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The National Center for Statistics and Analysis (NCSA), an office of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), is responsible for providing a wide range of analytical and statistical support to NHTSA and the highway safety community at large.

Just had the fleeting thought that maybe there is a substantial cost to review and create enormous traffic safety research systems and the subsequent training required of law enforcement personnel and administrative staff.
In contrast to the status quo which is basically a long running experiment, I’m imagining the control condition is cars are electronically speed limited to 15 mph since there is substantial evidence that travelling at this speed reduces traffic fatalities to nearly zero.

Has anyone seen estimates of the administrative costs associated with traffic safety analysis? My first intuition is that it is trivial compared to the damage to life, limb, and property.

  • zerakith
    6·
    8 months ago

    I haven’t seen any work estimating this. I have as part of my work spent some time trying to estimate the upstream effects of private cars (and other forms of transport) and it quite quickly gets very hard to find very much data. Even something quite basic like road maintainance gets quite difficult to unpick. So we know broad generalisations like heavier vehicles cause more damage but its quite hard to isolate this connection with individual traffic make ups (e.g. how much change in costs does a 10% change in average vehicle weight cause)

    Sadly, we don’t have a culture that particularly wants to know or track the costs. I’m not sure I’d be so confident though that the administration costs would be completely neglible. Some of the costs are quite high level: highway engineering, infrastructure and enforcement which can have high labour and materials costs. Probably what you need is a “natural experiment”. Find a town or city that already happens to have a strange policy (I vagually recall somewhere that has a network of golf cart usage?) and try and ask the relevant authority whether they can provide the back history of spending and compare it to a similar size “normal” road network.

    Related bugbare of my mine is the term cycling or walking infrastructure when in reality most if it is actually only necessary because of cars so its really car infrastructure (i.e. to facilitate cars going non human speeds without killing people or damaging buildings).