Why Sweden Has So Few Road Deaths
economist.com
economist.com
He spent a big chunk of that time trying to convince government agencies to build roads with pavement that had a better coefficient of friction. See for example
http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/roadway_dept/pavement/pavement_fr...
He estimated that they could reduce deaths considerably with more appropriate pavement.
In many cases, states refused to even allow pavement friction tests to occur, as they didn't want to be on the hook for paying for improvements if the tests showed poor friction. Also, requiring better friction would disallow certain road materials, which would adversely affect certain very large politically connected contractors.
In Europe, they take this much more seriously. The Germans have started using a concrete pavement that is both better for friction and is quiet.
It's interesting that if a government builds a substandard road that leads to people losing their lives, it doesn't seem to be a big deal, but if a car manufacturer produces a car that leads to a much smaller number of people dying, then it is.
It's super good if you have lots of rain (the rain sinks right away under the road surface) but it is prone to frost damage. Super quiet and great in the rain though, the difference is incredible when you switch from ZOAB to regular asphalt or the other way around.
It's also interesting but sad that many people don't even care enough to learn + practice super basic car maintenance as it pertains to safety equipment. I wonder how many accidents would prevented if everyone fixed their tyre inflation (there is a label on the driver's-side door frame, usually by where your butt or foot passes when stepping into the vehicle) and ensured they had well-performing brakes (a small mirror usually lets you see how much brake pad you have left, assuming you have 4-wheel disc, though the fronts are more important anyway).
Smog-testing is a thing, maybe we should have brake distance testing as well?
Without digging up statistics, I'd say technical failures of vehicles are not a very common primary reason for fatal accidents in West Europe. Bad tyres surely are sometimes a contributing factor.
It's partially a social justice issue, as we've managed to build up much of our country in such a way that walking and public transport are geometrically impractical, so poor people would be trapped at home if we banned them from driving the ill-maintained car they're barely able to afford to own and unable to afford to maintain.
It's only done every two years, however.
It is interesting, though, that road safety and risks to other people in traffic are not a big enough thing to trump the social justice angle (right of poor people to drive), but the environment card (emissions) is.
There is a weird logic to all this. Air quality makes a noticeable improvement in everyone's lives and, paradoxically, driving is so phenomenally dangerous and so unavoidable that people don't worry about the very minor factors like the one in twenty who isn't paying attention to their brake pads when assessing that risk.
It might be that the high-pitched squeal built into brake pads to notify people of impending doom is actually doing its job, though.
That is surprising, because it should be fairly obvious that if a car has brake failure, it could be lethal to anyone who happens to be in its path. Same goes with catastrophic failures of the steering system, although those are perhaps even more rare.
* "2+1" roads, which discourages meaningless overtaking or competing. (But I don't buy it as the single cause).
* Roundabouts instead of crossroads with traffic lights. (My bet this is one of the most important factors).
* Special reserved lane for doing left turns to secondary roads.
* Lots of street lamps (Sweden is famous for illumination and urban development).
* High percentage of expensive, very good quality cars (lots of Volvos) which kept well-maintained.
* 40 km/h speed limit in most small towns.
Together it works. Basically a complex phenomena is a weighted sum of multiple different causes - cultural (tradition), economical, social (current "normals"), technological, etc. with "random variables". Such simple model could explain it to some extent.
I am in Sweden now, and I drive a classic Volvo.
I live in the UK, and the only +1 roads I can remember seeing have clear markings showing which side of the road can use the extra lane (never noticed one that included both sides).
I can imagine low speed 2+1 roads being OK. It's the 50mph+ ones that lead to horrific crashes - human beings aren't great at negotiating closing speeds of 100+mph.
>* Sparse, mostly rural population (with an unique culture).
Moose kill a lot of Canadians in rural areas, dark brown fur in the dark countryside. Their legs are so long and moose are so heavy the crash through the windshield and kill the people in the front seats.
There are a lot of crashes and deaths in my small province due to drinking and driving as well as lack of seatbelt use and the two combined make fore even more deaths when crashes do occur. Plus everyone it seems drive 15 year-old cars that are not maintained.
After a hockey game, one could see a few kilometer long caravans of cars while not a single one is trying to move on the opposite lane to overtake which is absolutely unimaginable situation in social shitholes like Russia.
For me that'd be a very good reason to leave her behind, IFF the conditions are right.
Maybe it's just that if they grow up next to a constant stream of moving cars (that have never hurt them before) they simply become inured to all the activity.
I had access to a study done in the 90's that basically talked about the condition of cars and relation to income. A lot of low income rural folks have a single vehicle that has not been to over half of its required maintenance visits. It also doesn't help that you can get high temperatures in the summer and really low temps in the winter. The range is pretty incredible for Northern US and Canada.
