The article says "safest roads," but the statistic used to demonstrate that is deaths per 100K people rather than deaths per kilometer driven.
Seems to me the latter would be a much better metric for the safety of the physical roads.
Seems to me the latter would be a much better metric for the safety of the physical roads.
Fortunately, good old Wikipedia has what we are both looking for:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
For me the upshot is that UK still comes out quite good amongst its European peers, but the difference appears to be smaller.
> If we look at the number of deaths per billion miles driven, we see that motorways are roughly four times safer than urban roads, and more than five times safer than rural roads. This is not specific to the UK: among 24 OECD countries, approximately 5% of road deaths occurred on motorways.5 In almost all countries, it was less than 10%.
Both measures have bias, the "per people" metric doesn't take into account when people are actually driving while the "per kilometer" metric puts too much emphasis on long distance driving, which is usually done on motorways where it is the safest. Maybe the best metric would be "per time spent on the road, including as a pedestrian on the sidewalk", but I guess it is harder to estimate.
Anyways the UK is doing well on both metrics.
[1] https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
> Massachusetts is one of the safest
The Karen Read trial was illustrative about how seriously Massachusetts law enforcement takes DUI.
The conduct of the law enforcement professionals and people they associate with leading up to the events relevant to the trail is relevant to a discussion of how seriously they take DUI.
Read did drive under the influence and police and prosecutors laid harsh charges against her, but they could've laid those harsh charges (first- and second-degree murder IIRC) against her even if she had been stone sober that night, so it seems to me that the Read case says nothing about how harshly police and prosecutors treat ordinary DUIs.