Has anyone calculated the administrative costs associated with traffic safety research?

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,

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).

akilou,

This is one of those things where the answer is “it depends”. Like what counts as traffic safety research and what doesn’t. I’m sure depending on how you choose the end result is wildly different.

zerakith,

I agree there may be quite a large range but just to say that can still be useful.

I think its crucial to start denormalising all the costs and externalities of car focussed transport policy. Motornormativity means policy makers and general public internalise costs of progressive infrastructure and are blind to the huge costs of the status quo.

So even being able to pin a wide range on it can be helpful. Not for financial costs but for emissions I was able to show even for the lower end of a wide range of additional hard-to-quantify emissions for scenarios that didn’t drastically reduce private car usage as well as electricify would blow past thier carbon budgets.

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