Nope. 50, with 30 km/h slow zones outside schools and such. I don't think I've ever seen a 40 sign.
This, among with _removing_ traffic lights, both in favour of roundabouts, right-side-rule, and raised plaza-crossings (cars have to give way to pedestrians&bikes) have effectively reduced the amount of person damage in collisions. Walking plazas have an interesting effect in that it can cause an increase in small bumper hits on cars, but they reduce the speed of traffic by a lot, and change the flow of the street.
They are horrible and frustrating with multiple lanes (the one around the Arc de Triomphe can be tough to naviate) and lots of traffic, though they might still improve throughput during heavy congestion.
My only accident in a rented vehicle in Europe was with a 2-lane roundabout in Manchester which had a mandatory outer-left-turn lane that the other car didn't notice - I turned left from the center lane into the side street and got sideswiped. The other drivers were also foreigners (Belgians - my UK colleagues were not surprised about that part).
edit:clarity
One of the things I really like here though that I wish Australia would adopt is being able to turn right from (almost) any traffic light while it red.
Also roundabouts work great for low volume roads but with roads with significant traffic directions basically lock out the ones they pass.
The danger of an intersection is that cars are stopping and starting at it. If a car stops unexpectedly, you have to react. If a car starts moving unexpectedly, you have to account for it. Accelerating to make it through a light before it goes red, or slamming on the brakes in order stop in time for a light, are simply well-known cases of this.
This is why highways and freeways are relatively safe: you largely don't accelerate, except at onramps and offramps. Most highway accidents come from a failed overtake: you're accelerating in order to change lanes, and then decelerating to return to the lane. This is also why rubbernecking is dangerous: it's a subtle deceleration that may be missed by the person behind you.
It's not actually different for anything else that moves; it's just that other moving things have lower consequences (walking, cycling) or stronger traffic control (trains are on rails; planes listen to air traffic controllers). The closest thing is boats, and boats are rarely both traveling at high speeds and in dense formations.
The European design has roads enter from an angle (close to the tangent of the roundabout), which forces traffic to slow down. The other design (used here in Australia and I think the UK) has traffic enter at right angles to the roundabout. This increases traffic flow but is much less safe (especially for cyclists).
Roundabouts are a UK invention, fwiw.
(In fact, in America, the last few decades' worth of safety improvements to cars have been almost entirely offset by an increase in miles driven; despite their much safer cars, Americans are only slightly less likely to die driving today than they were in 1990 [1].)
The bigger mystery is why Americans are now far likelier to die in their cars than Europeans even after you control for the time they spend in them. That didn't use to be the case. Until the mid-1990s, Sweden (like almost every other country [2]) had a higher rate of traffic fatalities per mile driven than did the United States. Those rates have declined markedly all around the world, but much less in the United States than elsewhere.
My guess is that the divergence comes down to diverging patterns of living. Over the last few decades, American cities have sprawled all over the landscape, so Americans not only drive more, but their road infrastructure is built to facilitate daily travel at high speeds over long distances. A great many Americans drive 30+ highway miles each day between their suburban homes and city offices, but that sort of commute is rare elsewhere.
0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...
1. http://www.planetizen.com/node/68200
2. See, e.g., statistics showing that fatalities per vehicle mile were lower in the United State than in many European countries in 1991, https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/hs93/Sec7.pdf [PDF; see page 4]
If I had to guess, I'd say there being more metal involved is a significant factor in the number of deaths.
Two other possible reasons: 1. Manufacturers popular in Scandinavia, like Volvo and now Tesla, make much safer cars than their competition, and 2. It is ridiculously easy to get a driver's license in America compared to Europe. If you measured "graduates'" driving ability out of the gate, I'm sure Europe would come out on top. (Though, American roads being much larger and safer in general might compensate for this. I'm not sure what the article is talking about when it implies Swedish roads are safer -- they're a mess compared to America's in that respect.)
As for the last point about American roads being larger and safer, I'm not sure the second part is true. They are definitely larger, but there's been research done to indicate that larger != safer. I'll try to dig up the article, but I'd tend to agree with the sentiment. I've seen significantly more accidents on large laned freeways in America with a 55 mph speed limit than skinny backroads in Scotland with a 60 mph speed limit, even with adjusting for the larger amount of traffic on the American freeways.
>A great many Americans drive 30+ highway miles each day between their suburban homes and city offices
Seems like the answer is right there. People get exhausted on the road. Closing your eyes for 2 seconds is disastrous.
