Earlier this morning, I was talking a friend through the painful process of getting a UK driving license. My friend is a Chartered Accountant and a banker. He is bringing up a family. He has been driving for about 20 years in India, the USA and various holiday destinations. It's hard to find a lower risk-profile than him. But getting a UK license remains a painful process, low-risk-profile or otherwise.
Part of the pain is, of course, the sheer bureaucracy. But a part of the pain is that there is a real risk of cautious and experienced drivers failing the test. The UK test is a heck of a lot more rigorous than equivalents in either India or, slightly more surprisingly, the USA.
Does the UK get anything valuable out of these rigourous tests (apart from the perverse pleasure oily government employees get from randomly saying no)?
A quick Google search seems to show that the testing works. The per capita death rate through road accidents in the UK is about half US levels. That is massive, a lot more than I was expecting.
An interesting twist in the data is that almost 65% of the difference in death rates seems to be explained the fact that the US has more cars per capita. A first glance the more money -> more cars -> more road deaths pattern seemed natural. But no. One might have expected a society that is more dependent on cars to invest more in road safety. And at some human level, the risk of death per individual just feels like a much more important metric than the risk of death per vehicle.
Another interesting slant in the data is the ratio of injuries to deaths. The UK and the US are around the same level here, suggesting that there are no material differences in the quality of medical care delivered to accident victims. If anything the much-reviled NHS seems to be delivering a slightly better ratio than the USA.
3 comments:
Many people are unaware of the terrible toll that roads and driving take on our societies.
The World Heath Organisation states; "By 2020 road injuries could overtake HIV and tuberculosis to rank third in the causes of premature death and disability around the world."
"In the UK, the poorest children are five times more likely to die on our roads than the better off and this picture is replicated around the globe,"
The WHO-World Bank joint report sets out specific measures aimed at reducing deaths from road traffic accidents.
These include providing affordable public transportation and safe crossings and paths for pedestrians.
It also suggests that communities should be planned so that residents do not have to travel far to go to work, school or local shops.
In addition, it says more could be done to separate different road users, like lorry drivers or those doing the school run.
Strangely, the report, to my knowledge, doesn't mention driving training as a factor...
It is probably makes sense that that most governments are focused on the total amount of driving. If people drive less, lives will be saved.
But it will take generations to re-organize cities in ways that materially change the amount of driving people do. Training/ testing might be a quicker, lower cost route
Is this more about car usage? My impression is that cars are used a lot more in the US. I wonder how the fatalities per mile statistics would compare?
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