Increased speed limits on Oklahoma interstates

[kalvado]

Surprisingly, hardly any of you seem to care about how many people die on American roads. Does this not alarm anyone else?

No, we're suggesting that the potential benefit of an enhanced and thus more cost-prohibitive driver education program isn't necessarily worth the negative consequences that would result from it.

I can't speak for everyone involved in this discussion, of course, but the existence of risk compensation makes me fairly pessimistic about the potential for any given intervention to reduce the road fatality toll, either as an absolute number or as rates based on population or total vehicle-distance driven.  As a result, I--like many other drivers--tend to support measures that allow me to shave my risk at little net increase in inconvenience or out-of-pocket cost, such as changes in vehicle design, upgrades to roadside safety hardware, continued improvement of the highway infrastructure more generally, and so on.  Tightening driver licensing tends to fail on both of those criteria (though there are some measures that can be and in some states have been adopted with relatively little trouble, such as a logbook requirement for learners).

In general, lifetime risk of dying in a crash is about 1% in US right now, so out-of-pocket willingness to pay would be about $10K over the lifetime to cut that in half.
Low hanging fruits are alcohol and some tightening of maintenance rules IMHO.
It may be counter-intuitive, but I suspect improvement of vehicle design is not necessarily a net positive move past some point. Higher acquisition and maintenance cost would push people towards older clunkers  as described above - causing average vehicle on the road to be older and  less safe. This is a speculation only, however there are actual examples of such negative effects.
Possibly there are similar effects with respect to road budgets, where a great new structure leaves a lot of remote roads with diminishing maintenance,  but that is a whole different can of worms 

[J N Winkler]

In general, lifetime risk of dying in a crash is about 1% in US right now, so out-of-pocket willingness to pay would be about $10K over the lifetime to cut that in half.

Low hanging fruits are alcohol and some tightening of maintenance rules IMHO.

I tend to agree.

It may be counter-intuitive, but I suspect improvement of vehicle design is not necessarily a net positive move past some point. Higher acquisition and maintenance cost would push people towards older clunkers  as described above - causing average vehicle on the road to be older and  less safe. This is a speculation only, however there are actual examples of such negative effects.

I do see such a mechanism for clawback of safety gains as at least a theoretical possibility.  However, given that the average age of a light-duty vehicle on the road in the US has increased only modestly since 2002 (9.6 years) to 2019 (11.8 years), I don't see that recent safety improvements are failing to percolate through the vehicle fleet, albeit at an increased delay that may very well be a result of greater durability due in part to improved corrosion resistance.  (It seems noteworthy, however, that the vast bulk of the increase in average age occurred in the eight years between 2007 and 2015, presumably in connection with household debt deleveraging following the Great Recession of 2008.)

From the standpoint of clawback, my big worry has been behavioral adaptation to the presence of safety devices, e.g. driving more recklessly because the vehicle has more airbags and is in general more thoroughly engineered to protect the occupants' lives in an accident.  This is what risk compensation essentially is.  One first-line solution is for the driver to take personal responsibility and continue to drive as if this sophisticated protection were absent, so that the safety gain is preserved.  I don't know what design approaches could be used to defeat risk compensation in a more systematic fashion.

[SoonerCowboy]

So how 'bout them speed limits?

My thoughts exactly.

[jakeroot]

I--like many other drivers--tend to support measures that allow me to shave my risk at little net increase in inconvenience or out-of-pocket cost, such as changes in vehicle design, upgrades to roadside safety hardware, continued improvement of the highway infrastructure more generally, and so on.  Tightening driver licensing tends to fail on both of those criteria (though there are some measures that can be and in some states have been adopted with relatively little trouble, such as a logbook requirement for learners).

The best improvements are those that come free to us. I can absolutely understand your point of view here, and I agree with it.

To everyone else: I did not prepare to extend this discussion to such great length. I absolutely do not want to make things needlessly difficult or even impossible for those who have less income, or for those who simply have no other choice but to drive. I am aware that driving is ingrained into the fabric of so much of society (basically as kphoger put it); the difference is that I don't believe driving has to remain part of the fabric for so many people. Driving exists in every country, even North Korea, and the vast majority of first-world countries practice suburban development, but we have the unique ability to say that we drive more than anyone else despite not being exactly unique in our development patterns. I don't believe we can improve road safety without reducing reliance on vehicles amongst those that don't absolutely need to drive (so, excluding farmers, those off the beaten path, single mothers, et al). I feel this begins, at the very least, with stricter urban planning rules. Current practices are only cementing the concept of "the right to drive", and I feel that's unwise.

