Somebody thinks they are. The Centers for Disease Control just released a study saying that crash-related deaths cost $41 billion a year.
This smells to me like a government agency seeking more funding by jumping into an area outside of its core mission. The first thing to note about this study is that it is out of date. It is based on data from 2005, when 43,510 people were killed in motor vehicle accidents. By 2010, this had dropped 25 percent to just 32,788. That suggests that CDC’s estimate of the cost of crash-related deaths is also about 25 percent too high.
Make no mistake: every accident-related fatality is a tragedy. But motor-vehicle accidents appear to be a problem that is being solved, whether it is through safer highways, safer automobiles, reduced congestion, or some combination of the three. Can CDC name any diseases that is a part of its core mission that has seen a 25 percent drop in fatalities in the last five years? If not, it had better get to work on those diseases and leave motor vehicle accidents to the real experts.
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The CDC seems to be totally behind the times on this issue. Elsewhere on its web site, it says just over 42,000 people die in motor vehicle accidents each year. This is apparently based on 2007 data, although the number doesn’t match the count of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (whose official number was 41,059).
The CDC’s recommendations for improving motor vehicle safety are trite: stronger seat-belt laws, ignition interlock devices for people convicted of drunk driving, and improved teen driver safety programs. These aren’t much different than the recommendations of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. So it’s a waste of public resources to have a second government agency use obsolete data to make similar recommendations in an area that isn’t even within its primary mission.
The CDC be angling against a funding cut which means a smaller increase as they use automobile accident costs as a baseline for their stuff.
6 years in Texas has me convinced that there is something in the water down here that causes bad driving. CDC should definitely check it out 😉
Sometimes looking at an issue from a public health analysis perspective can reveal some interesting ideas. Sometimes it doesn’t.
I have studied some interesting analysis on crime statistics, for example.
Gosh, I hope there isn’t any intent of hand-waving going on here.
Using crude calculations, Randal forgot to include the cost of his new number, so I did:
IN 2010, AUTO-RELATED DEATHS COST $30.9 BILLION.
HTH
DS
There goes the car-hating, mobility-hating, taxpayer parasite again.
Sweden has the right idea – eliminate fatal crashes on its (extensive) highway network (and no, Dan, it does not involve forcing the entire Swedish population to live in apartment buildings on top of rail transit stations):
Vision Zero (on English-language Wikipedia)
2009 Status Report (Adobe Acrobat .pdf, 76kb).
C.P,
Thanks for the links. Vision Zero is very cool. However it’s major tenant, “Life and health can never be exchanged for other benefits within the society,” just ain’t gonna fly in the good ole’ US of A. At least not anytime soon.
no, Dan, it does not involve forcing the entire Swedish population to live in apartment buildings on top of rail transit stations
Blatant misrepresentations via simplistic frames and lack of evidence don’t become you, CPZ.
But wishes aside, let’s return to Randal’s point that he “forgot” to make with his corrected numbers:
That’s a lot. Looks like Sweden doesn’t want to waste money on such a scale.
DS
Note how Dan’s “point” has not a single thing to do with the Antiplanner’s post. What’s that, engaging in some hand-waving (or is it “hand flapping”) yourself?
Outcomes
Ten years after initiation of Vision Zero, results have been unimpressive in Norway. “The zero vision has drawn more attention to road safety, but it has not yielded any significant short-term gains so far,” a staff engineer at the Norwegian Public Roads Administration said.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero
IN 2010, AUTO-RELATED DEATHS COST $30.9 BILLION.
You’ve got to love that pretense of accuracy. Plus or minus $20 billion?
MJ, I merely used the numbers Randal provided and punched them into the calculator! If you have a more accurate number, do share!! And thanks for replying!!!
DS
The financial cost is largely imaginary.
Look at Oregon, for instance. The CDC states the total cost of fatal accidents is $422 million. That’s made up of medical costs and “work loss costs”. Medical costs are $4 million, or less than 1% of the total. The other 99% of the “costs”, again, are something called “work loss costs”. What’s that, you might ask? Well, that’s defined as “the total estimated salary, fringe benefits, and value of household work that an average person—of the same age and sex as the person who died—would be expected to earn over the remainder of his or her lifetime.”
WTF?
That seems like a bogus cost to me. The cost isn’t to “society” or government. The cost is to the dead person. Does this make sense to anyone? To me, it seems like fabricated inflation of a relatively small figure (medical costs–presumably mostly covered through auto and health insurance) by a factor of over 100 to support the “correct” conclusion.
Bogus,bogus, bogus.
Capitalists don’t make money off workers? Who knew? Society derives no benefit from labor?! Sacre bleu!
