Why Sweden has so few road deaths | Hacker News Reader

Why Sweden has so few road deaths

economist.com

34 pointsmkempe42 comments

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"That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either" --Milton Friedman

Wow, that just goes to show how ignorant Milton Friedman is...

What about that statement demonstrates ignorance?

The data mostly backs up Friedman's quip. So where's the ignorance exactly?

http://www.cato.org/blog/swedens-big-welfare-state-superior-...

"The 4.4 million or so Americans with Swedish origins are considerably richer than average Americans, as are other immigrant groups from Scandinavia. If Americans with Swedish ancestry were to form their own country, their per capita GDP would be $56,900, more than $10,000 above the income of the average American. This is also far above Swedish GDP per capita, at $36,600. Swedes living in the USA are thus approximately 53 per cent more wealthy than Swedes (excluding immigrants) in their native country (OECD, 2009; US Census database). It should be noted that those Swedes who migrated to the USA, predominately in the nineteenth century, were anything but the elite. Rather, it was often those escaping poverty and famine. …A Scandinavian economist once said to Milton Friedman, ‘In Scandinavia, we have no poverty’. Milton Friedman replied, ‘That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either’. Indeed, the poverty rate for Americans with Swedish ancestry is only 6.7 per cent: half the US average (US Census)."

6.7% of people in poverty is not "no poverty".

Especially considering the conditions that qualify as "no poverty" by the U.S.'s rather low standard. If you make $20k and live in a trailer park in Idaho with no medical coverage, you're not in poverty according to the US, but your quality of life is lower than that of a rural Swede.

Sweden also has considerable inequality, but the lower bound on basic infrastructure is better. If you live in a rural area in the far north and make barely any money, you still generally have solid permanent housing and access to high-quality medical care (this wasn't always the case, but has mostly been achieved as a result of concerted effort). You may have nearly no light in the winter, but there's not much the state can do about the latitude.

> You may have nearly no light in the winter, but there's not much the state can do about the latitude

Electricity? This is one of the first places I'd look for technology to improve things.

Parent meant no sunlight, not no electricity!

That's picking data, switching to swedes from scandinavians generally.

tl;dr

Sweden has 3 road deaths per 100,000 capita while Eurozone has 5.5 and USA 11. This is because Sweden build their roads with safety first (Lower speed limits, better physical seperation of pedestrians and care).

But ... Deaths per capita is a broad statistic. What about broken down by urban and non urban areas? Pedestrian v cycle v motorised deaths. In the end what is the null value for deaths per capita comparisons? Is 3/100,000 and 5.5 actually statistically significant?

As for the comments on thread that say "yet another swedes do it all better than us article" - well In my view scandanavian and Dutch politics all have a much less emotional more "strict mother" approach to many political debates - road safety is just one such. And we know better decisions about hard subjects are made with emotion safely caged.

Deaths per road mile would be a more interesting statistic.

I suspect that extremely long but relatively untraveled roads would throw that statistic off. A disused 200 mile long country road across North Dakota would probably easily offset high pedestrian deaths across a few blocks in a city. Sure, you're less likely to die on it.. but you're also less likely to be on it in the first place.

Working in road usage could possibly correct this.

In Australia we are often told country roads are the most dangerous. Drivers are less likely to concentrate, easily fall asleep at the wheel and speed. And trees are not very forgiving when you drive into one.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...

Deaths per terameter driven.

    Sweden 3.2
    Norway 3.5
    UK 3.6
    ....
    USA 8.5
    ....
    UAE 310

The data for deaths by US state is non-uniform:

State Traffic Deaths (Per 100,000 Population)

________________

Wyoming 27.48

Mississippi 21.58

Arkansas 19.27

Montana 19.07

Alabama 18.01

Oklahoma 17.76

Kentucky 17.49

South Carolina 17.47

Wheras as in highly urbanized states:

___________________________

California 7.27

Illinois 7.22

Washington 6.79

New Jersey 6.32

Rhode Island 6.27

New York 6.19

Massachusetts 4.79

http://vehicle-fatalities.findthedata.org/

While I don't really agree with everything you said, I I have to say that Scandinavia, The Netherlands, Switzerland and Singapore are the best governed places on earth. I have no idea why the rest of the world don't just copy us. If this sounds like arrogance, then you are right, but it has pretty solid foundations.

Meh. There's really not that much difference between most industrialized countries for those in the first standard deviation (aka. most people).

It's kinda like the Olympics, if you're in the top 10 you're doing fine.

If one is selecting a country to live in, it's likely better to optimize for your own situation rather than optimizing from a bunch of HDI/GDP/Freedom type reports.

It's like a friend said of China, probably one of the most free places on earth because he could stay out drinking all night. For him it was more important that bars were open because he likes to drink than it was to be able to protest the government.

For instance there is pretty much no way I'd ever live in Singapore; Singapore makes US drug policy look downright progressive.

I dunno, I'm from the U.S., and now live in Denmark, and it feels much nicer socioeconomically. They are both in the top 10, and the U.S. actually has a higher median income, but the subjective difference to me is huge. Not in the mean or median, but in the general feeling that there is far less poverty. Even bad parts of Copenhagen are nothing like the bad parts of Atlanta (same goes for other cities I've lived in, like Chicago and Los Angeles). You don't really have to watch yourself nearly as much. When I lived in Atlanta, you needed a lot of fairly specific knowledge about which areas of the city were safe, sometimes even which specific streets were okay to walk on at night. And the unsafe ones were unsafe in the "people get mugged here daily" sort of way, whereas the Copenhagen unsafe neighborhoods are more like "someone was mugged here 6 weeks ago and it's still in the news". Homeless people are much more rare; things like people living in trailer parks are also very rare. There is no safety problem biking 10km alone at 4am half-drunk; in fact it is not too uncommon to do so. And even poor people seem to have fairly normal lives, not that different from mine. They rent non-squalid apartments, send their kids to ok schools, have good medical care, etc.

