Each fatal road crash costs £1m
Discussion
Hmmm . .Its quite hard to justify such a figure, especially placing value on a tragic loss . .
However, I would probably imagine such a figure would take in to account just abt everything, bearing in mind statistics and monetary value an be manipulated . .One would imagine the figure is calculated basis immediate collatoral damage, cost of road closure, cost of police man hours et.c . . But chiefly I would imagine that the most weight is carried by production/consumption foregone and loss of earnings . . .It to my mind is thoroughly heartless to calculate such things, but obviously somebody has . .
However, I would probably imagine such a figure would take in to account just abt everything, bearing in mind statistics and monetary value an be manipulated . .One would imagine the figure is calculated basis immediate collatoral damage, cost of road closure, cost of police man hours et.c . . But chiefly I would imagine that the most weight is carried by production/consumption foregone and loss of earnings . . .It to my mind is thoroughly heartless to calculate such things, but obviously somebody has . .
chim666 said:
Sussex Police have drafted in a number of different unmarked, high-performance vehicles that are able to deter a hardcore of motorists who insist on putting people’s lives at risks.
With some vehicles capable of achieving in the region of 152mph top speed, there really isn’t much that’s going to get away ....
So how exactly is having unmarked pursuit cars capable of chasing speeding motorists at equally high speeds going to prevent fatalities?
Easy. The police will fall behind at 3 mph as every scrote learns the top police speed of 152mph and decides to use a BMW limited to 155.
What hogwash! £1M each fatality?? I'd like to see the invoices all added up together. Is this an average taken across a whole group? I'd respect these reports a little more if they had an exact figure and could actually back up their argument.
This smacks of scaremongering to me, it seems as though yet again the Police are attempting to back up their "speed kills" argument.
This smacks of scaremongering to me, it seems as though yet again the Police are attempting to back up their "speed kills" argument.
It's just a meaningless and no doubt made up number with no actual genuine calculating gone into it. Probably like the power of a nuclear weapon, doesnt matter what sort or size it is, it will always be described as ten, or a hundred, or a thousand times more powerfull than the Horoshima bomb. Sometimes these multiples are used when the weapon in question isnt actually as powerfull as that bomb.
Did the phrase 'up to' appear anywhere in that £1M headline figure? The media love 'up to' headlines as much as saying 750 'dead or injured' when its 3 dead, 35 injured and 712 with cuts & bruises.
Did the phrase 'up to' appear anywhere in that £1M headline figure? The media love 'up to' headlines as much as saying 750 'dead or injured' when its 3 dead, 35 injured and 712 with cuts & bruises.
This was discussed in Speed, Plod and the Law extensively last year as I recall. The majority of the figure relates to "soft" costs like distress of relatives.
I've just done a quick Google and found this: www.scotland.gov.uk/library5/transport/ras02-23.asp.
See table 10. The bits of interest are:
- lost output: £479,750
- medical/ambulance: £5400
- pain, grief, suffering: £952,100
- police admin: £1460
- damage to property: £5980-£12,890
...giving a grand total of £1,447,490.
Don't you just love the spurious accuracy of the calculation to 6 significant figures for something you can't really even begin to estimate!?!?
Put another way, the real cost of a fatality is around £20k (incidentally about the same as a serious injury). And note that road closures, loss of other drivers' time, etc, is not included at all.
Edited to say, even if the £1.5m figure were correct, it's completely wrong to say that this cost is borne by the taxpayer. Can the relatives claim £952,100 from the government for each road death? I'd say this is deliberate distortion of the truth by the police spokesperson.
>> Edited by Peter Ward on Friday 19th August 18:14
I've just done a quick Google and found this: www.scotland.gov.uk/library5/transport/ras02-23.asp.
See table 10. The bits of interest are:
- lost output: £479,750
- medical/ambulance: £5400
- pain, grief, suffering: £952,100
- police admin: £1460
- damage to property: £5980-£12,890
...giving a grand total of £1,447,490.
Don't you just love the spurious accuracy of the calculation to 6 significant figures for something you can't really even begin to estimate!?!?
Put another way, the real cost of a fatality is around £20k (incidentally about the same as a serious injury). And note that road closures, loss of other drivers' time, etc, is not included at all.
Edited to say, even if the £1.5m figure were correct, it's completely wrong to say that this cost is borne by the taxpayer. Can the relatives claim £952,100 from the government for each road death? I'd say this is deliberate distortion of the truth by the police spokesperson.