DS
Randall:
The drop in vehicular deaths is shown in the NHTSA to be strongly correlated to bad economic times and high oil prices, both of which reduce traffic on the roads. The report pointedly highlights drops in 1981 to 1983, 1990 to 1993, and 2006 to present, with other sustained periods of decline in 2000 to 2002 (interrupted by large increases after 9/11, probably driven by people abandoning safer airplanes), 1997-1998 (Asian economic crisis), 1989 (economic slowdown to 0% growth before 1990 recession) and 1979-1981 (Carter stagflation.
This makes you wonder how sustainable our present low numbers will be if oil prices come back down and when the economy recovers.
Given an exponential population growth, unemployment, and the job market for recent grads, labor is replaceable.
Certainly you cannot buy all the CDC’s loose statistical “analysis”. It’s a blanket statement. Look at accidents by age groups in 2008. Of all fatalities, 13.2% were under 24, and certainly this demographic is fairly replaceable as they have not had time to become highly skilled; many had not even entered the workforce. Another 30.7% were over 55, and most of those were likely retired. Additionally, possibly upwards of 20% of all fatal crashes were those under- or un-employed.
It’s not as simple as multiplying total fatalities by an average salary (including fringe benefits like retirement, health care, vacation time, life insurance) times an average remaining life expectancy. That’s an oversimplification.
Certainly, other causes of death, such as cancer and heart disease, have greater “work loss costs” than car accidents, so let’s try to keep things in perspective.
That is not to minimize the dangers of driving; certainly it is the most dangerous thing I did today. But the CDC’s recommendations are antiquated. Here are some *real* solutions: continued safety improvements driven by consumer demand AND development of driverless car technology. These two measures will do far more than unconstitutional sobriety checkpoints.
Frank:
The cost isn’t to “society†or government. The cost is to the dead person. Does this make sense to anyone?
I am the sole breadwinner for my family. If I die, they would suffer an immense economic loss of expected earnings and benefits totalling well over $5 million in present dollars assuming no raises. My company would suffer a loss in gross margin on my work of a couple million as well. If that amount is paid out in a wrongful death lawsuit of someone with deep pockets, they are suffering a loss too.
In many families, this sort of loss could force the family onto welfare, which is obviously a direct societal cost.
Andrew:
70% of Americans have life insurance to protect their assets and families. I would assume you have made the right choice to get coverage in the event of your untimely demise.
And at your job, you’re replaceable. That’s not intended as an insult. It’s the truth. If you quit tomorrow, undoubtedly there would be several qualified applicants eager, willing, and able to take your place. I know that 75 people applied to the job I landed here last August, and that was for a job that most wouldn’t want.
Again, see #16 for comments about keeping these deaths in perspective.
And let me be clear that the “cost” the CDC is using is the loss of income based on a lot of averages, including average income and average life expectancy. I don’t question that there is a cost. I believe the figure they’re using is highly inflated and the result of dubious statistical methods and basic math when more complex algorithms and rigorous statistical analysis is required.
Congestion causes accidents. And planners like Dan gleefully cause congestion to “punish” people for driving. So in a way, we can say that planners, like Dan, are responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths and millions in damages resulting from their planned congestion “features”.
MJ, I merely used the numbers Randal provided and punched them into the calculator! If you have a more accurate number, do share!! And thanks for replying!!!
Organizations like the CDC like to repeat these numbers ad nauseum with an air of confidence that suggests these quantities are essentially deterministic. Back in reality, we know from many, many empirical studies that there is a large variation in this value, across countries, across occupations, and across age cohorts. When I see the CDC, or anyone else for that matter, repeating these claims about social “costs” I typically roll my eyes and give them the same amount of reverence I accord to the Urban Mobility Report estimates of “congestion costs”.
The drop in vehicular deaths is shown in the NHTSA to be strongly correlated to bad economic times and high oil prices, both of which reduce traffic on the roads.
The data on fatality rates clearly show a long-term trend of monotonically decreasing rates of fatal crashes, irrespective of economic conditions, oil prices or other influences. These factors only cause short-term accelerations and slowdowns in an otherwise consistent long-term trend. Within the past decade or so, the absolute number of crashes has begun to fall, as well. Don’t expect this to reverse course any time soon, either.
I am the sole breadwinner for my family. If I die, they would suffer an immense economic loss of expected earnings and benefits totalling well over $5 million in present dollars assuming no raises. My company would suffer a loss in gross margin on my work of a couple million as well. If that amount is paid out in a wrongful death lawsuit of someone with deep pockets, they are suffering a loss too.
Do you have life insurance? Most people do, and this is a way of internalizing these costs. They are private, not social.
In many families, this sort of loss could force the family onto welfare, which is obviously a direct societal cost.
One of the lesser-known programs within Social Security insures families against this and provides them with a lump-sum payout in the event of premature death of an employed worker. It is designed to mitigate the need for such a family to “go on welfare”.
