A'ight. I specialized in vehicular manslaughters as a prosecutor for ten years. This is all anecdotal (though a lot of anecdotes, testing the cliche that the plural of anecdotes is not data) and worryingly close to argument from authority, but here are some quick ones not otherwise covered (and there is much good advice in the above):
Don't get in the car with the drinker. Everyone's drinking, guy seems OK even though he's had a few... just don't. If you watched the drinker the entire time and he's 190 pounds and had three beers during the three-hour football game, you're fine. But if you don't know, don't get in. If you're a teenager and the drinker's a teenager, don't get in the car. Please.
Tailor your speed to the conditions. Statistics keepers often cite speed when the real culprit is inattention. (It's an unsafe speed to rear-end another vehicle stopped at a light; the safe speed is zero behind a stopped car.) Speeding's a serious problem in residential areas or in rainy or dark condtions. If you're driving from Reno to Utah, a safe speed is probably very high.
Cross the street carefully. Pedestrians and bicyclists get killed. It's sometimes not their fault, but they end
Before my car burned the other week, I always kept a sleeping bag and alarm clock in my trunk; if I felt dangerously fatigued, I'd take off 20 minutes for a nap.
I think this post could do with some estimates of absolute risks.
According to the site you link to, there are 7476 deaths in traffic accidents for people in the 15-24 age range (NB - this presumably includes pedestrians, so is a massive overestimate of the deaths of people who were driving, but I'll go with it for now).
In total, there were 21,859,806 males in your age group, so your probability of dying in a road traffic accident in any given year is approximately 0.0003. This translates to a risk per day of approximately 0.0000009.
Combining these numbers naively, the risk of being involved in a traffic accident on the first snowy day is approximately 0.0000009*1.14. In other words, your excess risk of dying by driving on the first snowy day is approximately 0.0000001. Even assuming that driving in snow is 10 times more dangerous than driving in normal conditions, this risk is 1 in 1 million. Is it really worth going out of your way to avoid driving on the first snowy day to avoid a 1 in 1 million increased chance of dying?
It is worth noting that as an avid transhumanist, I might well expect Michael to think that a 1 in 1 million increased chance of living as long as the Singulari...
Cycling is around 10 times more dangerous per passenger mile than driving
...but might contribute sufficiently to your reduced risk of dying of coronary heart disease at 45 to offset that?
PSAs involving traffic safety appear to be one use of manipulation for the better, as in this excellent seatbelt commercial (got the link from lukeprog's twitter).
Wow. That is a beautiful commercial -- which utterly transcends the particular UK locality it was originally targeted to -- and remarkably different from typical PSAs of this type. (Indeed, fearing the typical scary PSA, I almost didn't click on the link.)
Apparently it was designed that way:
Created to raise awareness of the importance of wearing a seatbelt, Embrace Life was deliberately developed to provide a counter-point to the hard-hitting 'shock and awe' advertising so common to road safety.
Here's a few general principles I use.
Notice near misses and any aggressive manoevres you have to make. Any violent manoevre that you have to make is quite possibly an accident if anything additional goes wrong. Ask yourself what caused them, and if there was anything you could have done differently to make the incident less dangerous. This includes cases where the other driver is principally to blame ! Basically, treat near misses like aircraft do - think of it as an accident that you luckily didn't have, and try to find some way to avoid depending on luck next time.
Don't do things that nobody else will expect you to do. Doing something that nobody else is doing is dumb, not just because there might be a good reason not to do it, but also because nobody else will expect you to do it, and they may not allow for it. Follow the crowd unless you really know you're out there by yourself. This obviously includes driving faster than everyone else, or stopping suddenly (if you don't absolutely have to) etc.
Never let your car go where your brain and observation haven't been first. Drive to a complexity level that you can handle - if too much is going on, slow down until you can cope
Drive less. Commutes are dangerous, expensive, and mentally taxing. You would have to earn 40% more money at a job with a one hour commute to be equally satisfied with a local job.
One additional factor if you try to incorporate this stuff: everyone acting like you're a freaking weirdo for being vigilant. I'm referred to as a bad driver because I am cautious. People assume caution stems from incompetence.