(German, confused)
Contrary to what the article says, Sweden doesn't have the safest roads per capita - the Vatican City has fewer road deaths. It has a few streets that get driven on, so it gets to play as well. Of course, claiming the Vatican-as-best in this kind of analysis is silly, because barely any driving is done there; the roads aren't really used heavily. Road-miles driven per capita shows up this kind of light or heavy use.
To the point that people joke that the best way to reduce traffic deaths is to increase the speed limit, since that means people will be on the road for less time.
Also, European cities generally have much better public transportation such as really decent busses, trolley busses, light rails, subways, trains, and trams.
Finally, I suspect a mile driven by 30-60 year olds are generally safer than a mile driven by teenagers. Europe has older population and few teenage drivers.
See, e.g., a study comparing commuting habits of American workers with their British and Irish counterparts [0]. Aside from the more well known differences, the study points out that the average commuting speed is over 45mph in the United States compared to under 30mph in Ireland.
Typical European cities and suburbs are not like typical American cities and suburbs.
0. http://abstracts.aetransport.org/paper/download/id/4040 [PDF]
So I commuted (I tend to work from home) today, 31th of December, about 90km to the office of my company. Vmax was 200km/h. Tires are cleared up to 210, car can go ~230, but the weather wasn't nice and it's winter.
I don't think that you can bring up 'fast driving' on the US side of things, if you want to compare yourself to Europe. What am I missing?
France allows 130km/h. What's the limit (or what's the average speed over the limit, if you refer to that) for you?
I think I made it clear that I am talking about population averages. Average speeds depend substantially on how much driving is done on slow city streets versus high-speed arterials and highways, not on how fast the top-end highway speed is.
Americans drivers spend more time on highways, and especially on fast suburban arterials, compared to their European counterparts. Your 90km commute at 200km/h is atypical.
I always fail to understand the word 'highways'[1]. I _think_ Autobahn, and compare it with that in my post. Sweden, according to the infallible Wikipedia, seems to have a speed limit on their version of the highway/Autobahn of 110km/h, in exceptional cases 120km/h.
So I still think the GP is wrong, at least in terms of 'driving faster'.
1: I'm unsure what constitutes a highway, what is the difference (if there's any) to an interstate and .. what you'd call the 'normal' roads between cities.
Very generally speaking, interstates are federally-funded/built longer roads (I-10, for example, spans from Florida to California, but there often shorter offshoots) that are usually at least four lanes total (almost always much more in metropolitian areas) and do not have stoplights, stop signs, or any cross traffic at all. Access is controlled by marked exits. The usual speed limit is 70 mph, sometimes lower or higher, often much lower in metropolitian areas with lots of exits and therefore merging. It really depends on the area, congestion, and the actual speed limit but in my experience people more commonly drive ~80mph on the interstate, at least where the speed limit is 70mph.
Highways are pretty much a broad spectrum. They are usually paid for and maintained by the states (although federal grants are common). Sometimes access is controlled for short stretches, but in general they have stoplights and stop signs. They are usually multi-lane and often the major throroughfares through a city are a highway. Speed limits vary wildly. There are two lane country-road highways with few stops and 10 lane metropolitan highways with stops every 100 feet. They tend to be fairly long but not always.
"Other" is pretty much the final category, which includes city streets and country roads. They usually aren't very long; any sufficiently long road is usually transformed into a highway if it isn't already.
The "normal" roads between cities are almost always interstates and highways.
I think in contemporary usage, "freeway" and "highway" mostly mean the same thing: no stops.
I drove on the Autobahn once (A13) going from Berlin to Dresden when teaching a class there. I remember distinctly feeling that it was all familiar to me. Just like an interstate highway here in the US, only the drivers around me generally seemed like they were attentive to their driving. :)
I'd guess the German equivalent to our other highways would be Bundesstraßen and Landesstraßen?
There's actually a lot of interstates that aren't interstate. Not quite sure how that got started. Aside from perhaps a dozen "primary" interstates that aren't interstate, most of the "auxiliary" interstates are not interstate.
> a highway differs from other roads (sometimes we call those "surface streets") in that it has controlled or limited access and is "maintained" by a government agency of some kind.
I am a little bit curious as to where you're from. :) In my experience (a little bit of California, a lot of the south and eastern seaboard), controlled access on state highways is the exception rather than the rule. Usually the best case scenario is that you get no stops for the non-highway intersecting roads (they simply stop and make a turn or cross the highway when there's no traffic - obviously this only works on the rural sections) and interstate-style merges on major state highway intersections. In more built up areas stops tend to be frequent. I'd like to drive where you are!
