This Week in the Mercury
Friday, June 11, 2010
Transportation Car Crashes are the New 9/11
Posted by Sarah Mirk on Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 9:07 AM
Yeah! What he said:
Over 37,000 people died in motor vehicle fatalities in 2008 and that was a low year.Obviously you couldn’t reduce that to zero without totally eliminating motor vehicles, but even ten percent of that number is more people than died on 9/11. And yet the difference between the resources you can mobilize for “cut driving fatalities by ten percent a year” and “help stop another 9/11″ is enormous. I understand that, psychologically, people feel more menaced by the idea of being hurt by a bad guy than simply dying in a traffic “accident” but it’s worth emphasizing, as Adrian Lund does in the debate, that “speeding is a factor in one-third of all highway deaths.” Which is to say that a huge slice of this problem isn’t “accidents” but rather people driving illegally fast.
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