On 31/05/2012 23:00, hugh wrote:
In message , Robin writes
That's the whole problem you don't seem to get. A lot less than £6.7m
could be spent in saving one person in other fields. Town bypasses
could be just one. I'm sure others here will come up with other
suggestions.

The DfT "value of a life" figure is around £m2 so it's easy peasey:
light more roads/junctions. (DfT were always the government leaders on
how to deal with death and injury in cost-benefit analyses because they
have to do them so often for road schemes, speed limits etc)
Snip
Story was that Ford looked at the frequency of deaths with the Pinto
caused by rear end shunts splitting the petrol tank and decided it was
cheaper to carry on paying out compensation than rectify the problem.
Now that is cost-benefit analysis!!

They were right too, but the court didn't see it that way and applied
punitive damages against the manufacturer for its callous beancouting.

You will also find that we pay insanely high premiums to make already
incredibly safe methods of mass transport like trains and air travel
safer still whilst ignoring the piecemeal carnage on our roads.

The thing is that plane and train crashes make big news stories whereas
another dozen or so dying every day in car crashes isn't even news
unless they do mass suicide in fog by driving nose to tail at 70+.

About 100x more people die every year in car crashes than in trains or
planes and even if you express it as deaths per billion passenger miles
the car is still almost an order of magnitude more dangerous.

Stats for the UK are available online at:
http://www.igreens.org.uk/uk_rail_accident_deaths.htm

--
Regards,
Martin Brown