I'm not sure how to quantify that subjective feeling of the general level feeling wealthier, but one guess might be to look at Nth-percentile incomes for your choice of lower bound N. The U.S. has a higher median income than Denmark. But a bound that half the people fall below (N=50) doesn't give you strong guarantees. How do their 10th-percentile incomes compare? I.e. what is the lower bound that >90% of Americans meet, vs. the lower bound that >90% of Danes meet? IIRC, it's considerably higher in Denmark, which might explain why it subjectively feels wealthier to me—the income $x where you can assume "probably almost everyone makes at least $x" for some reasonable choice of "almost everyone" (80%, 90%, 95%, somewhere in that range) is higher.

People in the rest of the world don't get this, I think. They believe life has to be full of fear and desperation. It doesn't. I'm temporarily living in Berlin and it's a bit sad to watch all the homeless beggars around here.

There was a Planet Money podcast episode[1] which mentions that Americans are far less likely to wear a seatbelt, at least compared to Germans but also probably Scandinavian countries as well.

According to Wikipedia[2], the US is definitely worse than Sweden, Germany, and Norway in terms of seat belt usage. But at least it's better than Italy, Greece, and the Czech Republic.

I suspect this is a big factor in road deaths.

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/12/171814201/episode-...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt_use_rates_by_country

Interesting that the comments on the article make some good points, including that the UK has about the same / a better deaths per capita than Sweden, despite it being the exact opposite type of road environment

[edit: clarified wording some]

I don't think you want to see per capita, you want to see per driver-mile.

It looks like that's lower in Sweden, too, but the comments give more of a suggestion of that, not a direct statement.

> I don't think you want to see per capita, you want to see per driver-mile.

Not necessarily. Having e.g. a functional mass transit system that allows people to drive less is a perfectly valid way to reduce traffic fatalities.

Can someone explain how the 2+1 lanes work and how they would reduce road deaths?

Most inter-city roads in Sweden were 2-lane roads, where to overtake, you needed to swerve into oncoming traffic, 2+1 roads means that even if you're stuck behind an RV or truck, it won't be long before you can safely overtake. At least that's my assumption...

You may (and physically can) only overtake when there are two lanes going in your direction. The road alternates every couple of km between 1 and 2 lanes in each direction.

I had the same question as the parent comment. Perhaps I still don't understand. Doesn't that just create a bottleneck every couple of km? It seems to me that around here one of the biggest causes of traffic appears to be when ever there is a lane reduction.

I think the theory is that the middle lane is only used for overtaking slower-moving cars. Perhaps the Swedes, like the Germans, practice good lane discipline and stick to the right until they need to overtake.

I think this 2+1 wouldn't work in the US because (in my experience) very few people use the lanes correctly and they just distribute themselves evenly across all lanes, regardless of speed. That strategy does, indeed, lead to bottlenecks when the number of lanes reduces.

This is normal in the US for roads in mountains (going uphill) and it generally works great.

Here in Australia, 2+1 roads aren't very long - they're usually just long enough for a few cars to overtake a slowpoke, then a few kilometers further on you'll get another chance. You can't really cruise double-abreast on these roads, as they're not long enough for that.

Similarly you can't really bottleneck because the only input is a single-lane road - they're not long enough to add anything more than trivial traffic in rural areas.

I had the same thought living near a city. Then I remembered growing up in a rural area, and the amount of traffic the road is made for is key. Many many roads don't have enough traffic to matter, but could significantly benefit from the ability to pass slower traffic

I'm not sure if it's actually a lane reduction, they might have also just added 1 lane to the previously existing 2 lanes.

The big benefit I see is that you're never entering the opposing traffic lane, so head-on collisions are much less likely.

There is a wikipedia entry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2+1_road

minor thing about their speed-bumps..apparently they're trying out things like http://www.edeva.se/index.php/actibump/

They make no mention of much better driver training; higher-quality and routinely inspected automobiles; less traffic; and cultural values that probably play a huge role.

*Edited Typo

Wikipedia says Swedish drivers can't get a fully-privileged license until they're 20 or 21. Compare that to the U.S. where in many states a 16 year old who took a single practical driving test is considered fully qualified. I wonder how much of a difference that makes.

I think back to myself at 16 and cringe at the thought of me being allowed to drive a car...

The very first time I drove alone after getting my license, I was backing out of my parents' driveway and managed to put huge scrapes in three cars because I didn't have a strong enough understanding of how the world worked in reverse.

Because all three cars were ours, and it occurred on our property, there were no tickets, no police activity, no DMV penalties, nothing -- if my parents hadn't been strict (and thank GOD they were), I could've just kept driving.

I also cringe at the thought of that happening, because I, like a lot of 16 year olds, was really stupid.

My parents had me drive a VW station wagon with a Bug engine, automatic transmission and AC. I think I could walk faster. I think the only ticket I could get was for going too slow.

Less than you might think. Studies have consistently shown that experience matters much more than age. Though holding experience constant 17 year olds are more likely to get in accidents than 22 year olds, an 18 year old with two years of driving experience is much less likely to get into an accident than a 25 year old with 1 year of driving experience.

Furthermore, accident rates start increasing with age at only the mid 20's, perhaps due to decreasing reaction time with age.

Does this include fatalities?

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