I'm from Chicago area, grew up in Southeast, many years all over eastern seaboard up to upstate NY. Limited access just means no intersection with every possible side street, basically. Was just trying to simplify it a bit for the comment. :)
So the first step we should take for climate change is to organize our cities so that public transport is useful, where we can walk to work. In this matter, US has no chance of improving if they keep low taxes per gallon.
[1] http://www.connaissancedesenergies.org/fiche-pedagogique/str... (French, with charts)
.. Accidents happen because on narrow, inadequate roads, full of blind corners and surrounded by dwelling houses, vehicles and pedestrians are moving in all directions at all speeds from three miles an hour to sixty or seventy. If you really want to keep death off the roads, you would have to replan the whole road system in such a way as to make collisions impossible. Think out what this means (it would involve, for example, pulling down and rebuilding the whole of London), and you can see that it is guite beyond the power of any nation at this moment. Short of that you can only take palliative measures, which ultimately boil down to making people more careful.
But the only palliative measure that would make a real difference is a drastic reduction in speed. Cut down the speed limit to twelve miles an hour in all built-up areas, and you would cut out the vast majority of accidents. But this, everyone will assure you, is ‘impossible’. Why is it impossible? Well, it would be unbearably irksome. It would mean that every road journey took twice or three times as long as it takes at present. ..
http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/eaip_0...
An average speed of 12MPH seems high for central London!
> Transport for London's latest figures state that for the first quarter of 2011/2012 the average traffic speed on major London roads for the 12 hours between 7am to 7pm was 19.33 mph and over the same period was 8.98 mph across Central London.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/jun/30/uk.transport
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_space
http://www.rospa.com/RoadSafety/conferences/congress2006/pro...
Many of the "driving problems" I've seen involve drivers in areas where they feel comfortable. Eg, the last bit before home. Part of me wonders if after a period of time, the same behaviours would resurface as people became acclimatized to the lack of signage.
Edit: I'm talking about potential car-less city centers, which are limited to a very small section of most cities. City centers are generally less prone to deadly accidents anyway as shown for example here for the US: http://www.cdc.gov/Features/TeenDrivingDeaths/
There's probably an equal number of:
* giggling drunkards crossing the street
* jaywalkers who think it's the middle of the night
and obviously no car would be coming
* people who think black is reflective as they walk
into the road to cross a street on a dark road
* giggling people not paying attention
* pedestrians staring at their phones crossing the
street without looking
* inattentive drivers
* sleepy drivers
* drivers looking at their cell phone
Please note, I'm not saying that it's never the driver's fault either; but, the whole situation is a give and take for everyone. No cars in city centers except maybe public transit of some description would be pretty great, I think, in general.
In much of the rest of the world, the concept barely exists & many people find the idea that pedestrians are somehow automatically at fault simply for being on the road when someone drives their vehicle into them almost offensive. Why should the driver's right of way be preferred to the pedestrians'?
[1] Buses, trains & tracks, bike rentals & bike paths, etc. Choose as you may, it still requires a redesign of the city center.
That is not actually true. It would reduce injury and death, but it would increase accidents.
Every bit of statistics has shown that accidents are correlated to time on the road, not miles and not speed. Half the speed limit, double the time, double the accidents.
Injuries are different, those are correlated to speed.
The greater purpose of the article is (IMO) to point out bullshitting, "our unwillingness to face facts and our consequent readiness to make gestures which are known in advance to be useless."
People talk about reducing road deaths. One life when it is a specific person is supposedly worth any cost but in practice we agree to a system that strikes a balance between death and convenience. All sorts of things are possible at a cost, but we often BS because we don't want the cost and we also don't want to know that we weren't willing to pay it.
We're not even close to approaching the point where any further safety measures would have to be balanced with some time or convenience metric.
Not necessarily. Being unable to travel also causes deaths. Even if you value lives infinitely higher than convenience itself, you end up in a similar spot.
> I get the point, but that's not entirely true; improvements in car design have also reduced accidents in ways other than forcing people to slow down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...
However, only 14% of traffic fatalities ~(4,743/year) are pedestrains in the US. ed:(+ 726 bike/year) So there is a limit to how far that can take you. http://www.pedbikeinfo.org/data/factsheet_crash.cfm
* head-on because someone crossed the center line on a 2-way, 40-55mph road, and they are usually going well over the speed limit
* one of the cars was running the light at a 4-way intersection
* someone pulled out into traffic into a 40-55mph road and was hit
Many or most people in the US also mistakenly believe that these giant vehicles are safer than smaller ones, since again, they are totally uneducated about the realities of vehicle safety.
The state of driving in the US is truly horrendous.
It's a bit of an arms race.
