I just looked into injuries some more. The CDC says that for every 1 person killed, 8 are hospitalized and 100 are treated and released from the emergency department. Call it 1:10:100.
In the treated and released case, let’s say the cost of the injury is $1k. And let’s normalize things with death costing $1B. Since this injury is 100x more likely than death, we can say it costs $100k. Even if it were 1000k more likely than death it’d only cost $1M next to the $1B, so it seems like we can call this negligible and forget about it.
In the hospitalized case, suppose it causes issues lasting 50 years and costs you $100k/year (in utility). That’s $5M. Because it’s 10x more likely than death, call it $50M. But that’s still a good amount smaller than the $1B. And it was with conservative assumption of every person who is hospitalized ends up with a lifelong injury that causes significant distress. In reality it might be closer to $1M than $50M. So relative to death it also seems negligible. And perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t seem like it’s enough to outweigh the convenience of driving.
I just looked into injuries some more. The CDC says that for every 1 person killed, 8 are hospitalized and 100 are treated and released from the emergency department. Call it 1:10:100.
In the treated and released case, let’s say the cost of the injury is $1k. And let’s normalize things with death costing $1B. Since this injury is 100x more likely than death, we can say it costs $100k. Even if it were 1000k more likely than death it’d only cost $1M next to the $1B, so it seems like we can call this negligible and forget about it.
In the hospitalized case, suppose it causes issues lasting 50 years and costs you $100k/year (in utility). That’s $5M. Because it’s 10x more likely than death, call it $50M. But that’s still a good amount smaller than the $1B. And it was with conservative assumption of every person who is hospitalized ends up with a lifelong injury that causes significant distress. In reality it might be closer to $1M than $50M. So relative to death it also seems negligible. And perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t seem like it’s enough to outweigh the convenience of driving.