I'd like to think that the economic cost of regularly killing people on the streets is higher than getting to a place ten minutes faster. American traffic fatalities per year are basically equivalent to killing off a large town.
No one is saying reduce speeds everywhere. But in an urban context with lots of pedestrians, these speeds matter, and urban traffic is generally so stop-and-go and congested that drivers rarely sustain the top speed, and reducing it doesn't actually affect travel time by all that much.
"I'd like to think that the economic cost of regularly killing people on the streets is higher than getting to a place ten minutes faster."
However comforting that logic may be, it is unusable in the real world. If you value lives infinitely, then you will never ever do anything that risks your or somebody else's life in order to gain on any other need. You routinely engage in things that are not the safest possible option in order to fulfill other needs, ranging from food or water acquisition through mere entertainment. Therefore you place a finite value on your life. Don't feel bad, so does everybody else. It is possible to determine the value placed on life, I believe there are studies that show the value is more stable than you might think, and balance things appropriately.
It may be uncomfortable thinking, but, again, unless you literally never take even the smallest risk in the pursuit of other goals, you are already thinking this way. You just haven't lifted it up to the conscious level yet.
No one is asking for infinite value. A cursory glance at causes of death rates in USA reveals that far too many people are dying in automobile collisions. There is nothing about our world that requires that level of carnage. Future generations will find our customs ghastly.
As in the famous Churchhill quote, once you agree it's not infinite, now we're just dickering about price.
I'd say you're almost right about nobody asking for infinite value, but I'd say it's more like nobody who has pulled this up to the conscious level is asking for infinite value. People who have not examined the belief are quite prone to speaking as if life's value is infinite... but their own actions inevitably belie that claim. Once examined, it becomes rationally obvious that life is not infinitely valuable (including your own), but, well, if humans automatically accepted and believed all rational things they examine without emotional consequence the world would be a very different place.
Agreed, your parent post was strawmanning. Is there a name for this second-order sort of meta-strawmanning, in which we imagine people's unconscious inclinations, rather than merely imagining their arguments?
The United States government led by the Obama administration came up with values from 6-9 million dollars when weighing marginal costs of safety regulations.
>It is possible to determine the value placed on life, I believe there are studies that show the value is more stable than you might think, and balance things appropriately.
For evaluating safety regulations relative to the cost of inplementation, NHTSA values the risk of loss of human life in relation to the market value of risk reducing products, and the safety they provide.
They extrapolate from the take rate of airbags and their cost and effectivity, to how much value the average American places on their own life. IIRC on the order of $5 million.
FYI, juries do not look kindly on companies that implement this in liability suits. The data is that if a corporation writes down a $-figure for a (statistical) human life, it anchors punitive fines at a higher level.
Well, you do waste minutes of peoples lives.
Let's see: 100 mio people driving 250 days/year, losing 10 min each way (so 20/day). That's about 12k lives of 80 years. It's actually worse, because you are wasting "awake time", so add 30%. It seems America isn't /that/ far of from the optimum. Maybe better driver education or better roads would be more effective?
The real issue with driving slower is enforcement. Enough people don't take into account the speed limit that changing the speed limit without changing the roads leads to unsafe mixed speeds.
Universally adhered to lower speed limits in urban environments would be great.
Certainty of enforcement. People are careful to obey a rule punished 100% of the time with a $1 fine. They brush off a 10^-5 probability of a $100,000 loss by thinking "It won't happen to me."
Correct. I often walk down a road with a 20mph 'limit' where most cars are doing around 40 - and some appear to be doing more like 50. There's simply no economically viable way to enforce it, so it will continue like this until there have been a couple of fatalities.
Not a chance. And that is a good thing. This knee jerk towards "lets just monitor everyone, everywhere and automate the law" is antithetical to a free society. Most people know that, which is why speed camera votes always send that company (RedFlex or whoever) packing.
I don't know about the US, but where I live speed camera are relatively large bright colored boxes with reflective stripes on the side of the road, with mandatory "speed camera ahead" warnings.
Most of them are empty but people unfamliar with the place will usually slow down.
