This is a guest post from reader NCD
The above graph is a cumulative series for two causes of death in New Zealand 1921 to 2012. Can you guess what the data series for the blue and green lines are?
One of the challenges we face as a society is responding well to events that happen repeatedly as a series of smaller events that added together result in a major crisis. In contrast we respond dramatically to an event that concentrates the trauma into a short time span. The green line is earthquake deaths, the blue line is road traffic accident (RTA) deaths.
- Total deaths from earthquakes in New Zealand since 1921: 464
- Total deaths from traffic accidents since 1921: 37542 (at the end of 2012, although it seems that someone left the meter running).
You’re roughly 100 times more likely to be killed in a RTA than in an earthquake.
I wonder if our minister of Earthquakes and Traffic accidents, having a foot in each camp as it were, has ever paused to consider that he’s presiding over a much bigger disaster than Christchurch, but that hardly anyone’s noticed.
The 2 world wars are a bit different to an earthquake, in that there’s human causation. So we have sentiments like “never again” and “lest we forget” attached, the implication being that we mustn’t let such terror happen again. Total New Zealanders killed in the two world wars: around 28500 – several thousand less than have been killed in RTAs over the last century.
Over the next decades we’ll spend billions of dollars strengthening buildings for an earthquake that will likely kill dozens or hundreds. And while we’re willing to throw considerable sums at road safety, the sentiment is not the same. One gets the feeling that in spite of the rhetoric RTAs are considered by politicians as more like collateral damage- a necessary cost of doing something more important.
We have a lot to thank the airline industry for, not least an approach to safety that leads to astounding stats like this for 2011:
- USA large commercial airline deaths: zero
- For comparison, USA RTA deaths: 32,367 (You can see why a bar chart here wouldn’t be particularly useful!)
By the way, those airline safety stats weren’t a fluke: they were repeated in 2010 and 2012 and Q1 2013.
Now compare the (very helpful) fixation we have with the battery in a Boeing 787 that has yet to cause a crash, with our willingness to let cars travel in a way where we know they will frequently crash and kill. One might say that the airline industry has a bit of a Bob Newhart approach to safety. If it’s dangerous you just stop it.
The issue is increasingly on the radar for public health research and initiatives. In fact 2011-2020 is WHO’s Decade of Action for Road Safety. Worldwide we get the equivalent of a holocaust death toll every 5 or so years.
As for the economic cost of RTAs, NZTA has come up with some figures (because you can’t really get excited about a crisis until you put a dollar value on it, right?). Currently they’re estimating about $4 million per fatality. Including injury we’re at $3.70 billion dollars per year .
$37 billion dollars a decade. That’s quite an economic benefit you’ve got to produce by driving before you countered the cost of the damage done, let alone actually added to the positive side of the ledger (and don’t get me started on the pollution that isn’t counted!). Should we frame the debate differently by investigating the huge costs of inaction?
Once again, the Christchurch earthquake provides an interesting comparison: the scale of the trauma has caused us to re-evaluate the way we do things in New Zealand. Although there is huge economic cost in compliance with new standards, we (The Property Council excluded) accept this is needed, and we’re prepared to take the hit.
As for air transport, if we were having 300 commercial airline deaths per year, it would be all planes grounded with no protest brooked as to the economic cost of such action.
Behind the numbers and dollars we shouldn’t forget that there’s a society with disability, loss, loneliness and pain- measure that NZTA!
Given our current fatality rate, in the next hundred years we’re still on track to kill 20,000 to 30,000 New Zealanders. Which alternative universe are our politicians occupying where this is acceptable?
Before we have a debate about solutions (there’s another post for that), it might be worth considering if we need a different approach to the problem- one that allows for drastic action, one that challenges the core assumptions on which current acceptance of the status quo is based.
