the red by several billion over the last few quarters because bond prices have imploded. But their customers are insulated from that risk.

Exactly. I also find it funny about tech workers on a tech forum who work for businesses that earn 20%+ profit margins even at $100M+ revenue, something almost all other business other than pharma and oil can only dream of, falsely pointing fingers at price gouging.

I didn't accuse insurance companies of price gauging. I take issue with the difficulty of getting money back out of an insurer. Some types of insurance make it incredibly difficult to get them to actually pay claims. In fact many insurance companies deny claims by default banking on the fast many people will give up on the claim.

Insurance is not inherently evil or bad but insurance companies tend to be very scummy in their actual behavior towards their customers.

Looks like around 60% payout when discussing premium/payouts alone. Operating expenses eats into almost all the rest. Then they make money investing the float.

https://www.alphaquery.com/stock/AFL/fundamentals/annual/com...

Don't forget the ambulance chasers get 30% of insurance payouts

I think there are so many other factors though. Regulations about what must be covered, competitiveness in insurance markets, expected payouts for various situations, and a big thing: Americans are much richer and drive more expensive cars than in basically any other reasonably sized developed country, so you should expect the insured value to be higher.

Ever year. Important part of headline is missing.

> The total translates to $1,035 in extra costs incurred by each and every American due to increased medical and automotive insurance premiums for everyone, property damage, lost market productivity, and increased taxes to fund public services like first responders.

The amount we have adopted cars is ridiculous. And there really is little need. I have lived all over with no car.

Most cities used to have awesome tram networks that were dismantled to please drivers.

The trams were dismantled before the car took over. They were mostly expensive and didn't provide the freedom that cars do. (They could provide it, but only with a much larger network)

Unfortunately, they were dismantled so the car could take over.

Many city streetcar systems that were struggling in the great depression were purchased by a group of automakers (including General Motors) and chemical companies and then closed down. From my recollection, the goal was to remove the streetcar systems and increase adoption of buses and automobiles, thereby profiting on the sale of buses and tyres.

The important point is they were already struggling first.

> I have lived all over with no car.

You've actually only lived in a couple very small, very homogenous, places at the center of dense mass-transit networks.

It goes the other way too. Cities/states now tax cars to fund trains/trams.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/bridge-toll-hik...

Comparing road deaths per person and per mile with the UK they are like 5x and 3x less. I'd say it's mostly road design and engineering.

(Brit who drove in Austin TX recently, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...)

See the YouTube video by Not Just Bikes called “Why Cars Rarely Crash into Buildings in the Netherlands” for an interesting six minute talk about speed, road design and cultural expectations.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ra_0DgnJ1uQ

We only spend ~$50B annually on infrastructure. Things could be a lot safer if we spent more on infrastructure.

This is meaningless. If we spend x on y, things could be safer. So?

The submission is pretty much about the current state of affairs and investigating what can be done about it. The comment you responded to has a suggestion!

OK. Here's a suggestion. Let's spend $20M to subsidize the replacement of gas cooking equipment. Was that also worth writing?

Probably not since it's not even remotely on topic and it just sounds like you have an axe to grind.

OK. Here are more. Let's spend $10B on infrastructure to improve safety. Let's spend $20B on infrastructure to improve safety. Let's spend $100B on infrastructure to improve safety.

Makes me wonder why I pay 2600/year in insurance

Wouldn’t that be part of “costing Americans”, even if it flows through insurance premiums?

Also, my maxed out liability only insurance for 5k miles per year is ~$50 per month, $600 per year.

For an extra $2k per year, I assume you have significantly more comprehensive/collision coverage, miles, and/or prior incidents on your driving record?

For some savings, I always tell people to drop personal injury protection or reduce it to lowest legal amount if you have ACA compliant health insurance, since your healthcare costs would be covered by health insurance anyway.

As a point of reference, I pay around $140 a month for home insurance and comprehensive auto insurance. But I’m older and haven’t had a ticket in 15-20 years. Western US, if it matters.

I also have no tickets in 15+ years, and also western US in a suburb.

Zip code plays a huge part in the cost of your insurance.

Does this hold true for liability only insurance?

Should be true. Insurance costs depends on probability of the accident, which is not the same for different cities.

Right, but I would have thought liability has a lot more to do with the person driving than where it is being stored?

The very nature of vehicles kind of means that the liability can be incurred very far away from where the owner lives.

For collusion and comprehensive coverage I can appreciate why zip code matters

Need to account for the fact that not all Americans drive.

To get to the $1,035 per person they have taken the total cost ($340B) and divided it by the population, but if you divide it by the number of drivers (i.e. people actively insured) then you would get a bit closer to $2600.

