How dangerous is driving, really?

Safe roads versus safe cars, inspired by an excellent question from you. Well, maybe not specifically you. But certainly not a toilet paper hoarder. So, exactly how risky is driving?

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It’s gunna take me a few minutes to get to roads and cars - because it’s pointless addressing the following question without getting a handle on what’s really likely to kill you and what’s not, in the context of modern life in an allegedly developed country.

But in reality, you are statistically more likely to die in Australia from an accidental fall. And where exactly is the Police Ladder Squad at the weekend?

Preventable conditions caused by smoking and diabetes kill 25 times more Australians every year, than driving does. This report drills down into the relative risk of driving a car in the 21st Century.

Where is the step off point between a safe road and a safe car?

Will there be a point in the future where a car is so safe that the road is simply an afterthought?

I only ask this because you never really talk about how shit Australian roads are compared to some Euro roads.

- Jerimia Tukadra

Excellent question. So, in the words of 1990s hip-hop philosophers Salt-N-Pepa, let’s talk about death. Always uplifting in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. It’s on the tip of everyone’s tongue. In the immortal words of my brother from a different mother, Phil Collins, I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lord.

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Let’s talk about death, ba-by

On the bright side, driving is pretty safe

People are really funny about death, especially the inevitability of their own, you might have noticed. They’re so unwilling to acknowledge it’s out there awaiting all of us, ultimately.

Some people, maybe you, are just terrified of death. And yet, while I can’t speak for you, my own consciousness dissolves routinely, every night. I lose all sense of myself. One moment I'm lying there staring at the ceiling, counting pole dancing Ming Molls, and the next I’m gone. 

You subjectively cease to exist every night of your life, typically, for about six or eight hours. I’d suggest death’s kinda like that, only substantially longer. No waking up. Usually.

I’d put it to you that we are emphatically whacked as a society when it comes to death, risk and countermeasures. Here are some simple driving countermeasures that might save your life >>

As I write this, the zombie apocalypse, which you may have noticed, going on all over, has claimed 21 lives here in Australia, sadly. 

And hey, I don’t dismiss the exponential growth, flattening the curve, it could be thousands, ultimately. Hope for the best, plan for the worst; wash your hands, stay home if you can, be socially responsible. I get all of that.

But at this stage, it’s 21. And this is enough, apparently, together with the immediate uncertainty, for senior elected dickheads to impose a World War II-style deficit on all of us, to bring the economy to its knees, to close many public places and impose quasi house arrest on the population. These are facts.

Here in New South Wales, entertainingly enough, the fuckwit Premier (as if there’s any other kind) has elected to keep schools open while at the same time deploying the cops forcibly to eject any person even sitting alone, quietly, from a beach or a public park. Which seems somewhat inconsistent to me. These people have no fucking plan.

I think you’d agree if the zombie apocalypse ultimately claims 29,000 proud Australians, most people would be stunned and appalled - and 2020 will go down as a bleak year indeed.

And yet, for perspective, this same number of us die every year, routinely, from smoking and diabetes. Every year: 29,000. That’s about 24,000 from smoking (according to the Cancer Council). 

And about 5000 from diabetes, actually 4656, according to the Bureau of Statistics, for 2018. Smoking is wearing the yellow jersey, and diabetes is the seventh biggest killer of us. I’m just putting it out there that tobacco remains a legal product, and the sugar content of median food is hardly on the decline, nor is it regulated.

In fact it’s promoted as a major employer in Far North Boganland - can’t have a sugar tax to save thousands of lives from obesity and diabetes every year, can we? That’s preposterous. So that’s 29,000 deaths every year, like friggin’ clockwork, but no national health crisis.

Interestingly enough, next time you have a Biggest Morning Tea event (maybe next year), take a look at what food’s being served up, even promoted, by the Cancer Council’s own BMT website.

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Falling for it

It’s unlikely the zombie apocalypse will be as bad as one year’s worth of routine smoking and diabetes.

In contrast, 1145 Australians died on the road in 2018. Granted, that’s a lot of dead people, if they all got together for a meeting, but it’s only four per cent of the smoking and diabetes problem. In other words, smoking and diabetes kills 25 times more of us than road trauma. Here’s the proof >>

It goes without saying that, if you took truly epic, fuckwit driving conduct out of the equation, road death would be a lot lower, because driving is intrinsically safe. If you know how to drive, it’s even safer >>

In fact, you’re roughly three times more likely to die from falling off something like a ladder. Accidental falls are number 16 on Death’s Greatest Hits for Shitsville in 2018, according to Ausstats - 2952 people.

