I used to be a volunteer firefighter and I see some of the fatalities (but not all) on this map. Looking at one of them some of the information is quite accurate (type of accident, what caused it, age of person) while other information is not at all accurate (number of people in the car, if a seatbelt was in use). It's curious how some fairly important pieces of data can be quite wrong.
The data here is processed from NHTSA's FARS database. When someone dies in an accident, it gets input into a STATE reporting system, and FARS is manufactured by analyzing each state's individual record system. The feds consolidate all this data and publish a unified dataset annually. They say it's "a lot cheaper and just as good as collecting it themselves"
Additional errors are potentially produced from my own processing of the federal data, but those will be rooted out over time. Project being OS will hopefully help with that.
In fact, the author of the website "I mapped almost every.." might want to add references to the data sources for credibility and less of a "spam" look. How about an About page.
> It's curious how some fairly important pieces of data can be quite wrong.
I was nearly killed by a driver who disregarded the law and the police officer intentionally disabled his bodycam when interviewing a key witness, never questioned me, let the driver off with no tickets for his violations, and submitted a report with factual inaccuracies. Crooked cops don't have an interest in reporting the truth.
I get so angry when I ready the reports, and they mostly talk about the victim. "The pedestrian was wearing dark clothing", "the bicyclist wasn't wearing a helmet" (like that would've avoided the accident?), etc.
Of course, the victim is most likely being transported away in an ambulance or even dead, so they got little say. And the offender can paint the story with their picture: "the sun was low and blinding", "the cyclist came in at high speed" (probably a third of the car..), etc.
I’m a little confused at the assertion here. What is happening that shouldn’t be happening, and what should be changed?
Should they presume malice, and discount any reference to circumstance? What if the circumstances were actually causal (which one would hope so, otherwise there are far more murderous sociopaths than anyone would have guessed) how should we parse the difference, and how will we identify potential hazards?
Presumably, from the cyclist’s perspective, the story will almost always go like this: “I was riding my bicycle in the correct fashion, in the appropriate lane, equipped with proper safety equipment, and then BAM! They came out of nowhere,” because if they had an opportunity to see the oncoming vehicle, judge whether it’s being operated safely, see where the driver’s attention is focused, and evaluate whether the driver’s awareness has or has not been compromised by the prevailing conditions—one would hope they could have avoided the crash in that space of time.
I've been in a few close calls, and in every one the driver was not paying full attention to the road and (nearly) swerved into someone riding a bicycle.
But reporters use such sympathetic language describing the negligent driver.
Even without cameras I am pretty sure (from my past reading on ADAS systems) that you can infer driver attention from steering wheel angle position.
If you analyze patterns in wheel angle and rate of change of angle over time, I would suspect that drvers who are texting/'looking down a screen' are going to have very distinct series of 'abrupt' correction patterns.
Where that telemetry is available in cars post 2010's then it should absolutely be used in forensics.
Let me generalize on your behalf: Cyclists are maniacs. They want to be given the equal respect of cars in traffic but absolutely don't follow the same rules.
Interestingly pedestrians accidents go down when bike paths were installed on streets in NYC. Bike paths are closer and have less protection for pedestrians than car lanes so it is interesting that bicycles make it so much safer to be a pedestrian.
Because of how infrastructure is built you experience bicycles a lot closer and therefore they might feel more dangerous than cars. When you stop to think of it it is not strange, but when it comes to bicycles there is always someone who forget.
And some pedestrians are maniacs, but most of the time only are a danger to themselves. OTOH I have crashed into a lamppost from a pedestrian suddenly stepping into a bike lane from behind a utilities box.
I think we should assume that stupidity is evenly distributed and mode of transport doesn't affect it much, just the results.
Momentum is probably more of a correlation than mode of transport. Real world experience: hit by a bike versus hit by a moped, each time on a “vehicle free” footpath. One was not like the other.
