RE: Deaths on the Roads
Thursday 20th May 2004
Deaths on the Roads
John Low takes a look at the factors affecting the death rates from the 50's through to the present day
Like many of us, PHer John Low has been curious about the figures often quoted to us deaths on the roads. All manner of factors influence the figures and whilst some groups will bleat on that speed is the ultimate evil, he was curious to know what measures introduced in the past have had a significant influence on the death rate.
Thanks to the wonder of the internet, facts and figures are that much easier to come by these days and John seized the opportunity to do the research to satisfy his own curiosity.
Based on the research he did, John drew the following conclusions:
- The MOT test and other "technical" legislation appear to have had little overall effect.
- Following the introduction of the 70 mph limit, deaths fell quickly over the next few years, then rose again.
- Following the introduction of the 50mph limit, deaths again fell quickly. However, they were falling before the 50 limit was introduced. Given the political situation at the time - oil crisis, Suez, etc - it's entirely possible that the prevailing culture was to drive more carefully, speed limit or not. Vehicle use also fell during this period. As the political situation eased, the death rate rose again.
- When the speed limit was increased from 50mph back to 60/70, deaths fell. This was also the time of the first major campaign on drink driving.
- Intense campaining in the early 1990s appears to have made a huge difference, the fastest recorded fall in road deaths apart from when vehicle use fell in the early 70s (see above). This was primarily around drink driving and wearing seatbelts, and a little about speeding.
- Since 1994, with an ongoing intense programme of campaigns together with an explosionin the number of speed cameras, total road deaths have almost completely levelled off. The rate of fall of deaths relative to road use has halved.
- Bearing in mind the improvement in vehicle safety in the last 10 years, it would be interesting to see total reported accidents. I’d assume that total no. of accidents will have increased in that time.
- The introduction of the driving theory test in 1996 may have contributed to the fall in deaths in 1998. But if so, why has the fall not been sustained?
- The general falling trend in total deaths from 1965-1990 appears to level out through the late 1980s. However, the late 1980s saw the fastest rise in vehicle use.
- The recession of the early 1990s shows up in the plateau in road use at that time.
- The deaths relative to road use shows a reasonably consistent downward trend from 1969 to 1994. The downward trend is much lower from 1995 to 2002. The method for calculating the total road use changed in 1993, making direct numerical comparisons with previous years difficult. However, the downwards trend – ie, the slope of the graph - should not have changed for the worse, which it has.
Based on a swift calculation: from the period 1970 – 1994, deaths relative to road use fell by an average of 5.6% per year. From 1995 – 2002, the same figure fell by an average of 2.5% per year.
Maybe we're just reaching a stage where despite all the technical measures in place and safer cars, we can't address the basic problem of people driving into each other?
Draw your own conclusions... from the statistics. And remember there are lies, damned lines and statistics.
John did his research drawing on stats from:
Discussion
Interesting stuff. I'm not statistician but wouldn't it be resonable to assume that the law of diminishing returns would apply at somepoint, and that there always going to be a number of deaths on the road no matter how hard the powers that be try to convince us that it's possible. In fact it would appear that these findings support that.
May not be the law of diminishing returns.
Car safety & speed enforcement do not prevent a pedestrian being killed by a car that is not speeding, if they step out without looking.
Would also suspect that number of cars on the road is increasing, but the capability of the road network is not. Roadbuilding could = less deaths
Car safety & speed enforcement do not prevent a pedestrian being killed by a car that is not speeding, if they step out without looking.
Would also suspect that number of cars on the road is increasing, but the capability of the road network is not. Roadbuilding could = less deaths
.....silly naive boy am i...
jumjum said:
In 1875 before cars, buses and lorries the death rate on the road was 1,589 people !
And the population was a bit less than half what it is today and there was less roads, so the roads today are virtually as safe as before motor vehicles
What a gem of a statistic. Where on earth did you get that from?
Unfortunately I don't have the link to, or original source of, this:
Irvine S.L. Loudon said:
Medical Historian
The Mill House, Wantage, Oxon OX12 9EH
Send response to journal:
Re: Re: Unnecessary and unethical?
Email Irvine S.L. Loudon:
irvine.loudon@wuhmo.ox.ac.uk
Seeing the appalling mortality from road accidents and the constant traffic jams of today, it is easy to become nostalgic and yearn for a return to horses and carriages when travel was slower but safer and traffic jams unknown. In fact such nostalgia would be wholly misplaced.
