Stupid article of the day

http://nydailynews.com/front/story/178404p-154983c.html

Pete Donohue doesn’t get it. He compares the fatality rate per hundred thousand residents to find that NYC has the fewest traffic deaths of big cities. But consider the last sentence: “New York is the only place in the U.S. where more than half the households do not own a car.” What does low car ownership rates mean? Maybe fewer traffic fatalities? Wow, amazing leap of logic here!

A better comparison would be fatalities per hundred million miles traveled, a more widely recognized standard.

An even better stat would be fatal crashes per hundred million miles traveled. That statistic gets around the skew effect of when large capacity vehicles crash. For example, suppose on the same day road x has a passenger car fatal wreck where one person dies, and road y has a 15 passenger van wreck, causing 10 deaths. Is road x less safe than road y? Probably not. Road y was unlucky enough to have a 15 passenger van crash. Agenda pushers abuse this kind of skew to support needlessly harsh traffic laws.

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