Excess Automobile Deaths as a Result of 9/11

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/excess_automobi.html

134 111 13 years ago

devx• 13 years ago

I bet a lot of people chose driving over flying not just because they're afraid of having their planes hijacked, but also because of the TSA and not wanting to deal with them.

chiph• 13 years ago

I'm one. I'd rather spend a day and a half in the car than deal with them.

ds92• 13 years ago

Exactly. The Xray scanners (now pulled), the offensive groping, the authoritarian attitudes, the long delays - I'm sure I saw some numbers showing big declines in the airline industry from late 2001, and undoubtedly few Americans today think terrorism is a big threat, but no one likes the TSA.

ChrisClark• 13 years ago

Yes, that's exactly what the article says. In fact, it says the TSA inconveniences are the main reason people chose to drive instead.

marssaxman• 13 years ago

I am not at all afraid of having a plane hijacked, but if I choose to fly it is a dead certainty that the TSA will invade my privacy, violate my rights, and waste my time. I would rather deny them the opportunity by driving.

chatman• 13 years ago

I don't understand why this post is featured on HN. It is just commentary on a previous essay, and doesn't even sound like a comprehensive commentary; just a few observations.

eru• 13 years ago

It has a catchy title, however.

timdiggerm• 13 years ago

Bruce Schneier.

coldcode• 13 years ago

This just shows you that security is always a trade-off, whether in your application or in life in general. People rarely consider the true cost of a change in security policy.

crististm• 13 years ago

Yes, but the TSA added inconvenience does not directly result in visible added safety.

Amadou2• 13 years ago

It is probably more correct to say, "Everything in life is a trade-off."

ds92• 13 years ago

"since airline travel is far safer than car travel" -- source quoted by Schneier

This old line has been exaggerated because people make a fallacious comparison. Ask whether people feel safer driving or flying, and many will say driving - this may still be statistically wrong, but it is intuitively based on the correct comparison.

The comparison people intuitively make is "events I can't control in each alternative", while the fallacious-debunkers compare total casualties. But almost all of the plane casualties are beyond the traveler's control, while on the other hand he/she can make sure the car is in good condition, drive while alert, obey speed limits and so on. The plane casualty number may still be lower than the corrected car casualty number, but not nearly by as much as is sometimes claimed.

blackhole• 13 years ago

You can't control other drunk drivers, either.

GrinningFool3• 13 years ago

It does always take two people to get in a [two vehicle] collision. You can't control the other driver, but you can control how you react - and usually whether you've seen them coming in time to do so.

Sometimes it's unavoidable - you're stopped at a light and someone crosses the median to plow into you. In that situation, you are screwed.

But often, there is something you as the not "at fault" party could have done to avoid the collision (even with the drunk driver), had you been paying attention enough to see the situation. Change lanes. Slow down. Speed up. Leave more room. Leave less room. Always, no matter what, be looking.

Once I prevented myself from getting rear-ended at a traffic light: I was stopped and saw someone coming up behind me way too fast. I leaned on my horn, they clued in, and braked in time to stop just touching my fender. (I was in a motorcyle at a time, so REALLY happy with the outcome.)

Again, sometimes it really is unavoidable - but in a surprising number of situations there are actions a driver can take to avoid or reduce the severity of the incident.

Insurance companies understand this - that's why your rates raise when you get in an accident, regardless of whether you're legally "at fault".

Driving well and alertly doesn't end at the bounds of legal fault. Sure if you were rear-ended someone else will pay damages - but if you're in a wheelchair or dead, that money isn't going to make things better.

So to GP's point: there are a LOT of things that are far more under your control when you're driving. Falling out of the sky... not so much.

yaddayadda• 13 years ago

Correction: You can't control other drivers.

I've been rear-ended multiple times. None of the drivers that hit me were drunk or intoxicated. I still had no control over their actions. Short of not driving at all there was no action I could have taken that would have prevented me from being hit. I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time (e.g., I had been fully stopped for about 60 seconds at a stoplight, not in rush hour traffic, when the light turned green and I was almost instantly hit from the rear. I was about 16 cars back from green light, and there was no way I could have been rolling. But, the driver behind me saw the light turn green and decided that traffic would be moving before he reached my location.)

danso• 13 years ago

This is an interesting point though I don't think it would tip the scales in the favor of driving. However, another factor is that the total number of actual flights is a subset of all flights, the main filter being weather and mechanical problems. Whereas with driving, people drive regardless of the weather and sometimes, mechanical problems. I wonder how the risk changes further if you delayed your driving as much as airlines delay their flights?