MJ, the larger point I’m making is the various ways people are trying to quibble away from the fact that the tens of thousands of deaths by auto in this country per year cost in the tens of $billions a year.
Folk can quibble about the numbers to distract away from this fact all they want.
Feel free to distract away from the fact that the tens of thousands of deaths by auto in this country per year cost in the tens of $billions a year.
It is folks’ right to try and flap their hands away from the fact that tens of thousands of deaths by auto in this country per year cost in the tens of $billions a year.
Many here expect the usual suspects to spam the thread to hide tens of thousands of deaths by auto in this country per year cost in the tens of $billions a year.
It is expected that the arm waving on this thread is a desperate wish to distract from the basic fact that there are tens of thousands of deaths by auto in this country per year cost in the tens of $billions a year.
In fact, while Randal was busy quibbling, he “forgot” to include a number. That forgetting, in effect, tried to distract away from the reality of tens of thousands of deaths by auto in this country per year cost in the tens of $billions a year.
Why do some try and distract from this fact? Why hide reality? What’s in it for them?
HTH
DS
And again, planners are responsible for those deaths by creating congestion and making driving more miserable in their quest to chase people out of their cars.
Why do some try and distract from this fact? Why hide reality? What’s in it for them?
And my point is that, despite all the heroic pronouncements by people like yourself and the CDC, we don’t really know what that “number” is. We can scarcely come up with confidence intervals that do not include zero or some negative number. It is hard to call that a “fact”. To suggest otherwise is nothing more than an application of “scientism”. We can count crashes. We have a much tougher time valuing human life. And much like trying to determine the value of travel time, we like to use convenient values that, with a little hand-waving, convey a false sense of certainty to people too uneducated to understand the particulars of how they were generated.
A related point, which I neglected to make earlier, is that the CDC is an expansive organization. They see public health risks everywhere, and so look for opportunities to insert themselves into the conversation on every issue under the sun. They have even found common cause with urban planners, who are on a similar quest, on the issue of obesity. To make themselves look relevant, they need to come up with good stories about all the lives they can save and all the human suffering they can spare us if only we would give them the authority to _______ (insert public health intervention here).
Vehicle crashes are not, of course, a “disease”. There is little on this issue that the CDC can tell us that engineers, economists and others concerned with traffic safety don’t already know. Nonetheless, they continue to blare their shoddy trumpet as often as possible.
You’re absolutely right. It’s impossible, of course, to come out and honestly say something like “oh because of that evil automobile and its damaging effects we have calculated that its cost to society is exactly two hundred billion dollars, yet that is exactly what these “experts” do.
And my point is that, despite all the heroic pronouncements by people like yourself and the CDC, we don’t really know what that “number†is. We can scarcely come up with confidence intervals that do not include zero or some negative number.
Uh-huh. You should e-mail Randal that he’s using bad NHTSA numbers and you. Are. Umbraged.
But regardless of that little bit, why yes, of course you’re right: let’s use the old threadbare trick that since we can’t come up with one number, by golly its best we should just ignore the issue altogether! Don’t have one number. Can’t address it.
Brilliant. Haven’t seen that one 1.863 million times before, no sir. Nuh-uh. Never.
EMMmmmJaaaaaayyyy, FTW!!!
————————
This smells to me like a government agency seeking more funding by jumping into an area outside of its core mission.
chuckle
My, my.
DS
Danny Boy is so BRILLIANT! Absolutely nobody knows that auto accidents cost billions of dollars. Only Danny Boy has been able to figure that out. He deserves a Pullitzer Prize, or at the very least one of those discredited Nobel Peace Prizes, for figuring out that auto accidents cost money.
After all, without any Professional Planners, nobody in the US pays any money at all, much less based upon their statistical risk, for insurance against the high cost of automobile accidents. NOBODY EVER THINKS ABOUT THAT COST!!!!!!! [insert here all the stupid Dan jr high texting acronyms]
Professional Planners should demand billions of tax payers dollars to run a dozen ads every hour on all TV channels to educate people about how car accidents cost money. They could use these ideas that just came to me:
– Use a cute animal, like a Gecko, to talk about the cost of auto insurance. Run this every 15 minutes on every channel.
– Use a cheeky woman named “Flo”.
– Use a chant like “Like a Good Neighbor….”
– Use a piggy saying “wee wee wee” all the way home.
I could think of a hundred more while watching late night TV. Only THEN would anybody but Dan understand that there is financial risk associated with a car.
Speaking of good neighbors, I bet all Dan’s neighbors hate him. Especially if he’s the HOA president.
For Dan’s stupid reference to Al Gore’s even more stupid film, here’s a better version:
http://tinypic.com/r/1115ftz/7