Suicide is almost as likely cause of your death as a traffic accident. People spend too little effort at preventing traffic accidents, no question about it (all statistics agree that we are getting better at it, just too slowly), but situation is many orders of magnitude worse when it comes to preventing risk of death by suicide. We don't even do routine screening for depression! This total lack of concern is pure madness!!!
Most people replying to this comment seem to be assuming that no one is doing anything to prevent suicide. This is wrong. Public schools in the US spend a significant amount of time on suicide awareness and prevention - more time total than for driver's education, I would guess.
I won't dispute that this may not be sufficient or successful, but it is ignorant to assume that no one is trying to prevent suicides.
There is a discussion on this topic in Cialdini's Influence (which is a great read).
It is very difficult to tell the difference between an accidental traffic accident and a suicidal traffic accident (i.e. purposefully close your eyes and turn the wheel into oncoming traffic). The reason people may commit suicide this way is to avoid the stigma of suicide, avoid hurting their loved ones, and to allow their beneficiaries to receive their life insurance benefits. However some statistical analysis can give us a clue:
There is a trend that when a suicide is committed and covered in the news, there is often a rash of "copy-cat" suicides immediately following. These copy-cats are generally similar to the original in gender, age and style (public v. private, self-only v. murder-suicide, etc) .
The rate of traffic accident deaths ALSO greatly increases following media coverage of a suicide. This suggests that many of these traffic accidents may actually be suicides, but it is possible that there is some other factor (i.e. perhaps hearing about suicides makes people sad, which makes them prone to bad driving).
However, further study reveals that similar to other copy-cat suicides, t...
“Most highway accidents occur in the left lane”
You might want to specify what country that's about, since “about 66.1% of the world's people live in right-hand traffic countries and 33.9% in left-hand traffic countries” (from Wikipedia).
I missed a few important tips:
And do not forget: Traffic fatalities go down for decades. It is not as bad as one might think from looking into it.
On a related note, stocking canned food [so that you can remain indoors] for the event of high mortality pandemic (e.g. flu) can easily be order of magnitude more effective than reducing your risk of traffic accident all way to zero.
A high mortality pandemic has probability of one in few hundred years historically, higher if you scale for the population size, higher still if you scale for the pig and poultry farms. The death rates can approach 10% or more.
The problem with the risks that are global, is that anyone who wears seatbelt is vindicated of the accusation of paranoya once every few minutes by a preventable traffic fatality, whereas anyone who stocks up food for pandemic, is vindicated once a hundred years. People tend to act on things to avoid being blamed for ineptitude rather than to preserve themselves.
This by the way goes for safety engineering of anything that's big and few, like nuclear power plants, and natural disasters, like tsunamis.
Stop. Think about that for a second. I’ll convert it to the Imperial system for my fellow Americans: “in a [37.3 mph] speed limit area, the risk of involvement in a casualty crash doubles with each [3.1 mph] increase in travelling speed above [37.3 mph].” Remember that next time you drive a 'mere' 5 mph over the limit.
Could be that generally reckless drivers are more likely to exceed the speed limit.
So if you find yourself exceeding the limit, that's evidence that you're a reckless driver, and you should adjust your behavior accordingly.
Also note that millions more are injured rather than killed every year, making the dangers far higher than the death statistics indicate.
This is all good information. One thing missing in the seat belt part. Everybody in the car needs to be buckled down and heavy cargo like your laptop should be stowed in the trunk. There is a great video they showed in my defensive driving class which was an Irish television public service advertisement with four people in a car and three of them were wearing their seat belts and they were in an accident and everybody got killed with the unbuckled passenger flopping around the inside of the passenger compartment like a billiard ball.
As an amateur race car driver, I've got a few things to add here.
