Cars, lies and statistics

At TOIP I learned that the road and traffic authorities like to blame all road accidents and fatalities on three causes, namely speeding, drugs and alcohol and driver fatigue. This is pretty much all that they measure and indeed for each incident they like to assign a single one of these three causes to make the maths easier for the kindergarten-level statisticians they obviously hire.

Lies, damned lies and statistics eh? If this is all you measure and everything has to fit into this bucket then is it any surprise that the benefits of responding to these measured causes asymptote away after a few years?

You have to wonder if they are just stupid or, more likely, protecting a billion dollar legal services industry that have emerged around the fining of drivers associated with these three factors.

The government notes that “The annual economic cost of road crashes in Australia is enormous — estimated at $27 billion per annum—and the social impacts are devastating”. See – http://www.infrastructure.gov.au/roads/safety/

Well there are 17.2m registered vehicles in Australia so the cost of road crashes is appox. $1600 PER ANNUM PER CAR!

Now let’s see. A quick search of the internet finds:

1. A GPS enabled vehicle speed controller for A$55. See – http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Real-Time-Tracking-gps-tracker-mini_1785558320.html

2. An in-car alcohol meter ignition lock-out system can be got for $300 in volume (I asked) – http://andatech.trustpass.alibaba.com/product/111463430-101315460/AlcoSense_Vehicle_Ignition_Interlock_FR9000.html

3. An in-car driver fatigue system could be had for $500 per unit (I know the CEO) – see http://www.dssmining.com/what-we-do/how-it-works/

So, to summarise, if we believe the current government story, with a one-off investment by government or car-users of $855 per car, i.e. half of the annual costs of road accidents in Australia, we could completely eliminate road accidents and deaths.

In fact, with 17.2m units being sold the costs would probably come down to around $200 per car.

My guess is that this approach would only cut out about one third of accidents and up to a half of the fatalities. But it’s still worth doing.

But revenues from traffic offences would drop to virtually zero and the legal industry would decimated.

Go figure!