Everyone I know who has been in a crash hasn't been due to improper training, it been because of ignoring rules that they knew very well (speeding, texting and driving, etc). I don't know anyone that has crashed because they didn't know how a stop sign worked.
Picking one state at random it seems ridiculously easy: http://www.dmvflorida.org/driving-test.shtml
California gives you a 20 minite behind the wheel test! http://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/pubs/brochures/fast_...
Alabama says that you may fail if:
1. If you are involved in an accident.
2. If you violate the law.
3. If you drive recklessly or dangerously.
4. If you fail to cooperate with the examiner.
5. If you make several errors in safe driving practices because of habit or not enough practice.
(Although all three states also have written components to the test).
[1] or whatever the hell weird unit they'd use in the US. Yards?
How can anybody not know that texting and driving is a bad idea? That's just stupid.
It just takes one time to screw up.
Speed? What's the limit? What are you actually driving, if you're ignoring the limit?
Because Sweden allows 110-120km/h and other places in Europe might even allow more (France w/ 130km/h, and .. I'm from Germany).
You are NOT going fast in the US. You might drive a lot. You might commute more than anyone else. I don't know about these things. But fast? I don't buy it.
If you look at Austria/Italy, the fast lane rarely ever goes as low as the speed limit and going as fast as 145 kph usually meant we had to go out of the lane to let others through. Whoever is driving 110kph on an European highway is more or less a deadly road hazard. At such low speed it is nearly impossible to overtake lorries without having somebody nearly ram you from the back and it is guaranteed to cause a massive pileup of angry cars behind.
Source - I've been traveling Europe both on motorbike and by car
[0] That said, it is possible to make the streets safer, even when geography and economics are obstacles. My own town has been doing this, though often it is piecemeal.
For example, in New York, state and US highways (ie. State Route 5, US Route 20) are maintained by the State DOT -- unless you're in a "city". Areas that are organized as towns (think Hempstead, NY on Long Island with 300k+ people) get state services, areas organized as cities (Albany, NY with 90k people) typically do a lousy job at it.
The Federal government has been able to update things like street signals, etc. But fundamental things like road conceptual design, breaking out bike lanes, etc are going to be very difficult issues to handle without local control.
There are more people in NYC than Sweden, so the size and scope of the problem in the US is several orders of magnitude more complex.
Even hilly roads tend to have straight sections that can serve as the 2+1 area.
Traffic circles are another thing going in all around where I currently live. Unfortunately many people still do not know how to use them, but they are learning.
I'm no expert in roads, but can anyone explain how that shared middle lane is not the recipe for disaster?
They did feel a bit terrifying and constrained when we first got them. But now we're used to it.
I did nearly have an accident once when I tried to overtake a truck too close to the road switching from 1+2 to 2+1. Though that was due to me being really really stupid.
This isn't a "farm to market" road which some local hicks use to bring their vegetables in to the city to sell. This is the primary Interstate highway that goes North-South from the state of Washington thru the state of Oregon to the state of California. It's heavily used by both local commuters and long distance travelers.
BTW it rains a lot in Oregon!
[1] http://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/index.ssf/2014/11/odot_s...
Most roads just use a painted dashed line in the middle to indicate that you are on a 2+1, and a continuous white line if you are on the 1+2 side.
Not Sweden, but you can see an example here: https://www.google.pl/maps/place/Zyrard%C3%B3w/@52.0700711,2...
However I've also heard that in crowded situations it's actually faster for everyone to have just two separated lanes (no overtaking). Because the constant lane merging slows everybody down.
"It turned out that not only did safety improve, but it was also easier to overtake than before as the 2-lane sections provide safe overtaking opportunities."
"After some good experiences with test roads the system has been used often in places where the amount of traffic does not justify construction of a dual carriageway expressway but remote rural areas should be connected to major towns with a high speed road."
One of my favorite roads in Washington State is Highway 2. On this road, we have the periodic passing lane, at least when we're going Eastbound, we do. Westbound has fewer of those passing lanes; though, I think the lane in the Eastbound side is dashed, so you can actually pass using it if there's not much traffic going Eastbound. Nevertheless, when stuck behind someone who is clearly not following the "more than 5 people behind you: pull over" rule, I long desperately for the passing lane to come, as it appears all the time for the Eastbounders.
I have seen exactly the problem you're describing on /several/ occasions; but, I wouldn't give up the double-lane road, because sometimes people do stay their previous speed and you /can/ pass them. This road is a mountain pass, and so there are several curvy sections, all of which are too dangerous to pass in because you can't see far enough to confirm no cars are coming. When the road grows to 2 + 1 again, you'll see several people enthusiastically pass the slow person and from their slower speeds.
tl;dr: live in the US, love the 2+1 lane when it's around.