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Nice post, a much more positive reason. Be good to see the recent NZ stats for commuting hours (the main PT debate) transport accident stats (air, bike, bus, car, ferry, taxi, train, walk) accidents/deaths
Yep the costs around our addiction to cars are gobsmacking… when you look at the whole package, capital costs (buying/importing cars, building roads, importing oil etc), ‘ongoing’ costs (maintenance, running costs etc), wider economic costs of RTAs you describe here, the downstream ‘human’ costs… etc etc… it makes no sense at all.
Yet the pro-car lobby (manipulated by Big Oil historically) argue we can’t afford proper intra & inter city networks of trains, trams etc.
Over a long time frame, quality mass transport costs are a mere pittance compared to the short term thinking of motorised individualised transport – as your figures start to show.
I can appreciate the line of reasoning, although the key question I have is what kind of impacts could be expected from measures to improve safety? I.e. what is the pay-off from the types of drastic measures you suggest and how do these pay-offs change as RTA reduce?
I suspect the benefit/cost ratio of improvements may start to decline exponentially beyond a certain point, i.e. there will be some residual “rump” of RTA that are either impossible or extraordinarily expensive to fix. And before someone points it out, I will say that I do sometimes question the lengths we are prepared to go to with regard to Earthquake-proving old buildings.
But it seems perfectly reasonable to suggest that with NZ’s temperate weather we should be able to achieve the level of RTA found in, say, Northern European countries such as Norway.
You’re earthquake statement is interesting Stu and I agree. Building owners around NZ are going to have to spend many millions of dollars when in fact if the fatalities from the earthquake are analysed at a basic level, the majority of the deaths occurred in a single, relatively new building. Is this sudden need to earthquake proof all buildings over the top in relation to the actual risk?
At a high level of analysis, each vehicle km removed will bring a safety improvement in terms of accidents, injuries and fatalities avoided, so I suspect that the biggest road-safety scheme around in Auckland at the moment is the CRL. Again, this is another line of argument that AT could be pushing harder in terms of promoting the CRL scheme.
Induced demand would tend to undermine these savings, i.e. PT frees-up capacity on the road network that is eventually soaked up by additional vehicle trips, which by extension means that congestion and road accidents reache a similar equilibrium to where it was previously; the so-called “Downs Law”. http://www.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/IMG/pdf/traffic_seminar3b.pdf
But even if you ultimately reached the same absolute level of injury/fatality as now, there would be a period of time between implementation and the return to equilibrium when it would be reduced. There would be accidents, injuries and fastalities avoided.
Even when the trend took things on the roads back to equilibrium, you would still be achieving a higher number of passenger kms (by any mode) than now for the same level of accidents. .
fatalities even
Surely the need to Earthquake Proof Buildings isn’t just on the fatality side of things, but also the fact that if they stay standing it doesn’t cost the business/government/insurance companies money, (the bonus is probably that people won’t die) cause I’d imagine it’s more for the businesses and government not bailing out insurance companies etc.
Actually people can still lose a lot of money even if the buildings don’t fall down – our earthquake standards are designed to protect lives in the event of a quake, not the stricter threshold of ensuring that the buildings are still in perfect condition afterwards. Hence why 1,000+ buildings in the CBD have been demolished since the Christchurch quakes, even though most of them did a good job of keeping people alive through the disaster.
The building standards call for earthquake resistant buildings,not earthquake proof.ones.
As JohnP says, the difference is not whether the building is usable again afterwards, but more whether the building stays up and protects the occupants (and people near by) during the quake.
Same with cars, most are designed to protect the occupants (or people hit) from being killed or injured rather than ensuring the car still drives afterwards.
The car industry and the building industry have a natural vested interest in selling new cars or building new buildings – not fixing old bent ones, so this serves them and us both well.
[but we pay in insurance premiums].
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/05/september-11-road-deaths
A similar theme
I don’t think it is a fair comparison. The government is only spending a fraction on bringing buildings up to code. its mostly private expense. as opposed to government expense on road safety. FYI it has been estimated that in the 20th century, 60 million died from traffic accidents, 1.5 from earthquakes, 39 from falls, 100 from smoking and 116 from air pollution. maybe we should ban smoking, its a lot cheaper and would give better returns.
