Traffic safety holy grail: Zero deaths

Interesting little piece on states' reach-for-the-sky goal to completely eliminate traffic fatalities:

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-02-18/classified/ct-met-getting-around-0218-20130218_1_crash-fatalities-fatal-accident-death-toll

It comes on the heels of a story over the weekend, I think, about how there are essentially no commercial airline crashes any more.

It's actually remarkable how far we've come in a short time when it comes to auto safety. Remember, in the early 1980s, the Reagan adminstration was fighting tooth-and-nail, all the way to the Supreme Court, about mandatory seat belts. Not wearing them. But even putting them in vehicles, if I recall.

I'm wondering how possible this will be, without making cars prohibitively expensive. But someone in the piece had an interesting point - that zero deaths is the only morally acceptable goal. I'd never thought of it that way and, in fact, always used our road and highway system as the answer to, "If it saves one person, then it's worth it ..." arguments about gun control, censorship, and so on and so forth.

 

The safest car in the world would have no belts and no airbags - only a poison-tipped razor-sharp chromium spike 20" long coming out of the steering wheel hub and pointed directly at the driver's heart.

Impractical.

 

To reach zero deaths, the government would have to regulate every car's top speed at 0 mph.

 

Many years ago the (former) chief economist at the FDA spoke as a guest lecturer in an undergraduate honors class for which I was administratively responsible (I didn't teach it, I just made sure that everything was scheduled properly, etc.). He talked about the costs of vetting drugs versus the cost of not vetting them, with the idea that at some point an additional dollar spent on testing can't be expected to generate an additional dollar in benefits. He plotted the curves out like any economist would do, and the students in the class got suckered right in. "Of course," the students said, "You should find that point at which your marginal benefit equals your marginal cost and not spend a penny more on testing than that." And they were totally wrong, because such expenditures don't occur in a vacuum; every dollar spent on testing could be spent somewhere else.

If "zero deaths is the only morally acceptable goal," then what that means is that on the margin we might -- note that I wrote "might," not "would" -- pass over opportunities to benefit much more by spending in other ways. If, for example, we made cars even safer (but more expensive), we'd force people to spend more on their cars and less on other things that might improve their life expectancy. Put another way, at some point every life saved in pursuing a zero-traffic-deaths goal might result in a life lost in some other way.

 

Government-funded electric car joke goes here: ___________________________ .

 

That gave me a good early morning laugh. Thank you, sir.

 

My pleasure.

 

Right. Of course. Which is why the "if it saves one life ..." argument fails. But within those parameters, it would be interesting to see how low we can drive traffic deaths. Of course, public transportation would have to be part of that solution, I would think. And conservatives, of course, love public transportation.

 

Sort of reminds me of No Child Left Behind.

 

At some point we will have cars driving themselves. It might not be in 10 years or 20 years, but there will be a point where we type the destination, sit back, break out the Ipad and wait until we are there so we can park.