Wikipedia picture as reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MMLNorr1.JPG
- driver attention is higher - road signs tell drivers when overtaking will be possible - overtaking is possible without occupying the other side of the road - distance and speed judgment not needed (and thus not impaired by lack of sleep or alcohol)
Example: http://goo.gl/maps/KI48d
One direction (eastbound in this example) has priority as dictated by road markings, and those traveling westbound can use the lane for passing if and only if it is safe to do so. The onus is on them to ensure a safe maneuver.
With a fairly high standard for the driving test in the UK this is totally normal and as far as I'm aware has a similar low rate of accidents to normal 2 lane traffic.
This removes drivers having to judge when it is safe to overtake, you just have to sit back and wait for the middle lane to switch back.
South Africa has one of the toughest driving tests (the K53). Not to mention that even applying and qualifying for one is an ordeal on its own. And yet, the fatality rate is around 32 per 100k. If you make it too hard for people to obtain a license, they'll get one illegally. If you make the test too hard, they'll do the same. If you make the test impractical, it becomes worthless.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/world/africa/30license.htm...
These tests also include driving at a facility.
However, the EU requirements are minimum requirements, countries are allowed to make the requirements tougher, such as Finland (which I think requires at least 3 days at a facility).
Actually, in Finland the requirement is 3 hours (3 * 50 minutes, to be precise) driving in a track, practicing maneuvers in slippery conditions.
Wintertime they of course have proper ice conditions in the tracks. If you do this practice summer time, they try to make the track slippery using water or oil, but the achieved level of slipperiness can vary.
Is the education split into three seperate parts in all EU countries (first gives a temporary license, and there must be a few months before the others (to get real world driving experience), but all must be done withing 2 years)? When I got my license, the education cost about 2500 euros (I think it's higher now). Is that about the same as elsewhere in the EU?
I know tunnels was required in 2011, but the teacher also seemed to indicate that it was a recent change.
I never used a simulator, night driving meant driving at night. Taking a bus driving licence was mostly the same ordeal, although there is some extra focus in the theory about how a bus works and what requirements it has.
When I took my B-category driving licence, it cost about 6500 DKK (about 880 euros). But that was a big driving school, I also see prices at 8000 DKK (about 1075 euros). Fortunately, my bus driving licence was subsidised (so I only paid 3600 DKK (480 euros)), otherwise it would have cost 31000 DKK (4180 euros).
But I hear Finland is unbelievable expensive.
But fortunately a family member (or similar) can also teach, with just a few mandatory lessons at "facilities". This way, the cost is around 500 euros (if you don't include the car and fuel costs when driving the mandatory 20 half-hour lessons.)
(License categories are the same in all of EU I think: A is for motorcycles, B a car, C a lorry, D a bus, E a trailer, with sub-divisions like A1 and A2 for different power classes of motorcycles etc; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver%27s_license#mediaviewer/...).
In Finland, licenses were about to become very expensive last year after a law change that was lobbied by driving schools - that effectively made it impossible to teach your own family members to drive. But after seeing the ripping-off by driving schools, and also after extensive protests by the public, the government (unbelievably) backed down and changed the rules back so that teaching a family member is again feasible. My third kid is soon ready for the driving test...
BTW people say that it's a great test of trust and co-operation between a parent and a teenager to try to teach a young one to drive. For me this has fortunately gone very well.
We don't have costs after the 2 years though, the license just graduates and becomes permanent. Now you'd receive a certain number of points for the offenses listed above and there are limits that might require you to take driving lessons again or - in bad cases - might again lead to the loss of your license.
There's even a standardized roadsign for when tunnel rules apply: http://www.finlex.fi/data/sdliite/liikm/5226.gif
Of course, e.g. in Finland the part about headlights doesn't matter much because headlights are obligatory all the time, anyway.
And: there are some things you need to know about driving in/in to/out of a tunnel, particularly in winter conditions.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.8486413,-122.2424951,3a,24.8...
Why are they testing those other 399 people (0.25% = 1 in 400)? Driving while drowsy? drunk driving checkpoints? Someone's a little swervy and gets noticed?
I understand that in the US the police can't do that; they need some reason (like swervy driving) to apply a breathalyzer test.
Canada (BC at least) does roadblocks.
I never even noticed he wasn't wearing one. On the rare occasion I have a driver who doesn't use it, I tell them that story.
Why poor countries have lots of deadly car accidents probably has something to do with corruption, in part. People won't respect order, such as traffic codes, when their government isn't respectable. If I imagine I'm a citizen of a poor country, why would I stop at a red light if my president gave a contract to some foreign company in exchange for bribes. If he can do as he pleases, so can I.