>> Edited by Peter Ward on Friday 19th August 18:14
It's all spurious. The greens do the same sort of thing with environmental 'costings' when they try to show that motorists don't fully pay for the impact of cars on the environment. In fact they (we) do pay over and above the odds, but there's a factor for the price the greens believe society would want to pay for an even cleaner environment which is huge, of course it would have to be. Then they forget to include the benefits in their cost-benefit analysis (!) e.g. the enormous economic benefits from car use, and also fail to 'estimate' the price people would put on being able to drive. Given recent research showing that a Sunday drive alone gives a sense of well being, and the survey some years ago which showed that 17 year olds would rather give up the right to vote than the right to drive, we're into big bucks. Totally one-sided and unreal.
In the case of a road fatality any loss of life is tragic but like the above cost-benefit miscalculation they make up big numbers for fanciful stuff and then include some elements that would be paid for anyway without the accident taking place. While it might seem insensitive there is also an equal absence of any 'benefit' in the calculation such as, erm, benefits paid for an average amount of unemployment or possible temporary disability, the cost of keeping the person as an elderly dependent patient later in life, and so on as it's not obvious these have been deducted to arrive at the 'loss of productivity' figure. Not that the government don't try to minimise the latter by making old people sell their house and their soul and so on - but it all adds up and it's not included.
It's tragedy wrapped in b0ll0x.
>> Edited by turbobloke on Friday 19th August 19:21
In the case of a road fatality any loss of life is tragic but like the above cost-benefit miscalculation they make up big numbers for fanciful stuff and then include some elements that would be paid for anyway without the accident taking place. While it might seem insensitive there is also an equal absence of any 'benefit' in the calculation such as, erm, benefits paid for an average amount of unemployment or possible temporary disability, the cost of keeping the person as an elderly dependent patient later in life, and so on as it's not obvious these have been deducted to arrive at the 'loss of productivity' figure. Not that the government don't try to minimise the latter by making old people sell their house and their soul and so on - but it all adds up and it's not included.
It's tragedy wrapped in b0ll0x.
>> Edited by turbobloke on Friday 19th August 19:21
Andy Eccles said:
From:
www.sussex.police.uk/features/roadsPolicing/we_never_went_away.asp
Sussex Police said:
For every fatal road traffic crash that happens in Sussex, it costs at least one life and the taxpayer £1,000,000.
Why £1,000,000?
Because it's a nice round figure which they hope will be grabbed by the tabloids who like simple stuff. This also helps, so they think, to justify speed control.
However, the truth is of course that speed control has cost lives and thus money. The fools.
Andy Eccles said:
From:
www.sussex.police.uk/features/roadsPolicing/we_never_went_away.asp
Sussex Police said:
For every fatal road traffic crash that happens in Sussex, it costs at least one life and the taxpayer £1,000,000.
Why £1,000,000?
Most of that is loss of future earnings.
For someone who dies at 40, when the average age to die is 75, then that's 35 years loss of earnings.
The *real* cost of a death is IMHO orders of magnitude less ( < 100 K ?).
Still, nice round numbers help the mathematically illiterate and newspaper editors.
dcb said:Isn't the Bernie for suffering of relatives and friends, and the mere half-Bernie (productivity lost) for future earnings? Who knows.
From:<a href="www.sussex.police.uk/features/roadsPolicing/we_never_went_away.asp">www.sussex.police.uk/features/roadsPolicing/we_never_went_away.asp</a> Sussex Police said:
For every fatal road traffic crash that happens in Sussex, it costs at least one life and the taxpayer £1,000,000.
Why £1,000,000?
Time for some more political incorrectness - sicne nu labia are always pointing out as part of their social justice claptrap that deprived persons living on sink estates are disproportionately represented in road accident stats, what's to say the calculation shouldn't have a significant weighting for the fact that in many cases 'society' doesn't lose years of productivity but 'saves' a lifetime of dole and benefits? Of course we can't think such uncaring thoughts, just swallow their information pollution (nope)
dcb said:
The *real* cost of a death is IMHO orders of magnitude less ( < 100 K ?). Still, nice round numbers help the mathematically illiterate and newspaper editors.
Spot on for both points I'd say
Peter Ward said:As many have pointed out, these coprolites of propaganda are permeated not just with nonsense but with true stupidity.
This was discussed in Speed, Plod and the Law extensively last year as I recall. The majority of the figure relates to "soft" costs like distress of relatives.
I've just done a quick Google and found this: <a href="www.scotland.gov.uk/library5/transport/ras02-23.asp.">www.scotland.gov.uk/library5/transport/ras02-23.asp.</a>
See table 10. The bits of interest are:
- lost output: £479,750
- medical/ambulance: £5400
- pain, grief, suffering: £952,100
- police admin: £1460
- damage to property: £5980-£12,890
...giving a grand total of £1,447,490.
Don't you just love the spurious accuracy of the calculation to 6 significant figures for something you can't really even begin to estimate!?!?