There's one very important tip I've never seen driver's ed courses mention concerning rain driving: the available traction on wet pavement varies wildly depending on the surface. Rougher surfaces tend to offer more grip, some feel nearly as good as driving in the dry. Smoother surfaces tend to offer less, some (the worst blacktop parking lots) feeling as bad as driving on ice. Any paint (such as painted-on brick strips on some intersections) is going to be very slick, as is most concrete (as its generally smooth, though rougher concrete like is found on runways will have lots of grip). Between different types of wet asphalt the difference in grip of my race car (on street tires) can range from around 1.0 gees of maximum lateral acceleration to as low as 0.65.
Metal drawbridges are also extremely slick in the wet, to the point where a strong wind can blow a car into other lanes.
So unless your familiar with the surface you're driving on, do not take anything for granted in the wet. On poor surfaces even a little bit of water can massively increase stopping distances. Unfortunately you can't count on newer construction be...
Ten years later: How to avoid dying in a driverless car crash
Update your software frequently. Don't use cheap firewalls, choose the more reliable ones.
Don't use laptop or cell phone in the car, their electromagnetic frequencies may interfere with the car driving system. For extra safety, turn off the radio.
Don't drive after rain or in fog. Water may get into circuits, causing hardware failure in a dangerous situation.
Don't drive in the rain. A lightning close to you car may disrupt your GPS system or car driving system.
Don't drive in the first snowy day. The optical recognition system may not be fully adjusted yet.
When crossing a time-zone boundary, be ready to manually override the car navigation in case of a software bug.
Avoid the roads with human drivers, cyclicts, pedestrians, or where animals appear. The software does not always recognize them perfectly.
What? Teleportation FTW!
Twenty years later: How to avoid dying during teleportation: Turn off your electronic implants, because their signals may interfere with the scanning device. Don't teleport in a rainy day; a lightning in a wrong time may disrupt the data transfer. Etc.
Twenty years later: How to avoid dying during teleportation:
Adjust your philosophy as necessary such that the casual destruction of your physical form is not considered 'death'. Then make damn sure the anesthetizing system is in good functioning order before you are put to sleep, scanned, sent and destroyed.
The suggested hypothesis is that people take at least a day to recalibrate their driving behavior in light of new snow.
Solution: make an explicit effort to avoid driving on the first snowy day after a sequence of non-snowy ones. Use Anki to remember this association.
What, one can recalibrate one's driving behaviour in snow without actually driving? If not, not driving on the first snowy day only means that you'll get the effect of increased risk on the second snowy day instead. (But on the other hand you'd still be less likely to be involved by accidents caused by others -- but such a rule is not Categorical Imperative-izable.)
Drive a bigger car for bigger crumple zones. (Not an SUV, which are top-heavy and roll more.) In a collision, people in smaller cars generally suffer worse injuries. Crash test reports are great reading.
Don't go on a motorcycle, ever. Even if you're ridiculously careful, car drivers aren't.
Do an advanced driving course, then drive like a granny anyway.
Rather than all of these efforts to mitigate somewhat the dangers of driving, why don't you just take public transportation?
One factoid says that your chance of death doubles for each 5 km/h above the limit you are. Another says that speeding factors into 40% of crashes.
Suppose the average speeder's risk is equivalent to 5 km/h over the limit (which seems low). Then only 25% of drivers must be speeding. Those 25% of drivers make up 40% of deaths, and the other 75% of drivers make up 60% of deaths. This keeps the ratio at 2.0, as required.
But non-speeders die too, when hit by speeders. The "40% of deaths had speeding as a factor" includes those non-speeders. T...
"The Road and Traffic Authority of New South Wales claims that “speeding… is a factor in about 40 percent of road deaths.” Data from the NHTSA puts the number at 30%."
What does this mean, "is a factor"? If it means "at least one car was speeding," then it sounds like speeding might reduce the chance of a fatality. Suppose 40% of all drivers speed. Then, if speeding has no effect, the chance that neither driver is speeding is only 36%, which means speeding would be a factor in 64% of fatalities, not 40% or 30%.
Of course, ...
I've heard that driving in the beginning of a rain after a dry spell is especially dangerous because the oil on the road is floating on the water-- after more rain, it'll be washed away.