By the early 1900s, there were more than 100,000 public passenger vehicles and cabs, around half a million trade vehicles and about half a million private carriages in Britain. In London and other large cities traffic was grinding to a halt because of constant traffic jams, stabling could not keep pace with the increasing number of horses, and it has been estimated that the towns of England had to deal with 10 million tons of horse manure a year – most of which was collected at night and dumped in the poorest areas of towns. Moreover, horses and carriages were noisier, not quieter than cars, so that straw was placed on roads outside hospitals and the homes of the sick to muffle the rattle of iron wheels.
But what about safety? In England and Wales in 1905 there were 2,424 road deaths from horses and vehicle - a rate of approximately 70 per million population. This is very close to the rate of mortality from road traffic accidents today. Of course the comparison is far from exact. We have no data on serious injuries in the early 1900s and many who died at the time from injuries would almost certainly have been saved today. But if we express road-transport mortality in terms of road deaths per 1,000 vehicles on the roads, there is no doubt that horses and carriages were a greater danger to the public in 1900 than motor vehicles in 2000.(1)
For all these reasons the introduction of motor cars (slowly from about 1890 but very rapidly from about 1905), was seen as the answer to the horrendous problems of horse-driven transport. There would be no traffic jams because cars and lorries took up less road space than carriages and horse-drawn wagons. Cars would be faster but safer because they did not bolt or swerve unpredictably, were easier to control, and better able to brake in an emergency; and cars produced no manure. Further, for people like doctors the capital and the running costs of a car were much less than for horse-drawn transport. Moreover, cars enabled the general practitioner to visit far more patients a day with much less exhaustion.
For almost everyone, cars were seen as the answer to their prayers. No one in 1900 could have imagined the problems of road transport we have today.
Irvine Loudon
1. Irvine Loudon, ‘Doctors and their transport, 1750-1914.’, Medical History, vol.45, 2001, 185-206
bogush said:
Unfortunately I don't have the link to, or original source of, this:
Or this:
In Victorian times 24 tons of horse "pollution" PER DAY was collected from JUST Oxford St and Regent St!
But I do for this:
West Sussex County Times
REJOICE IN THE MOTOR CAR
According to Bjorn Lomberg, in 1850 fifty tons of horse manure were cleared from the streets of London each and every day. In 1890 fly paper was an essential feature of buildings in the centre of the capital. That was real traffic pollution. In 1840, one thousand people died in transport accidents in London alone......
Lance K Green BA Dip Stats
Posted in another forum by Peter Edwardson.
(Presumably that's the City of London, or one of the tonnages is way out).
Re John Law's analysis - good stuff, albeit it duplicates much of my work over the last 2 years and - inevitably considering that it assess the same data - comes to similar conclusions.
If anyone needs it my data, most conceniently in graoh form, goes back to 1988 for K, SI and Sligjht, but back to 1950 for K, traffic volume, vehicle stock. and hence fatalities per 100bn veh km
I also have K and vehicle stock back to 1926, so can add the following to John's findings:
Fatalities rose from 1950 to the post war peak of 7985 in 1966 as traffic growth overwhelmed safety improvements but from 1966 to 1994 they halved as traffic growth (though steady in absolute numbers)fell in % terms, now far far lower than in the 1950s.
The fluctuations in deaths each year are significant, but the downward trend since 1966 has been, overall, remarkable.
However, fatalities per 100bn veh km fluctuate much less and ran at around 5% pa even from 1950, increasing to the best ever of 10% pa in 92/93, only to fall off a cliff since - the graph is spectacular - and actually REVERSE in 2003 - virtually unprecedented.
1994-2003 is the WORST DECADE EVER by a large margin at least since 1950, and almost certainly since 1926. Making reasonable assumptions about average mileages in 1926, fatalities per 100bn ve km in 1926 would have nbeen 60 times greater than in 1994
The point here is that as this curve fell quite steadily and relentlessly from 1926 to 1994 (apart from WW2)and in fact steepened in 1988-1993 - there is NO REASON WHATEVER, given continuing major improvements in car design - ABS, air bags, crush zones, side impact barriers etc still working their way into car stocks, to believe that the curve was BOUND to level off (still less for it to go into reverse!)
There is EVERY reason to believe that the improvements seen for 90 years could and SHOULD have continued - but failed to do so because of a GROSS ERRORS OF ROAD SAFETY POLICY - ie speed cameras and reduced police patrols.
The evidence is damning.
Even if it were not, one has to ask - if the curve was BOUND to level off at a sort of irreducible minimum - what the hell is the point of speed cameras?
I would be interested to know what changed in the calculation of vehicle use in 1993. If it made a difference it should show up as a step change - but it does not - 1993 is IDENTICAL to 1992, and 1994 onwards pchange only slightly.