There is a wad of legislation regarding driving thick enough to stop a bullet. We have endless police patrolling the roads, and speed cameras, and red light cameras and even mobile phone cameras. 

But you can walk into Bunnings, and buy a six-metre extension ladder and erect it anywhere you want at home, with absolutely no training or oversight. Go figure. Here’s the result of getting it wrong on a ladder >>

While you’re up there on that ladder like Molly Meldrum - with no training - how exactly are you supposed to know how far back from the wall to stick the feet, with no training? While you’re up there, in an environment that’s roughly three times more likely to kill you than driving, take heart. 

It’s not the most dangerous thing you can do. According to Ausstats, so-called ‘intentional self harm’ is even more popular with the grim reaper than the ladder. It’s number 14 on the charts for 2018. Average median age: 44.4 years. That’s really fucking sad.

It’s horrible to think life just gets too much for people who’ve gotten only halfway through their time on the Earth and decided theirs has run its course.

And yet, the Highway Patrol is so prolific. The Ladder Police, the Self-harm Squad, the Sugar Patrol, not so visible.

Perversely, I think if you asked most people what was more dangerous, climbing a ladder, living at the bottom of a pit of endlessly bleak thoughts (click here if you need help >>), or driving a car, they would get the order of relative risk spectacularly wrong. 

And yet again, so many more resources are devoted to regulation and enforcement on the road.

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Reality check

Driving is very safe.

No activity is wholly benign, of course, but you can easily make driving ridiculously dangerous, simply by being a fuckwit.

We drive more than 200 billion kilometres annually in Australia, and 1100 people die - it’s statistically irrelevant.

Which brings me to the answer, in perspective: It’s not just cars and roads. It’s a three-part system. Drivers, cars and roads. The safest road transport system is when you get the safest drivers in the safest cars, on the safest roads.

I’d suggest that cars are way in front of drivers and roads, certainly in things like crashworthiness. Generally.

We’ve got a somewhat unique problem with roads in Australia. Big continent, roughly the same size as The United States of Retardistan. But only about one-tenth of the population, ballpark. So we don’t have much cash, per capita, per kilometre of road - which is why the roads take geological time to upgrade, seemingly.

There’s no question: safer roads save lives. When Jerimia asked: ‘will there ever be a time when cars are so safe that the road is an afterthought’, yeah, never.

See, there’s a limit to how much energy can be absorbed in a controlled way so that the loads imposed upon you by a crash are survivable. And presently that limit is in the 64-80km/h ballpark.

Pretty much, if you’re in the safest car on earth, at 80km/h, and you hit an unyielding, massive object, like a big tree, which stops the car, you will die. #Physics. There’s no clever hack for that. If you’re going sideways at the time, probably 50km/h.

That’s why we need safe roads. Smart civil engineering does three things: First up, it lets you see further ahead. You get more time to react: Brilliant.

Secondly, it removes all the hard, unyielding objects, so there’s really nothing substantial to hit.

And third, if there’s an object that can’t be removed - like the walls holding up a tunnel - they’re designed so that direct impacts aren’t possible, or they’re protected with barriers. Head-on crashes are prevented, too - by protection and/or physical separation, like median strips, bushes, barriers, or drainage ditches.

So, if you happen to be doing 110km/h when you lose control, the time duration of that crash is extended, the car loses energy, slows down and the loads on you become survivable. You can’t achieve that at highway speeds with the car alone.

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Mitigating circumstances

Unfortunately, despite the relative safety of driving generally, it’s still down to you not to be a fuckwit.

And this, I think you’d agree, continues to be a real challenge for many Australians, no matter how elevated their station in life. This is, like, a personal obligation, right? Get out of bed, don’t be a fuckwit, repeat.

Some people are just not wired for it. A great deal of road trauma is attributable to drivers whom I would categorise as recidivist fuckwits. I’m talking about the scumbag who has been disqualified from driving for 12 years, but drives anyway, pissed, in an unregistered car, speeding, with two unrestrained kids in the back. On the way home from a fucking methadone clinic. A complete ticker of every known ‘fuckwit’ box.

That’s the stereotype arsehole pumping up trauma on our roads. Coincidentally this is the same category of person the cops and the court system fail spectacularly to remove permanently from driving among us. 

They do seem very good at pinging you or me for being six kms over the limit - or (presently) for sitting in a park on your own - but as for getting actual scumbags off the road, they remain emphatically incompetent. Unfortunately, that’s an example of your dwindling tax dollars at work.

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