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National road fatality maxima: why the 1972 cluster?

Los máximos del número de fallecidos en carretera a nivel nacional. ¿Por qué aparece el grupo de 1972?

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Securitas Vialis

Abstract

We emphasize our ignorance of the reasons for the simultaneous turnaround in 1972 of the number of yearly road fatalities in ten OECD countries (and in four others, just before or after) and summarize some of the foundations of this ignorance. This failure to make scientific sense of the evolution and timing of the key road safety indicator in so many OECD countries implies that we also fail to understand why other countries actually had their own global maximum in years other than 1971–1973. By implication, questions then asked about upward or downward trending road fatality forecasts cannot be adequately answered. Making sense of the joint occurrence of national maxima, very much Meadow-shaped in many of these 14 countries and in others, is a missing pre-requisite.

Resumen

Destacamos la ignorancia sobre las razones en el cambio de tendencia simultánea en 1972 del número de fallecidos en accidentes de tráfico anualmente en los 10 países de la OCDE (y en otros 4, justo antes o después) y resumimos algunos de los fundamentos sobre esta ignorancia. Esta falta de sentido de la evolución científica y el indicador clave de seguridad vial en muchos países de la OCDE implica que también somos capaces de entender por qué otros países tenían en realidad su propio máximo global en años distintos de 1971 a 1973. Por ende, cuestiones entonces planteadas sobre la tendencia a la alta o a la baja de las previsiones de mortalidad en carretera no pueden ser respondidas adecuadamente. Encontrarle un sentido a la ocurrencia simultánea de los valores máximos en muchos de estos 14 países es un punto de partida.

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Notes

  1. This estimate is derived from the Sidi Bel Abbes registry established by Professor Suleiman.

  2. Certain Canadian provinces had their maximum in 1972 and others in 1973.

  3. We do not have at hand the series for Israël where the maximum is also in 1972.

  4. There exist thousands of studies of road safety interventions, but we could not find a single empirical demonstration of a turning point caused by them, because they typically produce shifts, or « jumps » in the trend, as in the real example of maximum highway speed modifications illustrated in Figura 5.

  5. The maximum for New Zealand is also in 1972 but the liberalization of trucking, freed from its 50-mile range limit in the middle of the 1980’s, makes the graph, available in Gaudry and Gelgoot [11], less interesting.

  6. It is posible to define non constant dummy variables incorporating hypotheses about the distribution of effects over time.

  7. On December 3, 1973, speed was limited to 120 km/h. It was raised to 140 km/h on March 13, 1974, and lowered to 130 km/h on November 6 of the same year.

  8. Men and women who obtain new driving permits do so with distinct seasonal patterns.

  9. In all of these countries, the trend has continued to be downwards since 1999. The peaks showed are therefore global maxima.

  10. Where the number of road fatalities was until very recently a military secret.

  11. Immediate loss of driving permit for many offenses; and fines multiplied by 10 and often by 20.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Éditions EMH for the permission to translate and enrich the original French version of this paper by the same author [5]. We draw very heavily from a French study [6] financed by the PREDIT program of the Ministère de l’Écologie, de l’Énergie, du Développement durable et de l’Aménagement du Territoire and updated recently [7–10]. Information on Algeria was gracefully supplied by Slimane Himouri, Director of the LCTPE (Laboratoire Construction, Transport et Protection de l’Environnement), Université Abdelhamid Ibn Badis, Mostaganem, Algeria.

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  1. Economics Department and Agora Jules Dupuit, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada

    Marc Gaudry

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  1. Marc Gaudry
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Correspondence to Marc Gaudry.

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Gaudry, M. National road fatality maxima: why the 1972 cluster?. Securitas Vialis 6, 47–55 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12615-014-9074-y

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