There’s a huge difference when comparing large scale natural disasters to continuous casualties as a result of human activity. For example the average number of fatalities from earthquakes is a little over 5 per year using your figures. While this is true it may not be the actual risk of dying in such an event. Christchurch got off lightly. If the earthquake had been of a higher magnitude then fatalities would have been much higher. There is nothing that says that a single event couldn’t kill much more than 80 years of driving fatalities. It is also difficult comparing risk factors between two activities. You have to take into account time spent in each activity, number of participants etc… You can’t just say that one has less fatalities than the other therefore it’s safer. Otherwise insanely risky activities that few people engage in like climbing Mt Everest or spaceflight come out as low risk. Don’t get me wrong driving is pretty dangerous and more should be done to minimise the risks but you haven’t really made a great argument.
In terms of a rate of risk as a function of exposure, driving and contact sports are the most dangerous things you can do.
One aspect that tends to be overlooked is how much safer all forms of public transport are than cars. I don’t know about the rest of the country, but Greater Wellington figures show that the risk of travelling in a car (as driver or passenger) is 10 times that of being a bus passenger.
Is there other any single initiative that could reduce personal travel risk by 90%?
Not to detract from the serious nature of the issue but the claim can be rephrased in terms of how much safer trained and regulated professional drivers are than drunken/drugged/distracted/law-breaking amateurs. Put 19 year-old texting drunken males behind the wheels of buses full of passengers at 1 am and you would see a big increase in bus fatalities. Modern cars are not intrinsically more dangerous than modern buses. Similarly, get a train driver distracted with texting on their cell phone and the risk increases dramatically (as was the case in California a few years ago where a commuter train over-ran a signal and collided with a freight train).
I am old enough, just, to remember the 1973 spike in the road toll which claimed 840 lives or thereabouts. What’s also worth remembering is that the road toll in 2012 was a little over 300 people – and to heighten the contrast, with a million more people in New Zealand and twice (?) as many vehicles on the road. So, over time, New Zealand’s road risk has fallen considerably. Have a look here for some other interesting comparisons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
Thank you NCD for writing this piece. It is a message which needs to be repeated over and over, as it cuts to the heart of one of the biggest inconsistencies in our societal development. It highlights a grotesque “blind spot” in the thinking of many people, who fail to recognise the anomaly or to question how it arose. How social impacts which would not remotely be tolerated in other walks of life are none-the-less tolerated on the roads. If airlines, railways or other industries manifested such a level of harm as does road-transport, they would be grounded until things were fixed, regardless of cost or disruption.
One of the biggest problems is the assumption that pretty much anyone has a right to drive, with minimal regulation or monitoring. Contrast this with the requirements necessary to become (and remain) a pilot or train driver. Perhaps if the requirements to gain (and retain) a drivers’ licence were similarly demanding, only those wishing to do so in a professional capacity would bother and driving would become much more a professional activity. But so ingrained into our thinking has the status-quo become that people react with shock and horror to such a suggestion. And the problem is compounded by a society which has seen fit to dismantle most of the transport alternatives to car- and truck-dependency.
Perhaps a future generation will change all this, and will look back in amazement at the way in which our society today allowed itself to become so addicted to such a costly and destructive activity.
Thanks.
Yes, I think future generations will see this aspect of our culture as barbaric. Especially in it’s treatment of the innocent.
And the deaths, pre-automobile, from horse drawn transport? From the typhoid from horse shit? And the lower life expectancy from a lower rate of economic development, with which automobility closely correlates? Automobility is an inherent part of human progress to something better. It is pointless to always focus only on the negative externalities and fail to see the bigger picture.
It is also absurd to suggest that mass public transport could enable anything like the same economic development, and in particular, the minimisation of the economic land rent that so bothered Karl Marx and Henry George and their contemporaries. Of course the Soviets made everybody live in flats and catch trains, and did not have to bother about economic land rent because all land was nationalised. The economic efficiency was, however, a disaster even without the distortions to land markets that result from a lack of automobility.
