The global road death toll | Hacker News Reader

The global road death toll

roadskillmap.com

35 pointsddai30 comments

My parents love to lecture me about the dangers of living in the city, so I added up homicide and traffic deaths (per 100k):

Chicago: 3.3 homicides (north side) + 5.2 traffic = 8.5

Fairfax County: 1.4 homicides + 7 traffic deaths = 8.4

If you're white or asian and don't drive in Chicago:

Chicago: 2.5 homicides + 1.1 pedestrian deaths = 3.6

From the yuppie perspective, the scary thing about traffic deaths is that you can't buy your way out of that risk the way you can buy your way out of crime risk. Your middle class teenage kids are highly unlikely to be the victims of violent crime, but are a major portion of the body count of driving deaths.

Nice to see the Persian Gulf aspiring for records again.

Fun Snapple fact: on any road with 2+ lanes, the leftmost lane is nostagically referred to as the crazy lane. If you go in it, it is culturally expected to go as fast as you can (so even in a 50 or 60 km, you see expats and locals go between 100-160 km or more, sometimes in Toyota SUVs with less common sense than playboys in Italian sports cars).

As a reminder of how out of control it is, you will see car carcases (I strain to call them car bodies) from horrendous accidents on the side of the road to remind you shit is real over here.

Driving with your family in the car is interesting. You must practice some minium of road rage, lest you get run over. Using profanity does not help, as that leads to violation in indeceny laws. So I think of clever ways of threatening people ambiguously regardless of background (commonly Gulf Arab, Arab, South Asian, and Southeast Asian).

Hint: you use your car as a weapon if you wish to survive.

I was thinking about this the other day. I think when I checked last the US death toll was about 3 times that of Sweden.

This is all good. The swedish government has been spending ridiculous amounts of money building away death in traffic.

But, I suspect the americans probably drive a lot more than the average swede. I think if you change the death toll from per-person to per-driver the numbers will change and if you change it to per-driven-mile I'm not sure there will be a difference any more. Anyone know if there are numbers on this? Can't be impossible to produce. Maybe you can estimate using national gas consumption?

edit: Found it, turns out: nope. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar4.htm

Why should miles be the denominator? What if Americans just drive around pointlessly because their built environment requires it? Does that lower the impact of traffic deaths?

Urban form and the external cost of transportation are inextricably linked. You can't say that of course it's safer in Sweden because they drive less, because it's safer in Sweden _because_ they drive less! That's the point!

Wikipedia has a list of countries by traffic-related death rate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...

Road fatalities per 1 billion vehicle-km (factors out the distance driven): USA is 7.6; Sweden is 3.7. I'm in the UK, we're 2.6.

Road fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants per year (a decent measure of "how likely I am to know someone who has died on the road"): USA is 11.6; Sweden is 3; UK is 2.7.

That link has the UK deaths per billion km at 4.3.

Looks like the UK's figures got updated from the 2012 stats to the 2014 stats, just after I commented. Thanks for pointing this out!

throwaway2424 makes a fine point. Road deaths are a result of bad driving, bad conditions, bad infrastructure, bad licensure, bad regulation and enforcement, and high rates of driving. Those are all related.

The USA has chosen to require almost everyone to drive long distances with low density zoning, poor public transit, and extremely high parking mandates on private landowners.

If another country has lower fatalities mostly because the government doesn't make them drive as much, that is a result of public policy, just as the high rate of driving in the USA is.

Also, the USA has extensive investments in road safety, probably more than any other nation. Modern freeway safety design standards to enable high speed driving without as many fatalities originates in the USA and close to US$100 billion each year is spent on high speed roads and improvements.

Also, the USA invests extensively in the world's best trauma surgery corps. The level of fatalities on the roads would probably be double what it is with merely typical first world medicine. Emergency trauma surgery to fight gunshot and car crash deaths is one of the few fields of medical care where the USA far exceeds world standards.

But by looking at how the numbers compare using different denominators, we can shed some light on the cause. By looking at deaths/distance we can determine if distance driven is the cause, or if it is another factor. (Obviously, it is a combination of factors, but that is beside the point.)

Driving is not an end in and of itself (statistically speaking). It's a means.

It'd be like measuring ad success rate by ad size instead of clicks.

