Cars Are Not Our Friends

I keep seeing reports from the AAA in the paper. Not the kind of research that tells you how many people are expected to travel over Labor Day; no, these appear to be newsworthy items that we should all be aware of when we think about the effect of cars in our world (aside from the environmental effects).

The first was on February 6, when a Star Tribune story about a teen killed in a crash contained this quote:

"We lose far too many people on our roads because they aren't buckled up," Dawn Duffy, spokeswoman for AAA in Minneapolis, said Tuesday. "In the average lifetime," Duffy said, "only one in 100 people will never be involved in a crash--only one."

Whew. Ninety-nine out of every 100 people is involved in some type of car accident over the course of their lives. Anecdotally, this resonates with me. I can't think of an adult I know who hasn't been in at least a minor car accident. (Well, maybe one. But he's got another 40 years or so to make it happen.)

Imagine all of the economic factors tied up in that number. The entire system built up around car insurance, first of all. Hospitalizations and out-patient treatment. Car repairs and replacements. Loss of time at work or school. Not to mention the possibility of death.

Which leads me to the second piece of research, which I read about in the March 6 Pioneer Press. This study took the annual number of traffic fatalities (over 42,000) and injuries in U.S. urban areas, assigned a monetary value to the total based on agreed upon figures used by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and then divided that amount by how many people live in those urban areas.

It came to a figure of $1,051 per person in lost income, property damage, medical costs, EMS, legal costs, and traffic delays. (Let alone the direct cost we all pay in our insurance. Not sure if that was included.)

Because small and medium urban areas have fewer people to spread the costs over, they bear a much higher per capita cost.

AAA compared these per-person costs to the usually computed cost of congestion -- you know, that report that comes out periodically telling us how much time (and therefore money) we all waste sitting in rush hour traffic.

They found that the cost of accidents far outweighs the cost of congestion (more than twice as much). But we never hear much about the financial cost of car accidents, although we all have personal stories of people lost.

Like the infrastructure to build the roads they run on, the cost of cars is hidden in its very mundanity, while the more easily countable costs of building mass transit are held up as pork barrel spending or worse.