There's an Austria paper that looked into the accident cause "speeding" (nicht angepasste Geschwindigkeit) means across the german-speaking countries. The results boiled down to "it depends" on the officer typing in the data as there aren't any reviews or such. There's good data on other accident aspects like the seat-belt-usage you mentioned (and it's shocking how many people die because they are too lazy to use their seat-belt) but those aren't down to subjective judgement on the spot.
Good data is needed as a few accident causes do tend to be common in certain road/location conditions and those can be fixed. For example while the total number of accidents on train crossing is low (15~20 fatalities per year) in Austria, all of them are the driver's fault and almost all (except for massive idiot drivers) can be fixed by installing automatic gates on all crossings.
Installing automatic gates at crossings can fix (almost) 15~20 fatalities a year there? I've seen at least double-digit traffic deaths in my life, 4 of which I've watched happen and can vividly recollect, here in the USA. Installing infrastructure to prevent deaths seems like a no-brainer if you live in a country that supposedly cares.
It's apparently not a no-brainer here -- two of the lethal accidents I've witnessed [one involving ripping the door off a car with the help of some kind stangers, to get someone out of a literally flaming wreck] would have been entirely avoided by a simple traffic circle. The most grizzly one I remember could likely (it seems to me; I'm not a traffic...engineer?) have been avoided by not having a low-traffic on-ramp connect directly to a major highway, when there was a clearly-denoted on-ramp a quarter-mile away. Seeing another human with their head 20ft away leaves a bit of an impression on a child.
I always find it funny when people say "you can't put a price on a human life" because this is exactly what traffic engineers do on a daily basis.
I don't know what the exact figure is but there's a number where below that improvements won't be made.
It sounds bad but at the end of the day resources aren't unlimited - $1 spent on road safety improvements is $1 that can't go healthcare, law enforcement, schools, military etc.
At some point spending millions of dollars to probably save one life isn't worth it
This is true, but the problem is that there is so much low-hanging fruit here like painting new lines, adding cheap concrete barriers, or installing elevated crosswalks.
The price is far far less than whatever the price of a human life is. The reason they are not implemented is not cost, but because people here consider it their god-given right to drive as quickly and aggressively as they want.
> The reason they are not implemented is not cost, but because people here consider it their god-given right to drive as quickly and aggressively as they want.
As an amendment to this: People in many western countries tend to do this.
Writing from Germany with, e.g., speed limits on some high ways being a broken promise from the last election.
Yep. A major arterial in my city is very obviously too wide for the traffic it carries, even during rush hour. I don't remember the exact number, but a study a few years ago found that the average speed was something like 12 MPH above the posted limit. People completely lost their shit when it was proposed to narrow it and put in bike lanes (the bike lanes weren't the point, but people were cycling on the sidewalk to avoid the impatient/distracted/aggressive drivers, and it would have been silly to not use the space for anything at all).
The following estimates have been applied to the value of life. The estimates are either for one year of additional life or for the statistical value of a single life.
- $50,000 per year of quality life (the "dialysis standard",[38] which had been a de facto international standard most private and government-run health insurance plans worldwide use to determine whether to cover a new medical procedure)[39]
- $129,000 per year of quality life (an update to the "dialysis standard")[40][39]
- $7.5 million (Federal Emergency Management Agency, Jul. 2020)[5]
- $9.1 million (Environmental Protection Agency, 2010)[41]
- $9.2 million (Department of Transportation, 2014)[42]
- $9.6 million (Department of Transportation, Aug. 2016)[43]
- $12.5 million (Department of Transportation, 2022)[44]
Long ago (too long for a search to dig it up) there was an article in the Wall Street Journal comparing litigation for wrongful death in different circumstances. If I remember correctly, two determinants were location (major urban center vs rural) and profession/status of the victim. The variance was considerable. An aggregate statistical value for something like a QALY is a pretty rough measure.
It’s worth pointing out that these numbers don’t exactly represent either of the things that the parent comment talked about. These are the statistical economic effect of people dying on average, but this is not meant to be taken as putting a number on all the value of human life. Note the DOT doesn’t call it the “value of life”, they call it the “value of a statistical life (VSL)” in an attempt to help distinguish between those two different ideas.
“This conventional terminology has often provoked misunderstanding on the part of both the public and decision-makers. What is involved is not the valuation of life as such, but the valuation of reductions in risks.”
Additionally, these numbers do not represent the threshold for whether a given proposal for roads is undertaken. They are used to inform the process, along with other relevant factors. That ‘Guidance’ like just above is interesting reading, they take time to point out that neither the economic data nor the risk data is perfect. (Perhaps that was obvious, but it’s good to know they recognize that fact officially in their analyses.)
The VSL for 2023 is 13.2 million, and one might assume based on the recent trend that it’s probably around ~$14M for this year. It’s good for our personal safety the higher their VSL estimate goes, but as parent noted, bad for our taxpayer pocketbooks, so we try to balance those forces. I know government processes can look bureaucratic and strange from the outside, and seem like a big machine we don’t control, but ultimately we do decide as a society how much we’re willing to pay to keep ourselves safe; public sentiment and tax/anti-tax pressures do have a massive influence in what gets done.
It doesn't seem inconsistent to say "you can't put a price on a human life" and also believe that it's possible to calculate the economic impact of a human death.
For example, saying that a particular individual's life is worthless is very different from saying they have no dependents.
How many crossings without automatic gates are there, vs how many fatalities at those crossings, and how many people cross at those crossings at all? When you remember that other important things to spend money on also exist, the math probably works out for leaving many of the rarely used crossings as they are. In America, there are a few hundred thousand crossings and only a few hundred deaths. Most of those deaths are concentrated at a relatively small number of crossings, while most of the crossings have very infrequent traffic across them.
It's the same kind of logic that has most train tracks not put behind fences. In populated areas where lots of people roam around, putting a fence up next to the track helps keep people off the track. But in most of the country, the population is too sparse and people being on the track too infrequent for anybody to rationally prioritize putting fence up alongside all the track. Half a billion dollars worth of fence to save maybe a few dozen lives just isn't going to fly when there are schools to fund, old lead water mains to replace, bridges to repair, NASA probes to Uranus, etc etc.
Yes, Austria has only a population of 9 million, with 1937 (as per 2015) unsecured railroad crossings with just a sign and no barriers or lights. The number of people being killed in car accidents was close to record lows at 178 last year with 42 of those not using a seat belt. Saving 15~20 lives by upgrading infrastructure is of course a gamble of prioritizing crossings but of course worth it as there's not just those 15~20 people but also their relatives being impacted. We have a lot of rural railroad, something better quarter-mile away is rarely an option.
Having a speed limit on the German Autobahn would save 140 lives a year. It's hard to understand why they still don't have a limit. Countries like Denmark and the UK have much less traffic deaths on their highways.
There's a thing that happens where people get "" trapped"" by automatic crossing gates. They get their car on the tracks as the gate closes in front and behind them. The gates are very weak so they could drive right through, but some sort of mental block often prevents this and so they stay there with their car on the tracks, sometimes not even thinking to get out of the car.
I think it's a lack of panic that does it. In that moment they're afraid of causing property damage and they aren't thinking about their own imminent demise. Probably because they see the gate before they see the train, and once they start thinking about the gate in front of them they get tunnel vision and struggle to switch focus to the more important thing coming at them from the side.
In Austria a big reason are old rural rail lines. It’s not trivial to install automated gates without having to remove some stops or keeping the gates down for very extended periods of time.
They are also not entirely safe because people are idiots and get stuck without understanding that they can actually push through the barrier.
Ones with nothing except signs to stop, look and listen. You're most likely to find this while hiking, as a footpath crossing.
Flashing lights and beeps.
Half barriers, which only cover half the road (one lane in each direction). These are my automatic. Drivers can't get trapped.
Full barriers. These all have CCTV, and the train won't get a "green" until the signaller has seen both barriers close, and that no one is in the middle. These are used in cities and other busy places.
One other fun type are the user operated gates. Normal farm gates on both sides of the railway, with a red/green aspect light telling you if it is safe to open the gate. Once you've driven through you have to stop and then close the gates. Last time I used one of them, by the time I walked back to close the first gate the signal had gone red so I waited.
We also still have some full barrier crossings operated by a signalman near me. There's something pleasing about that.
Germany has a lot of them on mostly remote, rarely serviced lines that see only a small number of regional trains per day. Main reason is cost to upgrade weighed against the (relatively) low risk of incidents because of low amount of traffic on both the train route and the crossing road.
I live on the same block as a urban street level crossings that just have lights. People routinely cut through the light. That line just goes to the factories so the trains are going pretty slow, or sometimes stop on the signal. There is a gated crossing a little further down the same street for a thoroughfare and cars routinely race the gate to avoid waiting for the train there too.
One could argue all those people are insane, but there are a lot of them.
I've seen people cross on red lights. Sometimes it's the impatient person who has to get through as it's closing.
Sometimes it's the impatient person who is tired of waiting as the signal has been going for minutes and there's no other evidence of a train.
Sometimes it's the inattentive person following the car in front.
Gates help the third person most. I haven't seen many crossings without gates, but they're a lot easier to miss than a gate.
Protecting people from a train collision has benefits for the train system as well. A collision causes confusion and delay and may damage the rolling stock or even the rails and could cause injuries and the operators likely need PTO. So it's rational to reduce collisions regardless of opinions about the choices of the participants.
I was looking at an incident in my neighborhood. In our city, we have frequent incidents of elderly drivers killing pedestrians in motor vehicles. The incident in our neighborhood did not show a driver age but did show the pedestrian age. I cannot imagine why the driver age would not have been recorded in an incident like that (but their height and weight were).
I was an EMT in the Los Angeles area for four years, and then in the Seattle area for four years. I developed the mindset that even if the patient died, we (the firefighters/EMTs/paramedics) had at least given them a chance to live that they would not have had without us. That helped soften the blow of the deaths.
That strategy was less effective for calls where the patient was declared dead on scene, and so no treatment was possible. I still remember each of those calls. Fortunately, I was never traumatized by them, in a PTSD sense. Rather, I learned the lesson of realizing how easily I, or one of my loved ones, can simply disappear one day; so I learned to make sure they all know that I love them, and to not take their presence in my life for granted.
Not the original commenter, but as a volunteer firefighter and EMT it is something everyone has to figure out for themselves.
There's tools like therapy, CISM, CBT, humor, and the support of your buddies. Too often there's drink, pills, and suicide. It's not a particularly widespread detail, but suicide is the largest killer of firefighters by a large margin. I think that is a symptom of putting too much work and pressure on too few people.
I have found CBT, exercise, fasting, and daily yoga help keep stress and depression at bay for me.
I also am lucky to be a volunteer, so I can afford to skip as many calls as I want after an upsetting call. The career folks I know have it much much worse, because they might be on a horrible call but if they want to get paid they have to keep working. They might have an entire 24hr shift with several troubling calls back to back.
I used to think all fire and ambulance should be paid career. However, there's an important side effect of a larger group of volunteers sharing the burden. If you see too much to handle, you can take off all the time you need to recover. You aren't trapped by the job into witnessing more than you can handle. My wife recently was on an ambulance call that troubled her. She has taken a few weeks off from ambulance to decompress.
That being said, volunteerism is seriously struggling in America. If you live in the 70% of America that is served by volunteers, it is likely your local is extremely understaffed. Too many companies only have a small handful of firefighters who still show up, and those heroes aren't "taking time off" to recover, because if they do, the engine doesn't move. Too much of the country is overly reliant on volunteers but isn't showing up to be a volunteer to share the load. It's a socialist program, but there aren't enough people showing up to share the work, so it's collapsing.
