Movement by Thalia Verkade

Author:Thalia Verkade [Verkade, Thalia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TEC010000, BUS070100, ARC018000, BUS067000, POL044000, NAT011000, TEC009160, BUS072000, POL002000, SOC015000
ISBN: 9781911344971
Publisher: Scribe
Published: 2022-05-31T05:00:00+00:00

A Formula for Traffic Deaths

Niek Mouter, a transport economist and philosopher, has done some interesting research into traffic fatalities. He and two other researchers asked people how many extra minutes they would be prepared to spend travelling to save one person from dying in traffic.

There is a method governments use to calculate this: a social cost–benefit analysis or SCBA. In essence, this is simply a spreadsheet in which the value of time spent travelling and the value of a human life — which economists have set at €2.6 million — are offset against one another. To calculate how much 1 minute of travel time is worth, researchers conducted a survey in which several hundred people at train stations and motorway services answered a series of multiple-choice questions on how much money they would be willing to spend to reduce their journey time. This was followed by a larger online survey. Together, these produced a figure that could be used in the SCBA: 1 hour in a car is worth €9.25 to a commuter.34

According to Mouter, politicians are told that the SCBA shows that a gain of 45 seconds per traveller on an average motorway produces more economic benefits than preventing one traffic fatality a year. After all, if a few thousand motorists save 45 seconds of the time they spend on the road each day, that adds up to a fair bit in the course of a year. So fewer vehicle hours are lost.

And this was how, in 2011, a department of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management calculated the additional traffic fatalities that would occur with the raising of the maximum speed limit to 130 km/h (just over 80 mph). With a few compensatory measures, it would all be quite acceptable.35

‘But if you ask people how long they’re prepared to wait to avoid a death in traffic — that is, how we should deal with this collectively — they’ll immediately say they’d have no problem waiting a quarter of an hour,’ says Mouter. ‘Which is 20 times as long.’

In other words, if a delivery driver runs over a five-year-old boy in the street, just about everyone would say they’d be quite happy for the parcel to be delivered more safely later in the day, as long as no one was killed in the process.36 Yet we are only asked our views in our capacity as consumers of speed. We are treated as Homo economicus, not as the social species we are.

And politicians refer to a statistical model built on this to justify expanding motorways or to raising the speed limit. A model which turns a five-year-old boy — indeed, every human being — into a ‘statistical human life’.

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