

The global road death toll - ddai
http://roadskillmap.com/

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rayiner
My parents love to lecture me about the dangers of living in the city, so I
added up homicide and traffic deaths (per 100k):

Chicago: 3.3 homicides (north side) + 5.2 traffic = 8.5

Fairfax County: 1.4 homicides + 7 traffic deaths = 8.4

If you're white or asian and don't drive in Chicago:

Chicago: 2.5 homicides + 1.1 pedestrian deaths = 3.6

From the yuppie perspective, the scary thing about traffic deaths is that you
can't buy your way out of that risk the way you can buy your way out of crime
risk. Your middle class teenage kids are highly unlikely to be the victims of
violent crime, but are a major portion of the body count of driving deaths.

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616c
Nice to see the Persian Gulf aspiring for records again.

Fun Snapple fact: on any road with 2+ lanes, the leftmost lane is nostagically
referred to as the crazy lane. If you go in it, it is culturally expected to
go as fast as you can (so even in a 50 or 60 km, you see expats and locals go
between 100-160 km or more, sometimes in Toyota SUVs with less common sense
than playboys in Italian sports cars).

As a reminder of how out of control it is, you will see car carcases (I strain
to call them car bodies) from horrendous accidents on the side of the road to
remind you shit is real over here.

Driving with your family in the car is interesting. You must practice some
minium of road rage, lest you get run over. Using profanity does not help, as
that leads to violation in indeceny laws. So I think of clever ways of
threatening people ambiguously regardless of background (commonly Gulf Arab,
Arab, South Asian, and Southeast Asian).

Hint: you use your car as a weapon if you wish to survive.

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bjorns
I was thinking about this the other day. I think when I checked last the US
death toll was about 3 times that of Sweden.

This is all good. The swedish government has been spending ridiculous amounts
of money building away death in traffic.

But, I suspect the americans probably drive a _lot_ more than the average
swede. I think if you change the death toll from per-person to per-driver the
numbers will change and if you change it to per-driven-mile I'm not sure there
will be a difference any more. Anyone know if there are numbers on this? Can't
be impossible to produce. Maybe you can estimate using national gas
consumption?

edit: Found it, turns out: nope.
[https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar4.htm](https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar4.htm)

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genmon
Wikipedia has a list of countries by traffic-related death rate:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-
re...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-
related_death_rate)

Road fatalities per 1 billion vehicle-km (factors out the distance driven):
USA is 7.6; Sweden is 3.7. I'm in the UK, we're 2.6.

Road fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants per year (a decent measure of "how
likely I am to know someone who has died on the road"): USA is 11.6; Sweden is
3; UK is 2.7.

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Retric
That link has the UK deaths per billion km at 4.3.

~~~
genmon
Looks like the UK's figures got updated from the 2012 stats to the 2014 stats,
just after I commented. Thanks for pointing this out!

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grecy
I'm from Australia, where the "road-toll" is very much front and center news.
It's constantly compared to "this time last year" in the newspapers and on the
nightly news. I would bet that any Australian that has even a passing interest
in "the news" can tell you what the annual road toll is.

It was quite the shock to come to North America (both the US and Canada) to
find it barely gets a mention, and most people have no idea how many people
are killed each year on the roads.

~~~
rogerbinns
The stat I find easiest to get is the death toll on US roads _each month_ is
the same as 9/11\. Trillions of dollars were spent on the latter, while as you
noted the monthly road death toll doesn't merit even a peep.

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MiguelVieira
These numbers can be roughly predicted by Smeed's law, which states that a
country's per capita road deaths are directly related to its number of
registered vehicles and population.

"Smeed had a fatalistic view of traffic flow.....Smeed interpreted his law as
a law of human nature. The number of deaths is determined mainly by
psychological factors that are independent of material circumstances. People
will drive recklessly until the number of deaths reaches the maximum they can
tolerate. When the number exceeds that limit, they drive more carefully.
Smeed's Law merely defines the number of deaths that we find psychologically
tolerable."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smeed%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smeed%27s_law)

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owenmarshall
In grand tradition I'm going to bitch about the graphic design elements.

For those of us with bad eyes, contrast is important. Coloring the oceans
yellow while having the actual data colored in various shades of yellow makes
this a major pain to read.

~~~
owenmarshall
Also, a bonus amusement: French Guiana is identified as France. It almost
always is with these statistics maps. This always throws me for a loop, but I
guess it _is_ technically a region of France, so maybe that's how it should
appear.

Any experts care to chime in?

~~~
eCa
French Guiana is both a region and a departement of France, and as such is
part of the EU [1]. It is basically just as much France as _Île-de-France_
[2].

As a fun fact, France is about to get its first land connection to Brazil [3].

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Guiana](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Guiana)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%8Ele-de-
France](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%8Ele-de-France)

[3]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyapock_River_Bridge](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyapock_River_Bridge)

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cjensen
Death per road mile driven might be a more useful stat. I suspect Europe looks
better than the US on this visualization due to lack of driving.

~~~
thrownaway2424
Makes no sense. The point is they've got a safe built environment and we
don't.

~~~
dodders
The UK driving test is much more stringent than the NY state test (I can't
comment on other states - I believe each state defines their own driving
test).

The NY test - 10 minutes in the car. I drove around the block; parallel
parked, 3 point turn and back to the start. Done.

UK test - an hour in the car; had to drive in urban, country and highway
settings (a dual carriageway, not a motorway - learners are not allowed to
drive on motorways in the UK); parallel park and answer a _lot_ of questions
while doing so.

That's not to discount the fact that the UK has a lot of bad drivers - but the
NY test was simply a joke.

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ddai
The global road death toll has already reached 1.24 million per year and is on
course to triple to 3.6 million per year by 2030.

In the developing world, where this pandemic has hit hardest, it will become
the fifth leading cause of death, leapfrogging past HIV/AIDS, malaria,
tuberculosis and other familiar killers, according to the World Health
Organization’s (WHO) most recent Global Burden of Disease study.

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BrainInAJar
But heaven forbid we build a bike lane to reduce the number of cars on the
road

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henryboston
This is one of the most beautiful map infographic designs I've seen in a long
time.

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lutusp
Avoid clicking this site's link! The landing page' malicious code prevents you
from left-arrow leaving the page -- you have to explicitly choose another
site.

It's either a very bad design with no evil intent, or actual malice.

~~~
muizelaar
They just add a history item everytime you interact with the map. If you click
back enough you should escape.

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sp332
I only clicked a few times and already had enough items to overwhelm my
browser's back button. I had to open my history to find HN again.

~~~
lotharbot
When I right-clicked on my back arrow, Chrome listed some of the map's history
entries and then had a separator line and HN. It's as if the designers
realized I might want to be able to go back to the previous domain as well as
going back to the previous page.

This discovery made me smile.