Zigurd3• 13 years ago

I don't believe it is exaggerated. Air travel is about 10X safer per mile. If you are not a high risk driver, that will narrow, but it's still true.

Comparing total casualties is very deceptive, since cars rack up many more passenger miles than airliners. Still, cars kill lots of people and car safety is a high-value goal.

Once we get self-driving cars that are significantly better at avoiding accidents and mitigating severity of accidents, this all will change in very significant ways. It will certainly result in many more people avoiding the TSA.

sigkill• 13 years ago

It will certainly result in many more people avoiding the TSA.

There is another interesting way of thinking about this. They might be more inclined to use air travel than road because the 'element of control' is lost from them in both modes of travel. So they would then compare the time it takes to reach the destination and since air travel is faster, they might even end up sucking up the TSA pat-downs.

lmgftp• 13 years ago

The issue with this comparison is... How many times has "feeling safe" resulted in saving a life?

Statistics isn't a feeling, and the comparison is correct in that, on average, air travel is significantly safer than car travel. One should note, however, that the "on average" is the key bit, as one might argue that drivers in accidents have some special characteristic at work making them more susceptible than most, but claiming that Schneier or his source is making a false comparison somehow is simply unfair and untrue. Moreover, plenty of fatal auto accidents are not the explicit fault of those that die (drunk driver, someone else texting while driving, semi-trucker not paying attn). So "feeling safe" is worth nothing when you're staring down the grim reaper in the grill of the semi that switched lanes without signalling to pass without seeing you.

tremendo• 13 years ago

It's an imperfect comparison yes. We're never given the whole picture, only comparing by miles traveled where of course airplanes go a lot further on each trip. I'd like to see a comparison by time spent on each type of vehicle, or by number of trips, where a lot of drivers make multiple trips every single day and their number of flights would be only a fraction of a percent of that. Not to mention the intuition that a plane crash would certainly result in death, whereas in a car crash you may have a much better chance of survival and recovery.

It would be just as "unfair" to compare driving against crop-dust pilots, which seem to more frequently end up in a crash.

Someone2• 13 years ago

"Not to mention the intuition that a plane crash would certainly result in death"

That intuition is somewhat wrong, depending on how you define 'crash'. http://www.ntsb.gov/doclib/safetystudies/SR0101.pdf table 2, shows 53,487 passengers involved in accidents, with 2,280 fatalities. Table 3 limits that to more serious accidents. There, of 2,739 passengers, 1,215 died, over half due to impact wounds.

Yes, a jet nosediving into hard rock will kill everybody on board, but one making a very rough 'landing' near first aid units? Not something to volunteer for, but not certain death, either.

arnarbi• 13 years ago

The fallacy is that people think they are in control in traffic, and that if they are careful then they'll be safe.

Dig up statistics about traffic fatalities, and see how many of them were caused by someone else. Here you can see that one third of casualties are not even drivers: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1105.p...

tedunangst3• 13 years ago

Those stats reveal that the majority of fatal crashes only involved a single vehicle. Also, they don't specify which vehicle the occupants were in. You can totally control who you allow to drive you.

chimeracoder2• 13 years ago

The inconvenience of extra passenger screening and added costs at airports after 9/11 cause many short-haul passengers to drive to their destination instead

"Inconvenience" is putting it mildly. Even before my recent experiences with airport security[0], I preferred to drive or take the train for short distances (NYC to Boston, Philly, DC, etc.). As one can imagine, that aversion has only increased.

Nate Silver puts this well:

According to the Cornell study, roughly 130 inconvenienced travelers died every three months as a result of additional traffic fatalities brought on by substituting ground transit for air transit. That’s the equivalent of four fully-loaded Boeing 737s crashing each year.[1]

Emphasis mine.

[0] Previously submitted to HN, but for the lazy: http://varnull.adityamukerjee.net/post/59021412512/dont-fly-... [1]http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/the-hidd...)

drpgq• 13 years ago

I guess 9/11 has been a benefit for Amtrak.

chimeracoder2• 13 years ago

Cue the "Joe Biden caused 9/11" conspiracy theories!

betterunix2• 13 years ago

Only in the Northeast. For most of America it is easier to get around by plane than by train.