Anyone know whether this should be included in one's calculations?
http://www.lrrb.org/pdf/trs1009.pdf The research is somewhat muddied but it appears that using headlights during the day helps.
Consider whether your journey is necessary - not travelling is always safer than travelling.
Consider what you can do to restructure your life to minimise the need for routine travel - Can you live closer to your place of employment/study, either by moving your home, or moving your employment/study? Can you work or study from home (at all? more often?)
I now live 20 minutes' walk from my employment instead of an hour's drive + 20 minute's walk, and there are many other benefits (much cheaper), but the safety improvements of not having to drive, especially a...
Nationwide, 49% of fatal crashes happen at night
Doesn't that mean that 51% of fatal crashes happen during the day?
The concept of blind spots only exists because people don't know how to adjust mirrors: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~gdguo/driving/BlindSpot.htm
I haven't looked at the statistics, but my impression is that if you are sober and somewhat cautious, the two types of common traffic mishaps most likely to result in death or serious injury are (1) a t-bone collision, i.e. another driver runs straight into the side of your car at an intersection; and (2) a head-on collision on a non-divided, high-speed road, where one car crosses the center line for whatever reason.
As to the first, I try to look both ways when the light turns green to reduce my chances of getting t-boned by someone who is trying to beat t...
First off, I want to state that I agree heavily with this.
I teach driver's education and want to add that what has helped my driving the most has been the mere repetition of truisms ("don't drink and drive", "look where you're going while backing up", "think about what you're doing", "check you're blind spot before moving over", etc.) and the knowledge that a crash resulting from these types of failures would be especially low status for me. When I'm tempted to keep driving late at night vs. pulling over at the next ...
The added complication of autopsy after death by road accident could imperil cryonics arrangements. How many road accident deaths are also accompanied by autopsy, especially of neural tissue?
The Road and Traffic Authority of New South Wales claims that “speeding… is a factor in about 40 percent of road deaths.” Data from the NHTSA puts the number at 30%.
Speeding also increases the severity of crashes; “in a 60 km/h speed limit area, the risk of involvement in a casualty crash doubles with each 5 km/h increase in travelling speed above 60 km/h.”
Speeding relative to the speed limit isn't a problem, it's actually just a proxy for speeding relative to other drivers. That's why going slow is also dangerous. Two cars colliding given the same geom...
This is probably entirely off-topic, but I actually suffered a car crash last week (no, I did not die). I have evidence to believe the crash was caused by a mechanical defect (f.ex., my steering locked up completely in a way that mere loss of power steering cannot explain). Unfortunately, I only have liability insurance, and the cost of repairs is quite steep.
Is there anything I can do to make the car manufacturer pay the repair costs ? Does anyone have experience in this area ?
(please downvote this comment into oblivion if you believe it is off-topic)
Another addition: Never ever drive while drunk or tired. If you have a history of doing that work on changing that!
Related: plan long drives in a way that does not exhaust you. By having stops and/or replacement drivers with you.
Dmytry recommends replacing driving with bicycling, and various commenters agreed that the safest way to drive is to avoid driving whenever possible. Living in a city with good public transportation is recommended.
I haven't actually studied this, but as someone who basically uses my bike as a car, it doesn't feel that much safer. Most cities don't have comprehensive enough bike paths to allow you to only use the paths, especially if you have a time limit and want to take the most direct route. Intuitively, it seems like bikes sharing roads with cars, wh...
I'm in the same demographic and I thoroughly enjoyed this post. It was a great question to ask and you addressed it along all of the relevant avenues. Thanks!
I started out enjoying this post, but the formatting in the Distraction section was so bad I stopped reading. It's very annoying to read endless lines, not separated from each other, with identical beginnings.
With respect to vehicle choice: keep in mind personal versus collective choice. The incentive to pick heavier vehicles as "safer" is a tragedy of the commons. In any particular crash, the heavier vehicle is likely to fare better. But if you make both vehicles lighter, both drivers fare better.
There's a lot of discussion about biking (and to a lesser extent walking) as more dangerous than driving. This really depends on the extent to which your values are selfish or altruistic.