[skluth]

Interesting discussion, but how about those speed limits???? 

[jakeroot]

Interesting discussion, but how about those speed limits???? 

To you and kphoger: thread discussions vary all the time. Get used to it, if you're not already.

[Rothman]

Interesting discussion, but how about those speed limits???? 

To you and kphoger: thread discussions vary all the time. Get used to it, if you're not already.

And thread variances get separated out or shut down by admins all the time.  Get used to it.

[jakeroot]

Interesting discussion, but how about those speed limits???? 

To you and kphoger: thread discussions vary all the time. Get used to it, if you're not already.

And thread variances get separated out or shut down by admins all the time.  Get used to it.

But they shouldn't here. We have been discussing driving exams and related topics since the first page. This "second round" seems to have started after Scott (an admin!) made a point about retesting about 60 posts ago.

There is a very obvious connection between driver competence and increased limits. As in, we need the former in order to responsibly adopt the latter.

[Scott5114]

Nobody's ever gotten sanctioned for thread drift. It's so inevitable it's like tilting at windmills. Best we can do is just split threads when needed.

Anyway, I think there's definitely some people lacking in competence that should be excluded from driving on safety grounds. My main objection is to imposing a high license fee, which does nothing to inherently improve safety (since you are not selecting for the safest drivers, only the richest). The only reason to do such a thing is to penalize car usage and force drivers to other modes of transit (which is not feasible in rural states like Oklahoma, as the responses in this thread illustrate), or to implement a Fallinesque tax scheme to raise revenue "without raising taxes", which ends up being more regressive than the taxes it replaces.

[kalvado]

In general, lifetime risk of dying in a crash is about 1% in US right now, so out-of-pocket willingness to pay would be about $10K over the lifetime to cut that in half.

Low hanging fruits are alcohol and some tightening of maintenance rules IMHO.

I tend to agree.

It may be counter-intuitive, but I suspect improvement of vehicle design is not necessarily a net positive move past some point. Higher acquisition and maintenance cost would push people towards older clunkers  as described above - causing average vehicle on the road to be older and  less safe. This is a speculation only, however there are actual examples of such negative effects.

I do see such a mechanism for clawback of safety gains as at least a theoretical possibility.  However, given that the average age of a light-duty vehicle on the road in the US has increased only modestly since 2002 (9.6 years) to 2019 (11.8 years), I don't see that recent safety improvements are failing to percolate through the vehicle fleet, albeit at an increased delay that may very well be a result of greater durability due in part to improved corrosion resistance.  (It seems noteworthy, however, that the vast bulk of the increase in average age occurred in the eight years between 2007 and 2015, presumably in connection with household debt deleveraging following the Great Recession of 2008.)

From the standpoint of clawback, my big worry has been behavioral adaptation to the presence of safety devices, e.g. driving more recklessly because the vehicle has more airbags and is in general more thoroughly engineered to protect the occupants' lives in an accident.  This is what risk compensation essentially is.  One first-line solution is for the driver to take personal responsibility and continue to drive as if this sophisticated protection were absent, so that the safety gain is preserved.  I don't know what design approaches could be used to defeat risk compensation in a more systematic fashion.

I don't see airbags as something that would affect risk estimates. I, for one, never saw a deployed one in person - it is more a subject of endless recalls than a safety device for me. Costs associated with an accident, however, are a very real thing. Even with comprehensive insurance package we have on our cars(and I actually think about coverage about once a year, during policy renewal), headache of managing service (been there!) and physical pain (never say never - so not yet) are very real things. Better brakes are a very visible thing, though.

As for age increase - I woulnd't call 20% "modest". If you think about it, it may very well mean multifold increase of 15+ year vehicles.
On a similar token, pickup age is significantly higher, 13 year - and if you think about pickup clunker as a workhorse for a lower end contractor/farmer - that blends well with the previous discussion. I saw more than a few of those with panels completely rusting off.
I don't know how much longevity enters the equation. It certainly does, though, no question about that. Ratio of that effect to financial considerations effect is harder to estimate, though.

[kphoger]

To you and kphoger: thread discussions vary all the time. Get used to it, if you're not already.

I know.  And I was happy to be part of this side-discussion.  I just wanted to get in front of the OP or another member complaining about the length of this particular thread drift.  It was getting long and a little heated, so I was just trying to steer us back before people started getting upset.