GrinningFool3• 13 years ago

Since the new "security measures" have gone into place. I've instituted a 12- to 14-hour rule: if I can get somewhere by driving there in less than 12 (to 14) hours, I'll drive.

As a tall person, a plane has always been uncomfortable for me. Add to that experience the long security lines and being treated like cattle... nah. It costs me more, but I'll drive.

rdl5• 13 years ago

If you had a self-driving EV such that a drive cost you duration of sitting in a comfortable chair with high-speed internet, a refrigerator full of drinks, and maybe $50, how far upward would you revise this?

I'd probably seriously consider commuting weekly or biweekly from central WA to SFBA, even if it took 20h. 10h would be nothing, as I could just sleep.

jlgreco2• 13 years ago

If my schedule permits it period, I drive. I've driven 4 days in a row rather than fly (my schedule was unusually loose then), though I have also flown rather than drive 6 hours (my schedule was unusually tight then).

Treated like cattle is exactly the right way of putting it. I would rather be inconvenienced on my terms.

greenyoda• 13 years ago

"Add to that experience the long security lines and being treated like cattle..."

Cattle probably have more legal protections than travelers in a U.S. airport.

pre• 13 years ago

After the tube-bombings in London a friend's mom offered to buy him a car so he didn't have to get the tube and risk being blown up.

Ha.

He refused (mostly to spare her the cost I think) while pointing out that would have been a good way to increase the chances of him dying while traveling.

bloat• 13 years ago

I am (irrationally) afraid of flying, but I try and counteract it by telling myself, when I get out of the car at the airport, "Phew, that's the dangerous part of the journey over with."

mhb• 13 years ago

That depends on how far you drive to the airport versus how far your plane trip is.

peferron• 13 years ago

Another mind trick is to tell yourself a few minutes after takeoff that you're now very safe for the entire journey until the landing.

coob• 13 years ago

And if he weren't killed travelling he'd be stuck in traffic for 6 hours a day. London traffic.

sklivvz1971• 13 years ago

I'm one of the "people that commented" and the thread is here: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/17578/96

api• 13 years ago

Our irrationality in the face of minor but "scary" risks (vs. chronic ones) is brilliant for Schneier to point out -- it's really one of the pivots on which the whole surveillance issue rests.

Throwing away our freedom to prevent rare, statistically insignificant events is equally stupid. By doing so we are risking a much greater danger -- the chronic danger of a corrupt and possibly deadly police state.

brudgers• 13 years ago

We tend to accept that death has a color [1]. Unfortunately, we tend to let our governments decide which deaths have what color. No doubt the 500 or so US residents who died each year as a result of actions following 9/11 constitutes many individual tragedies. But there have been many many more colorless deaths around the world as a result of other government actions with 9/11 as their rationalization.

[1] http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

lostlogin2• 13 years ago

There might have been many due to other government actions, but the vast majority are surely attributable to the US government. What's a few hundred thousand deaths when they are Muslim though?

JackFr• 13 years ago

I read the original Cornell paper which attempted show the effect of security measures on demand for air travel (http://dyson.cornell.edu/faculty_sites/gb78/wp/airport_secur...), and frankly I didn't find it very compelling. But even were one to accept its conclusion that security measures (and not an economic downturn or a change in preference due to a percieved risk) caused the change in demand, no one presents any evidence that the air travel was replced with car travel. It seems quite likely that many trips would have been simply forgone, or along the BOS-NY-WAS corridor replaced with the train.

toblender• 13 years ago

I first heard about this from the book, the "Science of Fear". It's unfortunate that fear of something like flight, can lead to death by other means.

mathattack• 13 years ago

From the comments:

Another good illustration: In the past 20 years total, deer have killed more on American soil (~150-200/yr) than terrorists. So where is the trillion dollar War on Bambi?

refurb• 13 years ago

That's a ridiculous comment. The commentor is comparing the numbers of deaths that occurred over 20 years to the number of deaths that occurred during a single morning on 9/11?

Amadou2• 13 years ago

What do you think would be an appropriate comparison? The number of deer-related deaths that occurred on 9/11?

betterunix2• 13 years ago

Major terrorist attacks are extremely rare in America. They were rare before 9/11 and they have been rare since. Deer hits, on the other hand, are common and cause extensive damage to vehicles and injuries to drivers.