Driving in the United States is a means of converting gasoline into square feet of living space.

We have close to taxation of Ricardian land rents, but probably not enough. Even if it's not absolutely true, Georgist land rents taxation is very interesting nonetheless.

I'm from Australia, where the "road-toll" is very much front and center news. It's constantly compared to "this time last year" in the newspapers and on the nightly news. I would bet that any Australian that has even a passing interest in "the news" can tell you what the annual road toll is.

It was quite the shock to come to North America (both the US and Canada) to find it barely gets a mention, and most people have no idea how many people are killed each year on the roads.

The stat I find easiest to get is the death toll on US roads each month is the same as 9/11. Trillions of dollars were spent on the latter, while as you noted the monthly road death toll doesn't merit even a peep.

That is interesting, where I live in Southwest Missouri, the news talks about it quite a bit. That and you see various related random statistics on MoDOT signs all over the place.

These numbers can be roughly predicted by Smeed's law, which states that a country's per capita road deaths are directly related to its number of registered vehicles and population.

"Smeed had a fatalistic view of traffic flow.....Smeed interpreted his law as a law of human nature. The number of deaths is determined mainly by psychological factors that are independent of material circumstances. People will drive recklessly until the number of deaths reaches the maximum they can tolerate. When the number exceeds that limit, they drive more carefully. Smeed's Law merely defines the number of deaths that we find psychologically tolerable."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smeed%27s_law

Death per road mile driven might be a more useful stat. I suspect Europe looks better than the US on this visualization due to lack of driving.

Makes no sense. The point is they've got a safe built environment and we don't.

If you are considering the safety of the roads themselves, then death/injuries per mile driven is the correct statistic. If you are considering the safety of the society as a whole then it makes sense to consider the obvious advantage of driving less.

The UK driving test is much more stringent than the NY state test (I can't comment on other states - I believe each state defines their own driving test).

The NY test - 10 minutes in the car. I drove around the block; parallel parked, 3 point turn and back to the start. Done.

UK test - an hour in the car; had to drive in urban, country and highway settings (a dual carriageway, not a motorway - learners are not allowed to drive on motorways in the UK); parallel park and answer a lot of questions while doing so.

That's not to discount the fact that the UK has a lot of bad drivers - but the NY test was simply a joke.

Using that stat the US comes out even worse...

Road fatalities per 1 billion vehicle-km

    USA: 7.6   
    Germany: 4.9  
    Netherlands: 4.9 
    Finland: 4.7
    Sweden: 3.7
    Denmark: 3.4
    Ireland: 3.4
    Norway: 3.3
    UK: 2.8

In grand tradition I'm going to bitch about the graphic design elements.

For those of us with bad eyes, contrast is important. Coloring the oceans yellow while having the actual data colored in various shades of yellow makes this a major pain to read.

Also, a bonus amusement: French Guiana is identified as France. It almost always is with these statistics maps. This always throws me for a loop, but I guess it is technically a region of France, so maybe that's how it should appear.

Any experts care to chime in?

French Guiana is both a region and a departement of France, and as such is part of the EU [1]. It is basically just as much France as Île-de-France [2].

As a fun fact, France is about to get its first land connection to Brazil [3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Guiana

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%8Ele-de-France

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyapock_River_Bridge

The global road death toll has already reached 1.24 million per year and is on course to triple to 3.6 million per year by 2030.

In the developing world, where this pandemic has hit hardest, it will become the fifth leading cause of death, leapfrogging past HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other familiar killers, according to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) most recent Global Burden of Disease study.

But heaven forbid we build a bike lane to reduce the number of cars on the road

This is one of the most beautiful map infographic designs I've seen in a long time.

Avoid clicking this site's link! The landing page' malicious code prevents you from left-arrow leaving the page -- you have to explicitly choose another site.

It's either a very bad design with no evil intent, or actual malice.

They just add a history item everytime you interact with the map. If you click back enough you should escape.

I only clicked a few times and already had enough items to overwhelm my browser's back button. I had to open my history to find HN again.

When I right-clicked on my back arrow, Chrome listed some of the map's history entries and then had a separator line and HN. It's as if the designers realized I might want to be able to go back to the previous domain as well as going back to the previous page.

This discovery made me smile.

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