Idris
Idris
If anyone needs it my data, most conceniently in graoh form, goes back to 1988 for K, SI and Sligjht, but back to 1950 for K, traffic volume, vehicle stock. and hence fatalities per 100bn veh km
I also have K and vehicle stock back to 1926, so can add the following to John's findings:
Fatalities rose from 1950 to the post war peak of 7985 in 1966 as traffic growth overwhelmed safety improvements but from 1966 to 1994 they halved as traffic growth (though steady in absolute numbers)fell in % terms, now far far lower than in the 1950s.
The fluctuations in deaths each year are significant, but the downward trend since 1966 has been, overall, remarkable.
However, fatalities per 100bn veh km fluctuate much less and ran at around 5% pa even from 1950, increasing to the best ever of 10% pa in 92/93, only to fall off a cliff since - the graph is spectacular - and actually REVERSE in 2003 - virtually unprecedented.
1994-2003 is the WORST DECADE EVER by a large margin at least since 1950, and almost certainly since 1926. Making reasonable assumptions about average mileages in 1926, fatalities per 100bn ve km in 1926 would have nbeen 60 times greater than in 1994
The point here is that as this curve fell quite steadily and relentlessly from 1926 to 1994 (apart from WW2)and in fact steepened in 1988-1993 - there is NO REASON WHATEVER, given continuing major improvements in car design - ABS, air bags, crush zones, side impact barriers etc still working their way into car stocks, to believe that the curve was BOUND to level off (still less for it to go into reverse!)
There is EVERY reason to believe that the improvements seen for 90 years could and SHOULD have continued - but failed to do so because of a GROSS ERRORS OF ROAD SAFETY POLICY - ie speed cameras and reduced police patrols.
The evidence is damning.
Even if it were not, one has to ask - if the curve was BOUND to level off at a sort of irreducible minimum - what the hell is the point of speed cameras?
I would be interested to know what changed in the calculation of vehicle use in 1993. If it made a difference it should show up as a step change - but it does not - 1993 is IDENTICAL to 1992, and 1994 onwards pchange only slightly.
Idris
Idris
bogush said:
Have a read of this:
http://library-2.lse.ac.uk/collections/pamphlets/document_service/HE3/00000080/doc.pdf
absolutely astonishing! I was transfixed - its all there! The same issues, the same bogus solutions, the same stupid officialdom, and the writer who sees straight through the whole damn mess and sees what should be done! In 1943 or 1944
Have circulated widely inc to every MP and every motorting journalist I know, and every newspaper email address I have
Thanks, thanks
Idris
I echo Idris' analysis and urge John to look a little deeper into the underlying changes.
Notably, engineering and medical improvements have been worth at least 5% per annum (as a road safety input factor) since the earliest accurate records in 1950.
In the mid 60s the growth in traffic - constant at +8.75 billion vehicle kilometres per annum - became less than the enginering and medical improvements and road deaths started to fall.
Whatever way you look at it, the bulk of the engineering improvements are continuing yet in the last decade road deaths have stopped falling and very likely rose significantly in 2003 (final figures not yet available).
See these Safe Speed pages:
www.safespeed.org.uk/smeed.html
www.safespeed.org.uk/fatality.html
www.safespeed.org.uk/factors.html
www.safespeed.org.uk/effects.html
I find the following graph to be the most revealing of all:
This is the graph of 1/fatality rate or the average number of million vehicle km driven between each road death.
The red trace is official data and the green trace is a best fit trend from 1950 to 1993. After extensive investigation, I have found NO REASON WHATSOEVER that the 1950 to 1993 trend could not have continued past 1993. It certainly isn't correct to state that we have reached a baseline in road deaths. As I mentioned, engineering improvements continue at a pace, and suggesting we have reached a baseline is tantamount to the absurd idea that "vehicles can't be made any safer".
Best Regards,
Paul Smith
Safe Speed
www.safespeed.org.uk
Notably, engineering and medical improvements have been worth at least 5% per annum (as a road safety input factor) since the earliest accurate records in 1950.
In the mid 60s the growth in traffic - constant at +8.75 billion vehicle kilometres per annum - became less than the enginering and medical improvements and road deaths started to fall.
Whatever way you look at it, the bulk of the engineering improvements are continuing yet in the last decade road deaths have stopped falling and very likely rose significantly in 2003 (final figures not yet available).