I assume that some $2600 policies have multiple drivers too.

But that doesn't account for deductibles.

I'm not sure reading the article, but I think this $2600 may not account for deductibles (or self-pay):

> The study calculated the total societal cost of car crashes, borne by every American, not just those directly involved in car crashes.

Parsing this, and making the assumption, the $340 billion is the distributed cost ("borne by every American"), while the deductibles would be singular costs (borne by "those directly involved in car crashes").

I'd need to see the actually study though.

We would also have to account for profit (let’s say 3%) and all overheads (let’s say 15%). Average car insurance charge is c$2000 so we can say $380 of that is probably overhead and profit.

That leaves $1,640 left. $340B then divided by the number insured (230m) would be c$1,500 so with these very rough numbers there isn’t too much of a gap.

In various jurisdictions, your insurance company may bear the cost of accidents irrespective of “fault.” Thus joining an insurance company with a lower-risk pool of drivers does not necessarily reduce your insurance premiums.

Minnesota, for example, is a "no fault state", meaning that if you are in an accident and are injured, you must have personal injury protection as part of your insurance package, or you will pay out of pocket.

Conversely, just across the border, Wisconsin is a tort state- meaning that liability is determined based on who is found at fault, and you recover your damages from the liable party. Generally speaking, if you have personal injury protection and / or comprehensive coverage, your insurance company will pay you and go after the other party (or other party's insurance) on their own.

Insurance companies in both types of states will favor drivers with clean records, but tort states tend (in my experience) to have lower premiums for good drivers.

Either way, minimum liability coverage as determined by law isn't really sufficient if you want to drive. Comprehensive coverage is the way to go.

Depends on the value of your car, and maybe how many miles you do a year, so it's hard to say.

Multiple factors may lead to you paying more than the average:

1. Not all Americans have cars or drive.

2. Each state has different legislative structures which impact payouts and medical costs. Some states cost more than the average per accident, some cost less.

3. Your risk may be higher than average

4. You may drive more or less miles than average

5. Your choice of car makes you more or less risky

The company has to pay their labor expenses AND profit. Not just cover claims.

That's interesting. I wonder how much mass shootings or making abortion illegal costs.

A little context would make this figure more meaningful. Like how much productivity resulted from having cars to begin with.

Also, the units are wrong. It's $340B/year.

But this isn’t a binary choice between “cars, with the number of crashes we have today” and “no cars”.

Shocker

Roads in the US are a major part of the problem. They are incredibly wide and attempt to make drivers feel as safe as possible, lulling drivers into a false sense of security.

No doubt a good 5-10% of that goes to ambulance chasing lawyers and fake chiros blowing up fender benders to policy maximums.

Seems that the issue is fairly pervasive and has struck a nerve with some who have contributed to it.

How much value do cars add to the economy? And what's the incremental cost of reducing the number of accidents? Without any context it's just alarmism.

What are the additional costs of cars and their infrastructure when there are more efficient options for transportation?

Irrelevant, we don't have those other systems. Invest in them first. Places like NYC have a start, but they don't make good investments in more. Other cities are trying, but have a lot of work to go.

What happens when there is a bunch of investment and they still mess it up?

https://www.tvo.org/article/ottawas-colossal-lrt-debacle-a-b...

Many working people I know who used to take transit before bought cars after the LRT came in.

Lots of places are like NYC and not making good investments. Which is why cars are likely to dominate for the foreseeable future.

The bigcorp I used to work for provided every employee with a bottomless metro card that could get you a free bus or train ride anywhere in a 20 mile radius. I would guess that maybe 1 in 5 people ever used it. Give someone enough disposable income that they have a choice between a 20 minute ride with their favorite podcast on the stereo vs. a 40 minute ride lurching along with a bunch of strangers and people tend to pick the first one. Our VP, to her credit, did take the bus every day, though.

Transit doesn't have to be that much worse than the car 'it often is, but it need not

My point is the ROI of investments in those systems is much higher than trying to improve car infrastructure. And, necessarily, crashes and costs of cars are reduced along the way.

Maybe. If you waste money like NYC does the ROI isn't there. Even if you don't waste money, a small investment won't have enough of a network effect to have a good ROI.

What does that efficiency metric optimize for? For most americans, switching to public transit means turning their 1-2 hr daily commute into a 3-6 hr. Most americans cannot afford to live in downtowns or near their jobs.

There are a lot of people who could get even more value from a great transit system. However anything less than great a car provides a lot more value and so it is really hard to get there. About 1/3 of all trips done in a car would be worse by any other means (plumbers bringing tools and all spare parts to where there is a problem), but the rest could be done via transit if we had it.

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