Knowing the risk of fatality, to the finest nicety
Becky sez, "The Boing Boing discussion of the woman who let her kid find his way home alone on the subway got me interested in comparing that risk relative to the risk of a child dying in a car accident. What I discovered en route is a treasure trove of car accident data, which can be sliced and diced any way you want it--click the Query tab for an array of very specific variables. (Want to know how many people died in car accidents in Tompkins County, New York, on Martin Luther King Day in 2004 while riding in the back seat on the right-hand side of a vehicle traveling at 23 miles an hour driven by a female living in zip code 60656? No problem. And that barely scratches the surface of the possibilities.) I answered my initial question, then played with the thing for hours."
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(Thanks, Becky!)
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The Danger Of Lying In Bed
By Mark Twain
1871
The man in the ticket-office said:
"Have an accident insurance ticket, also?"
"No," I said, after studying the matter over a little. "No, I believe not; I am going to be travelling by rail all day to-day. However, to-morrow I don't travel. Give me one for to-morrow."
The man looked puzzled. He said:
"But it is for accident insurance, and if you are going to travel by rail - "
"If I am going to travel by rail I sha'n't need it. Lying at home in bed is the thing I am afraid of."
I had been looking into this matter. Last year I traveled twenty thousand miles, almost entirely by rail; the year before, I traveled over twenty-five thousand miles, half by sea and half by rail; and the year before that I traveled in the neighborhood of ten thousand miles, exclusively by rail. I suppose if I put in all the little odd journeys here and there, I may say I have traveled sixty thousand miles during the three years I have mentioned. And never an accident.
For a good while I said to myself every morning: "Now I have escaped thus far, and so the chances are just that much increased that I shall catch it this time. I will be shrewd, and buy an accident ticket." And to a dead moral certainty I drew a blank, and went to bed that night without a joint started or a bone splintered. I got tired of that sort of daily bother, and fell to buying accident tickets that were good for a month. I said to myself, "A man can't buy thirty blanks in one bundle." ........cont.
ohh this could be a basis for a movie script
"A man who lost his wife in a freak auto-accident tries to find connection and closure with others who experienced the similar situation - and finds a deeper meaning"
To any script writers: feel free to use my idea; I'd rather get ripped off/be inspiration than have another Hanna-Barbara live action remake
Under vehicle accidents, there are tallies for drivers, passengers, and "unknown" victims -- which seems to mean that a known number of people were killed in a crash but it wasn't obvious how many drivers and how many passengers there were.
I'm puzzled at the small number of outlier cases which generate an "unknown" victim. If a crash kills four, and everybody is thrown from the vehicle, you'd have one driver and three passengers dead, regardless of whether or not you knew who was driving.
Oh, never mind, I think I just figured it out: if one of the four becomes a vegetable in the above situation, but doesn't die, you might never learn which of the four vehicle occupants was driving.
Thank you for allowing me to think out loud.
also it could be: people in the bed of a truck (like construction workers)
-excessive amount of people in car
-corpse found, not known what auto they were in (like stupid teens doing car stunts gone wrong)
What I find most interesting is that apparently there were 2 aliens killed in 1996...
I assume the unknowns would also take in any incomplete data reporting: say, the local police reported total number of deaths in an accident to the national database but not whether those victims were drivers or passengers.
Cory, have you seen the "Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service" comic? In the first volume, one of the villains is an insurance adjuster who murders people by leading them into situations where they are statistically likely to die (lightning strikes, car accidents, etc.). It's a pretty fantastic series.
Some of the 'Person Related Factors' are really puzzling - sure, things like "inattentive" or "interfering with driver" make sense, and I -guess- I can even see why they'd need "blind" as an item ... but "mother of dead fetus"?
?
I'm not sure what intrigues me more, that one (so many questions!), or "Phantom Vehicle" ...
Ok I have briefly looked at the data from my state using conjecture and speculation have reached the following conclusion:
If you are a Pedestrian under the age of 5 and a Pedalcyclists while the Weather Condition is Rain and Dark, but Lighted and related factors being Inattentive (Talking, Eating, etc.) or Emotional (e.g., Depression, Angry, Disturbed), it seems not very likely that you would be in a fatal incident.
But that being said, it is best/safe to not temp fate at all by actually being outside, you just should stay indoors and play video games or read true crime books all day long.
@8 - I haven't checked, but is that a one-time example?
If you've never been in the midst of a miscarriage, you might not realize how distraught it can make you. Someone racing to the hospital, hoping to get there in time, or coming back in a state of mental chaos after having undergone a miscarriage could easily get in an accident.
I certainly wouldn't disagree with that, Chgoliz, but OTOH there are a -lot- of traumatic experiences that could throw a person into a state of deep, deep mental chaos and render them less capable of driving safely - it just seems odd to me that they've singled this one out when all the other listed factors seem so much broader ... nevertheless, a quick search turns up 28 reports in 2006 alone in which it was indicated as a factor, so I suppose there must be -some- reason for singling it out ...
I wonder if it is a bureaucratic way of tracking how many pregnant women lost the baby in an accident, since the fetus wouldn't be counted among the other fatalities. It wouldn't be a cause of the accident, but they might not have had another category for it.
Seems to me that the hardest part of estimating this kind of risk isn't finding the accident data, it's finding the exposure data.
If intersection A has twice the accidents of intersection B, it may appear to be more dangerous, until you learn it also has ten times the traffic....
How many were killed by terrorists?
I'm just sayin'...
@8 -- I'm probably a morbid fuck, but I just laughed to tears at that category. I want to see it used as reasoning for more things...
@14 -- Seriously, that can't be ground in ENOUGH. Say it more. Say it to everything. Simple, facetious references to rabid and obsessive American stupidity are well-deserved.