There is also driver licensing. Here in the provinces of Canada, for instance, if you have a measurable pulse and/or your breath can fog a cold mirror, you can get a driver's license. I can't imagine that the same is true in Sweden.
A learner's permit can be obtained by passing a written test. After that, a very brief and easy road test results in a driver's license. No formal schooling is required; a friend or relative can teach you, for instance.
Furthermore, driver's license renewals do not require any testing. I got my driver's license in 1987. Since, then, I have renewed it every five years simply by paying the fee, signing a paper, and having my picture taken. I've never been required to take any additional training or testing.
Imagine if it was like that for, say, commercial airline pilots.
We have around 250 road deaths per year in a country of 5 million, and about 50 of these are suicides. This means that practically every week there's someone who kills him/herself by an intentional act in traffic. For instance, a couple of months back a mother killed herself and her three children by driving 100 km/h head-on at a bus where his husband was travelling. This was just an act of defiance, desperation and hate.
When suicides count for about one fifth of traffic deaths, it is not insignificant and leaves the number of traffic deaths well above zero. Also, natural deaths - people dying of a heart attack or a stroke while driving - account for a significant part of the statistics (somewhere around 10-15 %). They're counted as traffic deaths even in cases where no one else is hurt and even the vehicle is unscathed.
This is in contrast to the United States, where only very recently has anything other than maximum automotive throughput been prioritized.
This is big. Cities in Sweden have the ability to cater much faster to bikers because biking is a much more prevalent way of trasport than in the United States. In fact, that is one of the larger causes for deaths in cities like San Francisco. [1]
[1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Streets-of-S-F-a-road-...
[0] FTA "Building 1,500 kilometres (900 miles) of "2+1" roads—where each lane of traffic takes turns to use a middle lane for overtaking—is reckoned to have saved around 145 lives over the first decade of Vision Zero"
imagine a road like this: http://lh6.ggpht.com/_gt_enTZIj1g/TMq0zFITxUI/AAAAAAAADo8/Rb...
(not sweden but Netherlands but it works for the example.)
Overtaking is not allowed (except for farm traffic), in a 2+1 situation there would be three lanes all the time, alternating between directions. This means that there will always be a legal spot to overtake within a few minutes. (usually the climbing direction would be two lanes so you can overtake slow trucks e.d.) Therefore you don't have to overtake a slow driver by using the oncoming lane.
By a 'standard 3-lane highway', I assume you mean three lanes each way, these roads have nowhere near enough traffic on them to explain all that extra tarmac.
We have a few of these roads in my area but not very many, and you can easily go many many miles on a road similar to the one in your picture with no passing lane.
The advantage of these is that rather than forcing drivers to overtake into opposing traffic, they can wait until their direction gets the overtaking lane. These sort of roads are very common in Denmark. And I've seen a few of them in Germany as well.
(This is not to be confused with 2+1 highways where the middle lane change direction depending on the time of day, these have been phased out. There are usually clear markings on 2+1 highways when the direction change.)
all the 2+1 roads in Sweden have barriers.
In my neck of the woods, riding a bike is a disaster waiting to happen.
FWIW I tend to stick to the roads anyway, though, because the segregated bike lanes often have pedestrians and runners in them regardless, and the paths often get cracked from tree roots and whatnot. Most drivers don't seem to care if I'm not on the dedicated path, so long as I'm hauling and not riding crazy.
If you had the choice between getting to your destination in 20 minutes, with a 11.4 in 100,000 chance of dying, or arriving in 25 minutes with a 3 in 100,000 chance, which would you choose?
Option #1 takes 40 * 365.25 * 24 * 11.4/100000 = 40 hours off your life.
Option #2 takes 40 * 365.25 * 24 * 3 /100000 = 10.5 hours off your life.
Statistically speaking then, option #1 takes off about 30 hours of your life compared to option #2.
In fact, with those numbers you shouldn't take option #1 unless you only expected to live for another 1-2 months.
On the other hand, logging workers have a highest occupational rate of death, at 127.8 per 100,000 full-time workers per year. Assuming 2000 hours per year gives a much fatality rate per hour than what you've posited, so I don't understand your point.
I sure hope you do not drive if that is your attitude to safety.
A couple of reframes for example:
Would you rather drive a road where you gain 5 minutes and increase your chance of death by 4?
Would you rather drive a road where you lose 25% of your travel time to obstacles and change your chance of dying from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 30,000?
I believe the US government does have guidelines for how much a human life is 'worth' (~10M I had thought...) [0]. It's one of the 'objective' calculations taken into account when analyzing these types of projects.