Put another way, the real cost of a fatality is around £20k (incidentally about the same as a serious injury). And note that road closures, loss of other drivers' time, etc, is not included at all.
Edited to say, even if the £1.5m figure were correct, it's completely wrong to say that this cost is borne by the taxpayer. Can the relatives claim £952,100 from the government for each road death? I'd say this is deliberate distortion of the truth by the police spokesperson.
>> Edited by Peter Ward on Friday 19th August 18:14
Perhaps we should be less critical of whichever fool in the Sussex Police PR department mindlessly parroted the £1M number - he or she would have heard a number somewhere and presumed that it would suit the purpose of the press release. Another braindead bureaucrat in action - what else is new?
More criticism should perhaps be directed at whoever was responsible for the "precise" figures that the Scottish Governing Class has been kind enough to foist upon its unsuspecting public.
In the Scottish fiction, "Pain, grief and suffering" and "Lost output" are 98.9% of the total headline number. In other words, they are the only two numbers that matter.
It has been observed that pain, grief and suffering by their very nature cannot be calculated. That is not because they are difficult to measure. It is because they have nothing to do with money. It might be possible one day for medical science to contrive a way to measure degrees of pain, grief and suffering, and relate one person's to another's, or compare different experiences within a single person's life. If so, what would be measured would be units of pain, not pounds and pence.
That is intuitively clear to most us (apart from Scottish bureaucrats and civilians in the Sussex Police). What is perhaps less clear is the illogic of the "Lost output" category.
Leave aside the fact that much of a person's lifetime income (that is, the exchange value of his/her output) is used by that same person, and therefore lost output owing to premature death is largely offset by foregone consumption. The whole concept of "lost output" as a cost to society is a fallacy.
When a working person suddenly stops working, he no longer produces an output or receives an income for producing one. If the cause for stopping work was someone else's negligence, the victim or his family may seek compensation for the income that he was expected to generate but that has been denied to them.
What the Scottish fiction and similar cost "analyses" fail to note, however, is that the victim's output has not been lost to society, it will simply be produced by another person.
It would be lost if the society had zero unemployment and could not accomodate immigrants, or if the victim performed a unique function that could never be replicated by anyone else in the world.
For better or worse, this is not and has never been the case.
D_Mike said:As a northern lad at heart I was merely acknowledging your idea as a good one ... we should all see to it that - purely for the good of society - we fatac ooop north if we absolutely must. Glad to hear you're back in fine fettle.
Everything is more expensive in the south east. if you die in the north it costs much less. Hi D_Mike, how's the jaw?
I'm not sure what your idea is.
Well, as a southern lad living oop north (yorkshire, its actually the furthest north I've been in the UK!)... I err... intend not to die at all really. If I was going to die I wouldn't mind dying on top of a nice hill with pretty views... more of them up here than there are in Sussex anyway.
living oop north (yorkshire, its actually the furthest north I've been in the UK!)... I err... intend not to die at all really. If I was going to die I wouldn't mind dying on top of a nice hill with pretty views... more of them up here than there are in Sussex anyway.During the active period of this thread I posted a question on the Sussex website regarding their figure and quoting government figures. I'd given up getting a response but today I got this:
All credit to the guy for responding. But I do wonder whether it's justified for the police to quote a government figure without qualification and then say "we didn't mean to mislead". I think they have some responsibility to give an accurate figure for the item they're talking about or to keep silent on it.
Sussex Police said:
Dear Mr Ward,
Firstly may I apologise for the delay in this response to your e-mail concerning road death costs. The officer to whom your enquiry was originally directed is off sick and the matter has only just been referred to me for response.
The figure quoted, as you quite correctly state, is the Government's estimation of the average cost to the tax payer of a road death. It is accepted that there is some variance to cost depending upon the age of the deceased and circumstances of the collision. The costs include medical treatment (many fatalities follow lengthy and expensive medical treatment), loss of productivity e.g. taxation etc., criminal justice system, including policing, road and street furniture repairs and economic loss resulting from disruption to the road network etc. Compensation claims are predominately funded by insurers and therefore are not included in these costs so far as I am aware.
It would be difficult for the police service to calculate the average cost, other than that incurred internally, as we are not in a position to know the cost of medical treatment etc. I am not sure where you get the figure of £20k for NHS costs, but there are considerable costs as a result of road deaths that fall outside of the police service and NHS. As a result of us not being in a position to calculate figures ourselves the Government's figure has been used and I assure you that there is no intention to mislead anybody.
Regards
Phil Clarke
Inspector RPD Operations
All credit to the guy for responding. But I do wonder whether it's justified for the police to quote a government figure without qualification and then say "we didn't mean to mislead". I think they have some responsibility to give an accurate figure for the item they're talking about or to keep silent on it.
Gassing Station | General Gassing [Archive] | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff