Car accidents take more lives in developed countries than actual wars. This is depressing.
It tells us where we should concentrate our work. But this isn’t depressing: this is a sign that as a society we’ve become a lot more peaceful over the last few hundred years. Incidentally, the number of traffic fatalities in the US has shown general trend downwards for the last fifty years, even as the US population has increased. Moreover, I think the same is true in much of Europe. (I don’t have a citation for this part though.)
I’d expect a lot of that downward trend is due to better engineering, or to be specific, more humane engineering — designing cars in a way that takes into account the human preference that survival of the humans inside the car is a critical concern.
A 1950s car is designed as a machine for going fast. A modern car is designed as a machine to protect your life at high speed. The comparison is astounding.
It is arguably an example of rationality failure that automobile safety had to become a political issue before this change in engineering values was made.
It tells us where we should concentrate our work. But this isn’t depressing: this is a sign that as a society we’ve become a lot more peaceful over the last few hundred years. Incidentally, the number of traffic fatalities in the US has shown general trend downwards for the last fifty years, even as the US population has increased. Moreover, I think the same is true in much of Europe. (I don’t have a citation for this part though.)
I’d expect a lot of that downward trend is due to better engineering, or to be specific, more humane engineering — designing cars in a way that takes into account the human preference that survival of the humans inside the car is a critical concern.
A 1950s car is designed as a machine for going fast. A modern car is designed as a machine to protect your life at high speed. The comparison is astounding.
It is arguably an example of rationality failure that automobile safety had to become a political issue before this change in engineering values was made.