The laws are state and local. In AZ it's a city or township, then the people put it on the ballot and it gets shut down. Tucson voted 65% no cameras, and later we got a state wide ban on highways, so it's a still a work in progress. The tickets are civil law, so you can throw it out, frame it, or make a coffee table book if you get enough:)
You can lower speeds quite drastically with better street design, no enforcement needed. Make the road narrower and curvier instead of wide open and straight. You can even add bumps.
I suppose you're suggesting there's a distinction between someone losing x hours of life due to travel time vs. someone being killed and losing y hours of life. I'm sure you can see why someone attempting to create a reasonable policy might avoid making that distinction.
I thought you were asking about "the cost of driving slower"? I'm perfectly serious in my answer. Any transportation goal (with the possible exception of ambulance service?) that may be accomplished at high speed, also can be accomplished at lower speed, with sufficient planning.
But what about an even lower speed? If 15 mph is good, then 5 mph is better. And if 5 mph is better, 1 mph is superior once more.
I think we can agree there is a point where slow becomes too slow and the 'sufficient planning' becomes an unreasonable burden. So given we aren't operating off the notion that slower is inherently better, then there is some equation giving us our optimal point. What if that point is 45 mph instead of 15 mph?
In short, how do we argue that 15 mph is better than 45 mph that can't also be applied to speeds lower than 15 mph?
It's easy - you have diminishing improvements in pedestrian survival rates. 40MPH+ is associated with a fatality rate of over 50%, whereas you get to 30MPH and you have 7%, and 20MPH is essentially zero: https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...
Even if it is close to zero, how do we decide if the lives saved from going from a .1% fatality rate to a .09% fatality rate is worth the speed reduction or not?
jerf addressed this above. What you're saying isn't accurate. Doing things more quickly avoids wasting hours of life. That's a benefit. The cost is measured in hours of life of people killed and injured as a result of doing things at a chosen speed.
What activity are you talking about, that is feasible at 40mph in an urban environment but not at e.g. 25mph? Can you not imagine a different way of conducting that activity?
There is a fundamental inequity between the operator of dangerous equipment comparing hours and years of life, and the pedestrian who suffers the consequence of that comparison. The USA auto industry is built on this inequity, which is why no one ever talks about it.
Many people meet friends and make deliveries e.g. via bicycle. Those motorized vehicles that are set aside specifically for deliveries often travel more slowly than other motorized vehicles.
But I shouldn't pick nits; you were speaking in generalities! So when I said "any transportation goal" and you disagreed, you hadn't actually thought of a particular exception to my universal statement. And you still haven't thought of one. Are your contributions to this discussion offered in good faith?
1. I want to visit a friend. He lives an hour away by car. New speed limit changes it to two hours. I lose an hour of life in the car.
2. Auto plant needs radiators. Truck delivering them takes longer to get them there. Costs $x more. Car costs more. Car buyer has to work longer to buy car. Car buyer wastes y hours of life.
Or maybe you don't visit your friend so often. Or you decide that 90 minutes on the train is better than driving, or maybe your friend gets tired of making a 2 hour trip to the city, so he moves closer.
There are lots of alternatives that don't involve you spending more time driving.
While it's true that goods will cost more to transport if it takes longer, that higher charge is amortized across many products in the truck, so is a very small portion of the finished product.
So if a radiator fits in a box 16x24x6" or 1.3ft^3 and a 40ft truck holds 2400 ft^3 (subtract 20% since it won't be a perfect fix, so 2000 ft^3, so you can fit 1500 of them in the truck.
If a truck+driver costs $100/hour, that means each radiator will cost 13 cents more.
Or, another way at looking at it -- all of the parts that make up a car aren't going to be bigger than a car (sure, some space is lost to packaging, but there's a lot of empty space in a car), and 6 - 10 cars can fit on a car carrier truck, so each car will end up costing around $25 more.
Though since we're talking about urban speed limits, and there aren't many urban car manufacturers, slow urban speed limits won't affect the price of cars.
I suppose this subthread is complete, because you have now completely agreed with my original statement: you'll have to leave earlier for your trip to visit your friend, and delivery trucks will have to allocate more time (routes, trucks, drivers, etc.) for their deliveries. Alternatively, freight trucks might make fewer mostly-empty trips. Note that these two examples clearly match the characterization I provided: both may be accomplished at lower speed, with sufficient planning. This will be the "cost" of safe driving.