Also, there is a war on deer, but we prefer to call it "hunting." Hunting regulations are designed to cull the deer population, particularly in areas where natural predators were killed off by humans long ago. Hunting regulations balance the need to keep the deer population down with the need to not drive deer into extinction. It might make sense to bump up the number of kills allowed per hunter per season or to make the seasons longer if automobile hits are a serious enough problem (there are still more deer now in many eastern states than there were when the colonies were first established).

tedunangst3• 13 years ago

? The US kills millions of deer every year.

jweir• 13 years ago

Why does the Wikipedia article show a steady decline of fatalities? And this is occurring in a growing population.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in...

lingben• 13 years ago

you answered yourself, the decline is in fatalities per capita

Someone2• 13 years ago

It also is in absolute number of fatalities, since 2002, except for 2005.

sp332• 13 years ago

Fatalities from automobile accidents have plummeted, to the point that suicide is now a more-frequent cause of death for men age 25-34. Note that suicides are down too, but car deaths are down even more sharply.

Zigurd3• 13 years ago

Cars used to be death traps. Now even the lowest cost cars have decent survivability.

revelation• 13 years ago

No idea, what does it have to do with the question at hand here?

Maybe car turnover (switching to safer cars) acts stronger than flawed government policy.

jacquesm2• 13 years ago

To really properly balance this you'd have to compare with a world where the TSA does not exist. But we don't actually have the possibility to compare the two. Chances are (not saying this is the case) that the combined haul of what the TSA found during the last decade would have led to more deaths. Controlled experiments on this scale are unfortunately not possible so in the end it all boils down to what you wish to believe most or what seems to be most reasonable.

HarryHirsch3• 13 years ago

In Europe we had a rash of airplane hijackings in the 1970s and 1980s, onsequently there is plenty of institutional experience in how to deal with terrorism and aircraft.

We chose not to plump for the TSA groping squad. Neither should the US.

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

There were also quite a lot of hijackings in the US during that period. But none of them ended as badly as 9-11, so it's not a terribly meaningful comparison.

mikeash4• 13 years ago

"Chances are" implies that this is the most likely possibility. I think you may have meant to say, "it is possible".

jacquesm2• 13 years ago

No, I actually meant that it is the most likely possibility. I'm just not sure, but I take it that if you inspect a few billion air travellers that you occasionally will find something real that may have cost an air traveller to die. The numbers are too vast to discount a few lives lost as a good possibility.

In my opinion the balance is completely lost.

Contrast it with: chances are that if we equipped every passenger airline with a mandatory ER that we would save a few lives. And yet, we don't do this because the economics and the logistics are simply not worth it. (I can't prove that one either way).

Ditto the TSA.

downandout• 13 years ago

An interesting tidbit in the post is that DHS values each life at $6.5 million. Since most people do not have a net worth that high, and will never earn anywhere near that much in their lifetimes, it really makes me wonder where they get these numbers. While any loss of life is tragic, that loss rarely represents a financial loss of $6.5 million to the economy - even if you take earning potential into account.

cynicalkane• 13 years ago

Are you actually expressing confusion that the value of a life is higher than its discounted cash flow?

tlrobinson• 13 years ago

"[Economists] often consider the value of a statistical life (VSL). The VSL is the value that an individual places on a marginal change in their likelihood of death. Note that the VSL is very different from the value of an actual life. It is the value placed on changes in the likelihood of death, not the price someone would pay to avoid certain death."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life

frobozz2• 13 years ago

Simply adding up all the dollars that might find their way into and out of your bank account is rather a naive way to value a life.

You may not ever earn or own that much money, but perhaps one of your descendants might be the next Gates/Buffet/Rausing/Musk (pick your favourite rich person).

If you are yet to breed, or having bred, yet to finish your job of raising that child, then you might want to include the potential financial loss that your descendants incur by not living up to their full potential, or taking an extra generation to climb above your current social level.

You mention a financial loss to "the economy", rather than explicitly to the household of the deceased. You may not earn $6.5M for yourself, but you might implement some feature that saves 1000 people who earn $65K each a year of effort.

Your employer may need to replace you, we often see posts about how important it is to hire the right people, because of how much the hiring process itself costs.

If a well-liked individual dies, then the productivity of some of those close to them drops for a period. Your next of kin may have to take time out of work to arrange the disposal of your remains, attend an inquest, deal with probate, authorise the withdrawal of life support from your brain-dead body (and deal with the psychological trauma that that might cause). Your friends and relatives may take a day off work to attend a funeral.