See these Safe Speed pages:
www.safespeed.org.uk/smeed.html
www.safespeed.org.uk/fatality.html
www.safespeed.org.uk/factors.html
www.safespeed.org.uk/effects.html
I find the following graph to be the most revealing of all:
This is the graph of 1/fatality rate or the average number of million vehicle km driven between each road death.
The red trace is official data and the green trace is a best fit trend from 1950 to 1993. After extensive investigation, I have found NO REASON WHATSOEVER that the 1950 to 1993 trend could not have continued past 1993. It certainly isn't correct to state that we have reached a baseline in road deaths. As I mentioned, engineering improvements continue at a pace, and suggesting we have reached a baseline is tantamount to the absurd idea that "vehicles can't be made any safer".
Best Regards,
Paul Smith
Safe Speed
www.safespeed.org.uk
I have always been convinced speed cameras don't work, and the fgures seem to back this up.
firstly the direct results of speed cameras.
Drivers :-
a) brake suddenly (often to way below the limit)
b) drive closer together
c) become annoyed or frustrated
d) spend more time looking at their speedo (and the camera) i.e. less time looking for hazards.
Secondly I don't actually believe someone driving slower is less likely to have an accident. I think a slower driver will think about other things, work, their partner, that house over there etc. and become distracted from the task of driving. OK the damage might be less but its better to not crash than have a minor accident.
So directly speed cameras don't work couple this with police stuck doing paperwork, the growth in 'untraceable' vehicles its not suprising the death rates are getting worse. hat does suprise me is the continuing apathy of the average motorist.
Motorists are a majority why do we get treated so bad.
Tony
Finally I heard that cyclists kill more people per mile than cars - unfortunately don't have a source. I can beleive it though there is at least 1 pedestrian fatality per year caused by pushbikes and the total mileage must be tiny compared to cars.
firstly the direct results of speed cameras.
Drivers :-
a) brake suddenly (often to way below the limit)
b) drive closer together
c) become annoyed or frustrated
d) spend more time looking at their speedo (and the camera) i.e. less time looking for hazards.
Secondly I don't actually believe someone driving slower is less likely to have an accident. I think a slower driver will think about other things, work, their partner, that house over there etc. and become distracted from the task of driving. OK the damage might be less but its better to not crash than have a minor accident.
So directly speed cameras don't work couple this with police stuck doing paperwork, the growth in 'untraceable' vehicles its not suprising the death rates are getting worse. hat does suprise me is the continuing apathy of the average motorist.
Motorists are a majority why do we get treated so bad.
Tony
Finally I heard that cyclists kill more people per mile than cars - unfortunately don't have a source. I can beleive it though there is at least 1 pedestrian fatality per year caused by pushbikes and the total mileage must be tiny compared to cars.
Thanks for the comments guys.
Idris, I realise this is duplicating some previous work. I did it largely so that when discussing the matter with others I have an answer to their comments of how you may have manipulated the statistics
I take the point that the general trend may show a natural "levelling off". However, I'd expect in that case to see a more gradual change in the slope of the curve - here it's a quite distinct change over a very short time.
Another point that makes me think that the rates haven't bottomed out - during the firefighters strikes of last year, road accidents fell noticeably. This was reckoned to be because people were driving more carefully given that they would get less quick response if they had an accident.
So by getting people to pay more attention - as opposed to less which is the result of the speed policy - accident rates can still fall. This seems to be a variation on the idea of a big spike in place of the airbag.
Idris, I realise this is duplicating some previous work. I did it largely so that when discussing the matter with others I have an answer to their comments of how you may have manipulated the statistics
I take the point that the general trend may show a natural "levelling off". However, I'd expect in that case to see a more gradual change in the slope of the curve - here it's a quite distinct change over a very short time.
Another point that makes me think that the rates haven't bottomed out - during the firefighters strikes of last year, road accidents fell noticeably. This was reckoned to be because people were driving more carefully given that they would get less quick response if they had an accident.
So by getting people to pay more attention - as opposed to less which is the result of the speed policy - accident rates can still fall. This seems to be a variation on the idea of a big spike in place of the airbag.
JohnL said:
Thanks for the comments guys.
Another point that makes me think that the rates haven't bottomed out - during the firefighters strikes of last year, road accidents fell noticeably. This was reckoned to be because people were driving more carefully given that they would get less quick response if they had an accident.
So by getting people to pay more attention - as opposed to less which is the result of the speed policy - accident rates can still fall. This seems to be a variation on the idea of a big spike in place of the airbag.
excellent point.
Ive not hear of one decent answer to why driving re-tests arnt compulsory every 5 years - it would be a start of continued education.
Gassing Station | Speed, Plod & the Law | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff