BIKE: Cars are the deadliest threat of all

[rcbaker]

[But the peak in world oil production will of course reduce that
problem -- even as it creates others. Six billion plus meddlesome
primates determined to procreate create problems that cannot be
solved short of quite appalling outcomes. See www.dieoff.org
for more details. -- Roger]


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/13/opinion/13KRIS.html

New York Times
March 13, 2004

OP-ED COLUMNIST

117 Deaths Each Day

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF


Here's a pop quiz. Rank the following in order of the number of American
lives they claim in a typical year: food, guns, terrorists, flu and cars.

Ready? The most deadly are automobiles, which kill 117 Americans a
day, or nearly 43,000 a year. Then comes flu, which (along with
pneumonia, its associated disease) kills 36,000 people. Third is guns:
26,000 deaths. Fourth, food-borne illness: 5,000. And finally, terrorism,
which in a typical year claims virtually no U.S. lives — with horrific
exceptions like 2001. But antiterrorism efforts get most of the attention
and the resources.

To a point, that's sensible. The train bombings in Madrid are a reminder of
our vulnerability. President Bush is right to emphasize the risk from
W.M.D., because a single nuclear bomb could claim 500,000 lives.

Still, we need a balance in confronting threats, and I don't think we've
found it. Watch President Bush's campaign ads, and it's clear that he's
overwhelmingly focused on the war on terrorism — in 2001, he called it
"my primary focus." As he put it this year, "I'm a war president."

Mr. Bush's intensity and unwavering purpose comforted the nation in the
aftermath of 9/11. But America is too complex to have national policy
reduced to the single overarching priority of counterterrorism.

"It's an important threat, but it cannot be the organizing principle of our
foreign policy," argues Ivo Daalder, a former national security official who
is co-author of "America Unbound," an excellent (and respectful) book
about Mr. Bush's administration. "There are worse threats out there.
Climate change. H.I.V./AIDS."

Or, I would say, nuclear proliferation. Or cars.

Vehicle fatalities don't get attention because they occur in ones and twos.
If people died at the same rate but in one horrifying crash a month that
killed 3,500 people, then Mr. Bush and Congress would speedily make
auto safety a priority and save thousands of lives a year. As
Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has said: "If we had 115 people
die a day in aviation crashes, we wouldn't have a plane in the sky."

"Driving a car is one of the most dangerous things we do," note Barry
Nalebuff and Ian Ayres, two Yale professors, in their book about
innovative thinking, "Why Not?" They note that a major effort by Sweden
has reduced traffic deaths by encouraging seat belt use, converting
intersections to traffic circles (they "soothe" traffic), replacing rigid
guardrails with new rails or cables that absorb or "catch" cars, and
exhorting cyclists to wear helmets. The upshot is that Sweden 's accident
rate is one of the lowest in the world.

"If the United States could achieve Sweden's current standard, this would
save 12,500 lives per year," the authors say.

Granted, it seems less presidential to call for more guardrails than to
invade Middle Eastern countries. And, in fairness, President Bush's head
of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Dr. Jeffrey Runge,
is pushing hard to save lives in unheralded ways, from improving S.U.V.
design to getting drivers to check their tire pressure.

A month before Dr. Runge took up his post, several teenagers were
rushed to the hospital where he worked as an emergency room physician.
The driver in their car, a 17-year-old redhead named Sarah Longstreet,
was known in her high school for her friendliness and her Bible Club
activities. She wore a seat belt and her air bag inflated, but she died when
a Ford Explorer veered across the center line and plowed right over the
hood of her Mazda. That incompatibility in the two cars' designs made her
one more unnecessary auto fatality — and she became "sort of an angel
to me," Dr. Runge said.

So when I asked him about priorities, he answered this way:

"First off, we have to do everything we're doing for counterterrorism," he
said. "There's nothing that we're doing that we shouldn't be doing, and
you can make the case that we should be doing more. . . . However, we're
still losing 115 people a day on the highways, and basically the
perpetrators of those deaths also fit within a profile" — such as alcohol
abusers.

Governing the U.S. is like playing 200 simultaneous chess matches (while
whiny columnists second-guess every move on every board). The
terrorism chessboard is among the most important, but if we could just
devote a bit more energy to the others, we could save thousands of lives
— including the life of the next Sarah Longstreet.

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