This is an oversimplified dichotomy, of course, but if you're selfish, then you should prefer to be in a large (but not so tall that it rolls easily) vehicle, while if you're altruistic, then you should prefer to be in a small vehicle or a bike or (best of all) on foot. The increased personal risk to is more than made up for by the decreased risk to others, if you count the others as just as valuable as yourself.
Some people have hinted at this, but I don't think that anybody made it explicit (my apologies if I missed that).
Solution: Download a great turn-by-turn navigation app (recommendations are welcome).
The Google Maps app on Android has a beta "Navigation" mode that does this, fantastically (reading out street names is a bonus, although it tends to add "State Route" to the end of everything).
What I didn't see mentioned in this post: probability of death by car crash given no interventions, cost (mostly in time) of performing each intervention, and amount it decreases your death probability by. It seems like most of the interventions outlined above are pretty high-cost ways of avoiding an already low risk. Do the proposed strategies actually increase the number of quality-adjusted years of life?
Also note that health-related risks (cancer, heart disease, etc.) are probably all grouped separately but going to a doctor regularly helps with all of ...
I propose some amount of recreational bicycling. That'll strongly condition you not to take eyes off road (or at least it is the case for me due to damaged sense of balance and me having to look to keep bicycle upright).
A better way to avoid fatigue-caused accidents is to not drive long distances at times when you would usually be sleeping. Ways to achieve this include leaving parties earlier (maybe by setting a phone alarm), asking to crash at the place you're partying, or reserving an AirBnB near the location you'll be visiting. My housemates and I have done the last one several times when we're driving 25+ miles for a late-night event; $50 per person is well worth the convenience, not to mention the significantly reduced chance of death.
I know no one is likely to do this, but consider the safeguards taken by auto racing drivers. They are required to wear a helmet. For high speed driving helmets on all in the car would cut the death rate. That said, I doubt anyone will do this, as the inconvenience is great for a small payoff.
When I lived in the USA death in a road accident was often accompanied by an autopsy. This needs to be assessed in your article as it presents a serious problem to those of us, like myself, who have cryonics arrangements in place
I no longer live in the USA, but for those with cryonics arrangements, it is important to consider the likelihood of an autopsy in a car crash, so death is also compounded by wilful and legal destruction of brain tissue by a medical examiner.
Eh. I'm more interested in questions of how these effects interact with each other. For example, I find it much easier to be engaged as a driver when I'm driving 5-20 mph faster than other cars on the road (or, if there are no cars or only fast cars, at somewhere between 80 and 100 mph, assuming clear skies and a straight highway), and so I'm less likely to get into an accident because of the increased attention, but I'm much more likely to die in an accident if it does happen.
Similarly, the increased fatalities due to driving at night are probably primari...
Aside from cryonics and eating better, what else can we do to live long lives?
Using this tool, I looked up the risks of death for my demographic group. As a 15-24 year old male in the United States, the most likely cause of my death is a traffic accident; and so I’m taking steps to avoid that. Below I have included the results of my research as well as the actions I will take to implement my findings. Perhaps my research can help you as well.1
Before diving into the results, I will note that this data took me one hour to collect. It’s definitely not comprehensive, and I know that working together, we can do much better. So if you have other resources or data-backed recommendations on how to avoid dying in a traffic accident, leave a comment below and I’ll update this post.
Changing your behavior can reduce your risk of death in a car crash. A 1985 report on British and American crash data discovered that “driver error, intoxication and other human factors contribute wholly or partly to about 93% of crashes.” Other drivers’ behavior matters too, of course, but you might as well optimize your own.2
Secondly, overconfidence appears to be a large factor in peoples’ thinking about traffic safety. A speaker for the National Highway Traffic Safety Association (NHTSA) stated that “Ninety-five percent of crashes are caused by human error… but 75% of drivers say they're more careful than most other drivers. Less extreme evidence for overconfidence about driving is presented here.
One possible cause for this was suggested by the Transport Research Laboratory, which explains that “...the feeling of being confident in more and more challenging situations is experienced as evidence of driving ability, and that 'proven' ability reinforces the feelings of confidence. Confidence feeds itself and grows unchecked until something happens – a near-miss or an accident.”
