Path: utzoo!lsuc!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: ont.general
Subject: Re: Highway Driving Rules
Message-ID: <3166@looking.UUCP>
Date: 29 Apr 89 04:20:50 GMT
References: <89Apr26.134028edt.9320@ois.db.toronto.edu> <440@bnr-fos.UUCP> <1989Apr27.112604.11727@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> <1730@yunexus.UUCP>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Distribution: ont
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 21

If you are going to be completely utilitarian about it, then when you
count accident statistics you also have to count lost time due to slower
highway speeds.

To do this you need the passenger mile figures, but I believe that somebody
once calculated that when the US reduced from 70 to 55, thus making
everybody's trips take 25% longer, you actually got a bad result.

The bad result comes from taking total passenger hours, taking 25% of
that, and expressing it in years of human waking lifetime.  Many
thousands of lifetimes are being wasted on the roads because of slower
speed limits -- more than the number of lives cut short by traffic
death.

Of course, to the people who die the traffic death, this isn't a good
argument!

But if you only measure total human life wasted, faster speed limits
save lives.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473