If blame is to be apportioned for someone's death, expensive legal professionals will be involved in working out how much blame should fall on whom. Insurers will argue about how quickly their liability should be discharged, and how much they should actually pay.

Sagat• 13 years ago

Judging people's "value" according to their wealth is laughable and has a whiff of protestant fundamentalism to it. There are a ton of people with absurd wealth who are in fact costly to the economy (drug kingpins, polluters, embezzlers, corrupt heads of states...).

mzs• 13 years ago

Not the way I think about it, but maybe you could: You earn dollar, then you spend a portion, someone else earns some of that, then spends a portion of that, this continues. So $6,500,000 is not that unreasonable with that and inflation in mind.

Symmetry2• 13 years ago

It doesn't particularly matter what the specific number is, what's really important is that we have consistent way of looking at all the different ways we could save lives by spending money and evaluate them rationally, rather than spending $1e9 to save a life here but refusing to spend $1e5 there. People's intuitions about these things are really horrible, and if someone is willing to pay an amount to save 1 life they usually aren't willing to pay anything like 10 times as much to save 10 lives.

3am3• 13 years ago

This is a morbid point, but I dislike the figure of ~3K people killed in the 9/11 attacks.

If either of the towers had fallen sooner or had fallen sideways instead of collapsing almost completely vertically, then it could have been much worse.

I'm trying to make the narrowest possible point when saying this: just that ~3K casualties was far from the worst case outcome that was possible that day.

EDIT: per my reply below, I'm only trying to make the discussion as honest as possible. At the core is the question, "Given X casualties to air travel based terror attacks, is a particular security policy worth implementing if it leads to Y casualties indirectly?". I'm addressing a shortcoming in what I see as the figure being used for X, since it's a small data set. It would be interesting to address the effectiveness (% of attacks thwarted or discouraged) of the security policy, too.

bmm6o• 13 years ago

Why does it make sense to introduce into this discussion some number of hypothetical counter-factual fatalities?

3am3• 13 years ago

Because at the core of the point is a comparison between a very large data set (auto fatalities) and a very small data set (large scale terrorist attacks). Since - thank god - there is a very limited data set available in the second case it's worth asking if the expected value is higher than the observed value up til now.

recursive• 13 years ago

And the actual number of car-related casualties are far from a worst case scenario also. Why do you dislike an apples to apples, actual to actual comparison?

scoot2• 13 years ago

It was also far from the best. The second tower could have been evacuated before the second plane struck. One or both towers could have remained standing.

Speculating as to what could have happened makes no sense. The number who died is what it is, for better or worse.

Symmetry2• 13 years ago

Why limit this to Air terrorism attacks then? If the first World Trade Center attack [1] had succeeded in bringing the towers down the casualties would have been far worse. Or if the terrorists had smuggled a nuke into New York it would have been even worse than that.

As it stands 9/11 is actually a worse terrorist attack than can ever be achieved with the use of airplanes again, see Flight 93. So it doesn't make sense to consider these sorts of hypotheticals when talking about changing air security policy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing

3am3• 13 years ago

"As it stands 9/11 is actually a worse terrorist attack than can ever be achieved with the use of airplanes again, see Flight 93." I think this point is highly debatable, though I hope we don't find out in our respective lifetimes.

Anyway, as to why I didn't address non-air terrorism: I didn't set the scope of the discussion, I'm just participating in it. Sadly I'm well aware of the '93 bombing, the Bali bombings, the African embassy bombings... all sorts of non-aircraft attacks.

I literally said in my post that I was trying to make the "narrowest possible point". I meant it.

hobb0001• 13 years ago

Security theater. sigh If the government was actually serious about protecting women and children from people with malicious intent, terrorists would be toward the bottom of the list, just above school shooters. Domestic abuse far outstrips any news-worthy outrages, but you don't get many votes talking about that.

lukifer• 13 years ago

Security theater to treat criminal violence theater. It makes a perverse sort of sense.

Terrorism is not really about deaths; there are many greater causes of preventable death, as you note. It's about attacking a nation's perception of safety. You can ignore another random car accident or drug-related murder, but it's much harder to ignore 9/11.

I'd much prefer the vaccine to the "cure": to educate ourselves on this tactic and refuse to play along, treating terrorism the way we would treat a natural disaster. But alas, there's too much money and power to be gained in the security theater racket, and power abhors a vacuum.

Excess Automobile Deaths as a Result of 9/11

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