All but the 70-80 year bracket, then the men really make up for lost fatalities. What’s up with that? (really small sample size? Most drivers at that age don’t drive much, and mainly in places with a lot of intersections and pedestrians? Men more likely not to know their limits? Women involved in more non-fatal accidents?)
Also, it’s good to know that for the 50 years between 25 and 75, the fatality rate for everyone is really low in comparison. Raising the legal driving age might just shift the effect from all of those learners to some extent, but it would still presumably make the roads safer. Stricter controls after retirement age would also seem to be warranted.
(I didn’t learn to drive until I was 25, partly to avoid being part of the statistics to the left of the chart)
It would be interesting to parse out how much the left side of the chart has to do with “inexperienced drivers have more accidents” and how much has to do with “teens engage in riskier behavior.”
I think it’s often difficult to parse data due to the many factors involved, but here’s a study that discusses the chart WRT older drivers. All I know is that if you’re a male Canadian driver, don’t go to Yukon:
I’m not sure you’re right. They also use “gentleman” favorably, as in this post:
And in the case of this 92-year old guy, I’m not sure it would be appropriate to use the word “gentleman” ironically, since I think the main thing he’s guilty of is being too old to drive.
I’ve never hit even 1 stationary car in a car park… how is that a subjective assessment? Me: 0 This old guy: 10 (at the very least).
That’s the point: I am frequently told that I’m a dick for driving stoned (which, by the way doesn’t bother me… anyone who thinks that has not looked at the data on the subject) but some of these same people would then turn around and defend old people’s right to drive as me impinging on their freedoms and being ageist… while Brainspore’s handy charts quite effectively demonstrate that the very elderly probably shouldn’t be driving, or at the very least be regularly tested.
They’re not comparable since alcohol impairs the consumer in very different ways to marijuana. Alcohol impairs the user’s ability in such a way that they take more risks and overestimate their ability, while marijuana leads people to take less risks and underestimate their ability.
In any case, society’s general acceptance that some level of alcohol impairment is acceptable is the crux of my argument above about people not looking at the data on the subject. Two separate studies of crash/fatality data, one in Canada and one in France, have indicated that marijuana use statistically results in less accidents/fatalities than drinking to the legal limit.
It’s that ridiculous double standard that galls me and it permeates most levels of the law. College students, for example, will get in far less legal and social trouble if they are caught drinking than smoking weed despite the fact that, on basically any measure you care to use, alcohol is far worse for you.
Its a good point about alcohol generally making people more willing to take risks, but speaking as someone who spends a good deal of time driving, personally I’m glad for deterrents to driving under anything that impairs motor function or mental state. And even if you argue that you personally are able to drive very well while stoned, I don’t think you’d argue that everyone is.
As far as “on basically any measure you care to use, alcohol is far worse for you than marijuana”, I disagree with you there as well. Almost all my friends who smoke pot extremely regularly are dead broke and underemployed, and while this theory gets me in trouble pretty often (I live in San Francisco), I see a pretty obvious connection. I used to have a slogan: “marijuana, crippling the underground for years now”. But of course that doesn’t have anything to do with driving.
The same exists for alcohol, but that doesn’t seem to pose a problem for driving after legal levels of pre-driving drinking. Why would a separate drug be any different? People who know they drive like shit after a drink but when still under the BAC limit tend to not drink before driving and I see no reason to assume that weed smokers wouldn’t do the same.
As far as “on basically any measure you care to use, alcohol is far worse for you than marijuana”, I disagree with you there as well.
Anecdotes do not a measure make. I could counter them with my own as well.
Me? I’ve got a university degree with good grades which I earned while smoking weed every day. I’ve been employed full time since university at numerous jobs, have made a fair amount of money working on freelance projects and have learned to speak Japanese during this time. Someone I know is an IT guy who makes very good money. There have been times that I’ve been hitting bongs with him at his house while he migrates data of large multinational corporations remotely. Another person I know smokes regularly, employs 50+ people in his business which takes in millions of dollars a year.
I know the kinds of smoker to which you refer as well, but these people IMO have addiction problems rather than a marijuana problem per se.
Agreed, there’s lots of exceptions to my theory, and its probably impossible to prove causation, and of the many potheads I’ve known over the years there have of course been a few who have been super functional, but they’re by far the exception. To ignore the fact that many if not most potheads are unmotivated to the point of dysfunction is to ignore a pretty big part of the evidence, in my opinion at least. Or maybe I’m just being contrarian, since San Francisco is the new Amsterdam and taking any stand against pot smoking is downright rebellious around here. Maybe I just miss the subversion of smoking shitty brown seed-ridden dirt weed behind bleachers.
But I’ll say that for me personally, if I smoke a bunch of pot, I find it really hard to motivate to do unpleasant tasks for a good week or so. And that’s a danger that’s arguably far worse than most things light alcohol consumption is capable of, driving aside.
Agreed, and it’d be great if people always made intelligent moral decisions, but that’s what laws are for, to protect us from people who make bad moral decisions. Call me a cynic, but I’m going to go ahead and posit that without a law explicitly prohibiting driving while stoned, we’ll get a lot more people driving while stoned. And personally I’m not convinced that that’s a good thing.
Don’t hold your breath. Self-driving cars have been “5-10 years around the corner” for a lot longer than 5-10 years already and despite Google and other high profile adventures into the space, there are still some serious obstacles to be overcome before they’re viable.
I could see them in very limited use (i.e. shuttling people around a private retirement village) within that time frame, but there are a lot of fundamental problems they still have to figure out before fully self-driving cars are ready for widespread adoption on public roads.
Driving while tired is another one, which can be worse than driving at the legal alcohol limit. Both are real risks, but very difficult to measure accurately (unlike the use of drugs like alcohol or marijuana, or other actions that are illegal in some places like eating or using a phone). I think it’s quite possible that non-users overestimate the risks from weed, but I think a good general rule of thumb is to recognise that you’re operating a deadly vehicle and treat it with respect. Don’t drive when you are physically impaired by substances or your physical condition. Don’t do stuff that impairs your ability to drive, like texting or organising your kids in the back seat. Just generally focus on the road and recognise when external or internal factors mean that you can’t do that properly. If you are driving dangerously and others are driving worse, maybe neither of you should be on the road.
Why did you arbitrarily pick 75? Because it looks like the graph starts to spike? Or because the number of deaths went over some limit in your mind? It seems equally straightforward to me that nobody should be driving. There are about 30,000 traffic-related deaths per year and they are not all due to young and old people. Just because those in the middle are killing fewer doesn’t mean they’re doing a good job.
