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Nonsense. Mostly because nobody actually "kills someone and then drives in circles".

Human life being valuable does not change that certain activities carry a certain amount of risk, and so of course the more you do that activity the more likelihood the risk manifests. It is valuable information to know if one area has a hugely disproportionate number of traffic deaths compared to overall traffic metrics.

e.g. let's say I'm picking between two cities for my next job. Every day I will drive 25 miles to work, regardless of which city I choose. I look at the stats and see that in X city, there is 1 traffic death per 10,000,000 miles driven. In Y city, there is 1 traffic death per 100,000 miles. Therefore if I live in Y city I am 100x more likely to be involved in a fatal traffic accident. That is very relevant info to me and doesn't cheapen the value of human life at all.



Of course "driving in circles" is an exaggeration, but I think they're trying to say that if a place is structured to encourage lots of mileage (maybe there are things with relatively little utility, like surface parking, causing destinations to be very spread out; maybe there's no public transit option so more people are driving), then there will be more fatalities at a given per-mile rate. If you optimize _purely_ for the per-mile rate you might be missing out on ways to reduce fatalities by reducing mileage.


Sure, it's not perfect, but it is clearly better than not normalizing at all, which is what OP was arguing for instead.




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