I have come here because of a link posted from an argument HERE:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/8950273/Swarm-could-trigger-capital-fault
I am not sure whether my response there will make it through moderation. So I will post more below here.
The argument started with “Paulson” saying
Very little has been learnt yet from the Christchurch events and the huge vulnerabilities of Central Business Districts.
Decentralised urban areas with low and light construction is the only way to go, from both economic and seismic risk perspectives. And others too.
“Best” said:
Paulson is absolutely correct. Wellington has been set up to be many times more tragic than Christchurch and many times worse than it could have been if its planning had been more attentive to human safety – WHEN, NOT IF, the “big one” hits. Wellington’s planning has been shamelessly manipulated to the benefit of CBD property investors. Of course Greenie “anti-sprawl” absolutism has been the convenient pretext.
“GMB” said:
Best: Start here: http://greaterakl.wpengine.com/2013/05/01/shakes-guns-and-automobiles/
It’s easy to fear The Big One. It’s a big catastrophe and people will probably die. We will probably have killed more in the year on the roads, but that’s not a catastrophe because it’s individual choices and the instantaneous toll is small. So WHEN Wellington’s Big One comes, it will be tragic, but probably not as tragic as what we do every day.
I am anti-sprawl for a number of reasons. Sure, it’s wasteful and clogs the roads at peak hour travel, also wasting time and money. But mostly I’m anti-sprawl because sprawl makes cities boring and I’m part of a generation that cares about details like that. Again, WHEN Wellington’s Big One comes, it will be tragic, but I refuse to live a tragic half-life in suburbia.
So while you’re driving back and forth to your sprawling suburban home, think about the relationship between distance travelled and the road toll. VKT stands for Vehicle Kilometers Travelled and it’s a reliable predictor for the road toll. So realistically, you’re trading catastrophes. The only difference is that you refuse to see the road toll as a systematic design failure.
gmb: there is plenty of academic research on “decentralisation and the stability of travel time”. Peter Gordon et al and Alex Anas et al are the main authors to look out for. Wellington has nearly 1/3 of regional employment in its CBD area and this makes it an international outlier. 15% is closer to average. It is far easier for the most people to live closer to work when employment is dispersed.
If VMT is higher in dispersed cities, it is not because the urban form is inefficient, but because people get places quicker and have more money left over after housing costs. All the cities in the USA with house price median multiples stable at 3 for years (including through the “US” house price bubble) are low density (around 1/3 Auckland, or LA, or the European average) and they also all happen to have average-to- low traffic congestion.
Check out the TomTom Congestion Index. Wellington must be the world’s worst city of such a small population – it is worse than every city in the USA except LA, which is 30 times its size. I would love to see average commute distances too, but no-one has done the necessary research. I bet Wellington is especially bad for this, due to people being “priced out” of the most efficient locations. Our road toll and accident rate are nothing to be proud of. I don’t know why you think there is a relationship between this and our “superior urban planning” compared to US cities 1/3 our density. Ours is slightly worse, if anything.
So all our growth containment planning and intensification and commuter rail “investments” over the last 30 years hasn’t achieved much that is positive, has it? The bottom quartile housing prices are about 3 times what they should be – the bottom quartile is always inflated the most, which is social injustice. So is the fact that lower income earners are the most “priced out” of locations near employment in insufficiently decentralised cities.
The NZ economy might never recover from a “big one” when it hits such an appallingly badly designed Wellington. It could be 20 times costlier economically than ChCh as well as in human life. And meanwhile it is doubtful there is any net gain from the policies that are the cause of this.
Another common misperception about VMT, which actually tends to rise predictably with GDP per capita everywhere, with the real price of petrol acting as a moderator, is that it is people with cars “driving more and more” Actually by far the greatest contributor is more and more people getting mobility. Women, the poor, the elderly, the young.