And just paying folks to do this full time comes with very real increased tax burden and acute trauma on those individuals. Paying career staff isn't cheap.
If you live in an area that is served by volunteers, please seriously consider volunteering yourself. A lot of people on this site are young and physically able to volunteer. Tech folks are often well situated to volunteer, as we are more likely to be financially stable, have flexibility to dip for a call if it's urgent, often work remote, and sometimes would really benefit from getting out in the sunshine and meeting folks. Also it's so rewarding to do something so real after a big day of mental labor.
In the volunteer service you don't ever have to do something if you don't feel comfortable with it. If you show up to a call and you don't want to go inside the building you don't have to. Plenty of work is needed outside of a structure fire. If the call comes and you're too tired or busy, no big deal. I only make ~20% of my local calls, and that is high for my company. I've said "no way" to my officer before, and he reconsidered or found someone else.
You also don't have to be in "perfect shape". I thought they were going to be making me do crazy fitness tests to join like in the movies. Then I realized, we are so desperate for help we'll take anyone if your doctor will sign a form saying you're fit for duty. We've got members who are 200lb overweight, members who weigh 100lb, need glasses, some are 14, and some members who are over 70. Some can't wear an air pack so they do fire ground support work outside. Kids under 18 and folks who haven't yet gone to fire school aren't legally allowed inside a structure fire anyway. If you want to show up and put on gear, we've got work for you. There's so much work, it's so hard, and so few show up that anyone who does is a help.
It can be extremely rewarding to be a first responder in a small town. We only have 4k residents in my local, and I like getting to meet them and help them.
After just a few years I can't go to the grocery store without waving to half a dozen people. My calendar is filling up with invites to backyard BBQs, music jam sessions, a pie baking competition club, DnD games, a computer club, and a lifting club, all discovered through just meeting cool local folks. Between volunteering and regularly visiting our local busy coffeeshop at peak "sit around and chat" times, I'm feeling connected to a community in a way I thought only happens in movies and TV.
Definitely reach out to me if you ever want to talk about it. I'll happily answer any questions you have. I will say I'm kicking myself for not joining sooner. For eight years I was next to an amazing firehouse and never knew!
> There's tools like therapy, CISM, CBT, humor, and the support of your buddies.
EMT, Paramedic, trainer of both.... my understanding is that CISM has been largely discredited. Maybe its a misapplication, a "lock you all in a room until everyone has talked/cried about it", but still.
Thankfully, in the PNW, many many departments have contracts with therapists. Some near me even have mental health professionals as full time employees.
The other, perhaps bigger reality for me is this:
It's not the trauma calls that get to you - in the end we're all just blood and tissue. It's the emotional calls. The CSA calls. SIDS. Elder neglect.
When I was in highschool I had to fill out a survey about my experiences with substances. I remember getting a laugh out of lying on the survey. Always take any self reported questionnaire results with a large grain of salt.
This is why nutrition research is extremely confusing and contradictory often. I worked in a nutrition department and the amount of post menopausal obese women in our knee studies that said they just ate a half cup of green beans that day is astounding.
Now try to use data that flawed to make assumptions over a lifespan about human health. About the only studies I truly believe are the ones where people are at a facility and all food is provided to them and tracked.
My favourite example of this is that the number of condoms used in the USA, according to surveys, is dramatically higher than the number of condoms sold in the USA.
Or they are confusing imagination of how much they would like to have sex with reality. Or they feel the social pressure, to boast themself. Sexual activity is kind of a primitive success metric. Reporting low numbers means reporting low success ..
I lived in one of those food study centers after college. Most people there were pretty diligent about sticking to the program, but there was a big scandal when one guy was kicked out after discovering extensive cheating and several papers had to be retracted.
We were allowed out - I had a full time job, but couldn't eat or drink any food not provided by the center (we took a radio-isotope tracer with food, and had to collect our poop). It was quite interesting :_)
Well, some studies validate their FFQs. Also, FFQs don't have to be perfect. They just have to create analytical clusters or continuity. As FFQs become less accurate, confidence intervals get wider but it just depends if the study is powered to handle it.