So if you’re tempted to use this post as an opportunity to feel superior to other drivers, remember: you’re probably overconfident too! Don’t just humbly confess your imperfections – change your behavior.
Driver distraction is one of the largest causes of traffic accident deaths. The Director of Traffic Safety at the American Automobile Association stated that "The research tells us that somewhere between 25-50 percent of all motor vehicle crashes in this country really have driver distraction as their root cause." The NHTSA reports the number as 16%.
If we are to reduce distractions while driving, we ought to identify which distractors are the worst. One is cell phone use. My solution: Don’t make calls in the car, and turn off your phone’s sound so that you aren’t tempted.
I brainstormed other major distractors and thought of ways to reduce their distracting effects.
Distractor: Looking at directions on my phone as I drive
Distractor: Texting, Facebook, slowing down to gawk at an accident, looking at scenery
Distractor: Fatigue
Distractor: Other passengers
Distractor: Adjusting the radio
A last interesting fact about distraction, from Wikipedia:
Recent research conducted by British scientists suggests that music can also have an effect [on driving]; classical music is considered to be calming, yet too much could relax the driver to a condition of distraction. On the other hand, hard rock may encourage the driver to step on the acceleration pedal, thus creating a potentially dangerous situation on the road.
The Road and Traffic Authority of New South Wales claims that “speeding… is a factor in about 40 percent of road deaths.” Data from the NHTSA puts the number at 30%.
Speeding also increases the severity of crashes; “in a 60 km/h speed limit area, the risk of involvement in a casualty crash doubles with each 5 km/h increase in travelling speed above 60 km/h.”
Stop. Think about that for a second. I’ll convert it to the Imperial system for my fellow Americans: “in a [37.3 mph] speed limit area, the risk of involvement in a casualty crash doubles with each [3.1 mph] increase in travelling speed above [37.3 mph].” Remember that next time you drive a 'mere' 5 mph over the limit.
Equally shocking is this paragraph from the Freakonomics blog:
Kockelman et al. estimated that the difference between a crash on a 55 mph limit road and a crash on a 65 mph one means a 24 percent increase in the chances the accident will be fatal. Along with the higher incidence of crashes happening in the first place, a difference in limit between 55 and 65 adds up to a 28 percent increase in the overall fatality count.
Driving too slowly can be dangerous too. An NHTSA presentation cites two studies that found a U-shaped relationship between vehicle speed and crash incidence; thus “Crash rates were lowest for drivers traveling near the mean speed, and increased with deviations above and below the mean.”
However, driving fast is still far more dangerous than driving slowly. This relationship appears to be exponential, as you can see on the tenth slide of the presentation.
Driving conditions are another source of driving risk.
One factor I discovered was the additional risk from driving at night. Nationwide, 49% of fatal crashes happen at night, with a fatality rate per mile of travel about three times as high as daytime hours. (Source)
Berkeley research on 1.4 million fatal crashes found that “fatal crashes were 14% more likely to happen on the first snowy day of the season compared with subsequent ones.” The suggested hypothesis is that people take at least a day to recalibrate their driving behavior in light of new snow.
Another valuable factoid: 77% of weather-related fatalities (and 75% of all crashes!) involve wet pavement.
Statistics are available for other weather-related issues, but the data I found wasn’t adjusted for the relative frequencies of various weather conditions. That’s problematic; it might be that fog, for example, is horrendously dangerous compared to ice or slush, but it’s rarer and thus kills fewer people. I’m interested in looking at appropriately adjusted statistics.
I should note here that I have not personally verified anything posted below. Be sure to look at the original comment and do followup research before depending on these recommendations.
1All bolding in the data was added for emphasis by me.
2The report notes that "57% of crashes were due solely to driver factors, 27% to combined roadway and driver factors, 6% to combined vehicle and driver factors, 3% solely to roadway factors, 3% to combined roadway, driver, and vehicle factors, 2% solely to vehicle factors and 1% to combined roadway and vehicle factors.”