My comment was actually incorrect, since it's 11.4 in 100,000 per year. I think I'd want my spouse to spend 1/5th less time driving for the increase in risk.
One issue is that going fast often doesn't kill the driver due to modern car safety, but some unsuspecting other road user.
In other words the drivers aren't carrying the risk so they are not the right people to ask whether this is a good trade-off.
"Sweden has 264 road deaths for 9.5 million people. Britain has 1730 for 62 million people. The deaths rates, at 28 per million people, are virtually identical in both countries and way below every other European country.
Britain though, has impossibly crowded narrow roads laid down hundreds of years ago, full of bends and hazards large urban conurbations with lots of people, including pedestrians, using the roads at the same time, and almost no new roads designed for safety or anything else.
Yet Britain has no more per capita road deaths than Sweden. Perhaps the Swedes have technical solutions in road planning, design and all sorts of legal restrictions on drivers to aid road safety. Perhaps the British are just more considerate and more aware, that, as their roads are much more hazardous, they have to take a lot more care when driving."
Very surprising that Britain has done that well.
While it's surprising the Economist failed to mention this maybe the UK's and Sweden's approaches are actually not that different? We have lots of speed bumps, traffic calming techniques, cameras, average speed checks, high vis signing, smart roadside warning stuff, railings at many pedestrian crossings etc. Most modern cars you can buy now come with beeping alerts if you don't plug your belt in and our drink driving rules are tough and enforced.
Also, depending on where in the UK you live, it's difficult to drive at a speed that could do any serious damage due to the horrendous congestion! Whenever I'm on the M6 I seem to spend most of the time stationary :/
Anecdotal Edit: I also think there's a difference in driving mentality/culture between British drivers and those from some other EU countries e.g. France. I lived there for 5 years and noticed that drivers there were much more willing to overtake on blind bends (which used to scare the shit out of me) and much less inclined to make way for other road users merging. Their attitude to driving seemed a lot more focused on their individual needs rather than the collective. My French girlfriend (who now lives with me here in the UK) agrees FWIW.
I simply attribute Britain's improbably good driving safety record - in spite of having a road infrastructure that is not any better than that on the continent - to driving on the left and not having people constantly take their dominant hand off the steering wheel and put their dominant eye at a disadvantage.
Something that has to be considered is only weirdos live to drive, most people drive to live. This will be contentious much like work to live vs live to work. None the less, its quite mathematically possible to have a situation where fewer societal lifetimes are lost overall, yet more lives end in a car crash. Obviously re-implementing feudalism and never allowing serfs permission to leave their lords land would have very low car death rates, but the total amount of wasted lives would be enormously higher.
Its quite possible that in terms of "lifetimes lost commuting per million people" that the USA is lower than Europe, what with our lack of public transit and seemingly everyone owning a car. For political reasons this statistic cannot be compiled because the result may not match predetermined journalistic goals.
Scotland has just reduced the drink drive alcohol limit even further to the point where you effectively can't have any alcohol all day if you're driving.
Given the mention of the Swedish rate between tests and positive results for breathalysers I imagine they have the same laws as the UK. The police in the UK can breathalyser anyone: a) who has committed a moving traffic offence b) involved in a road traffic collision c) who the officer suspects of having alcohol (any) in their system
Most police forces require their officers to breath test if they have grounds, and while many police officers don't like dealing with traffic offences almost all of them will go out of their way to stop drink drivers. Given almost every driver commits a moving traffic offence every so often there is pretty much always grounds to test anyone (you don't have to actually prosecute for the offence, i.e. crossing a mini roundabout, just over the speed limit etc).
To get onto wild speculation and anecdote, I noticed that anti-drink drive adverts in the UK tend to focus on how horrific it would be to be responsible for killing someone, whereas in Canada they focused on what the penalties would be if you were caught.
Yes it can - the roads here (as in most countries) are constantly being upgraded to improve capacity and safety. e.g. The dualling of the A9 (the main route to the North of Scotland) will hopefully make a huge difference to this notoriously dangerous road:
http://www.transportscotland.gov.uk/project/a9-dualling-pert...
[NB At the moment the A9 switches from single lanes in either direction to dual carriageway and back again numerous times - people get mixed up as to whether they are on a single or dual carriageway with unfortunate results].
I'm sure there are examples throughout the UK of this kind of thing happening.
Basically translates to: "this substantial increase on costs (3 lanes instead of 2, +50%) is going to save the lives of 15 people per year". It is really praiseworthy for a country to just go for it and put people first. A human life is truly invaluable but very few countries actually account for them as such; on most other countries "15 dead" would simply just not be worth the investment.