I find that most of the dismissal around FFQs is pretty vague and seems to come from a group of people who find the consensus in nutrition research inconvenient for them.
How many Americans think chocolate milk comes from brown cows? I’d wager almost every single person who answers in the affirmative really just thinks it’s the funnier answer.
You're missing an important third group: people making money pushing these beliefs. Themselves, they likely don't believe it - but they know this type of "content" creates strong "engagement".
Behind the Curve is a good documentary about flat earthers. A lot of them seem to believe it because it gives them a sense that they have figured something out that others haven't. It makes them feel special.
Others believe it, or at least continue to believe, because they find a community and connection with other believers.
That is what you hope, but do you know how many people believed in the Q conspiracy? Chemtrails? Reptiloids? Bill Gates using the vaccination to control everyone through a microchip? It is the same ballpark.
I wish those people pushing this, were doing it just for the lulz. But mostly they are serious.
I'm convinced that chemtrails came from a stoner watching some variation of How planes fly / aeronautics at 3am and heard chemtrails in place of contrails and we are now forever stuck with it.
What I want to know is why Bill Gates got stuck with the microchip conspiracy theory when Elon Musk regularly has press conferences about the progress his team is making with actual brain microchips.
That is simple, because Bill Gates did talk about a microchip for people in an interview, but just an RFID chip, to keep track of the vaccinations. Also his foundation is doing vaccinations big scale.
Even without foreign hostile agencies making disinformation, it is easy seeing crackpots mixing it all up.
I used to scrape the calls for service for my local PD, and the inaccuracies were considerable. Of course there were typos in addresses or cross-streets, but there were also inaccuracies with how the incident was classified (for example, a former coworker and friend said his neighbor called the cops on him in the middle of the night one day- I looked it up and it was classified as a domestic disturbance rather than a noise complaint).
Some records, like those involving child abuse, don’t show on their calls for service website at all, so that’s an entire group of data that we the public just don’t get to know about.
Government data is notorious for being dirty and inaccurate.
I had a similar, awful curiosity. Looked up the death of a friend. All of the details I ever learned (speeding, ran off road, jumped curb, hit a tree) are listed accurately here.
The claim that only 1 out of 5 deaths is even recorded on this map is sobering.
Any idea what spicifly might be the possible causes for data errors? Like is every state using the exact same form? Are are people who filled them out trained how to do so correctly?
It's not just states, it's every law enforcement jurisdiction, which then gives their data to the state, which then standardizes it. In turn, it appears the states aggregate it at the federal level. In my mid-size city, jurisdictions that operate here include the city police, county sheriff, university police, state police and Department of Natural Resources law enforcement.
At least in the Indiana, the quality of this data... varies widely. Coordinates don't always match reality, the street names can't always be geocoded, sometimes the timestamps don't even parse as valid dates.
I talked to a city staffer here whose job largely involves cleaning up this data. But not in a permanent sense. They are using the aggregate data handed down from the state, and they are cleaning a local copy. Then next year or next month, they get more data and have to re-merge or re-do their fixes because their fixes aren't upstream, and have originated from another jurisdiction.
Yeah, I checked one near me and it said EMS arrived 1 minute after being notified and victim was transported via EMS air. Time to arrive at hospital seems reasonable for an air transport from that spot though. So I guess the helicopter just happened to be idly hovering over the van at the time it went off the embankment?
Ground EMS could have arrived in 1 minute if they were already nearby. Just because the patient was transported by air doesn't necessarily mean that the helicopter unit was first to arrive.
Even if the helicopter is overhead for a planned drill you can't land it in a minute. 30 years ago if my first cpr class the teacher said it was typically 45 minutes from when you call - which is why they (in a big city where a level 1 trauma hospitial is at most a 30 minute drive away) almost never call for air help.
