Albereth
Honorary Master
First off - ridiculous that so many people end up dead.
This year it was blamed on month end, school holidays and a long weekend.
It's always a long weekend. It's pretty much always around some sort of school break.
I'm not too sure how they allocate deaths to the Easter weekend. Is it just the F, S, S and M or would T be added in? Because if we're losing close on 50 people a day on any other day, well 287 is worse than average but not massively so. Around 22% more assuming a 5 day counting period.
What isn't clear from the numbers quoted is how many of the fatalities are caused by pedestrians. And I haven't seen the classification of the numbers by vehicle type etc etc.
But a stat that was given that seems to have caused a bit of debate was that 70% involved black male drivers. Is there any significance in this? Well, without any context, not really. And no context was given by Peters.
If blacks are around 80% of the population then the number of pretty positive assuming accidents are, well, accidents. Blacks are proportionally less involved in accidents than sheer demographics would suggest. But males? Seeing that we're about 48% of the population it would seem that we're definitely worse drivers.
But we don't have a proportional representation of the population on our roads over Easter (or at any time really). I'd say that the percentage of male drivers is going to be in the high 90s. This means that the 70% black male figure quoted is meaningless in trying to determine if sex has anything to do with the accident rate. The other 30% could all be purple males.
Does being black have anything to do with it? Well, this is where the debate could become quite pointed. I'd say that on any given normal day the majority of drivers on the roads would be black (Truck and other delivery vehicles). Come Easter there is a shift to more middle class drivers which would have been predominantly white some years back, but now all folk have holidays. And there would also be more taxis and buses. I don't have a breakdown but a thumbsuck would cause me to say that the black male percentage is actually significant when considering the population of drivers on the roads over Easter.
However, I think that I would like to also know the distances travelled as I think that black folk travel further than purple folk. Then we could look at that 70% in the context of driver distance.
Why all of this? Well, I think that driver fatigue is the biggest contributor to accidents.
But, of course, maybe black males are more likely to drive an unroadworthy vehicle.
There must be an answer to tackling road deaths in the numbers.
Thoughts?
This year it was blamed on month end, school holidays and a long weekend.
It's always a long weekend. It's pretty much always around some sort of school break.
I'm not too sure how they allocate deaths to the Easter weekend. Is it just the F, S, S and M or would T be added in? Because if we're losing close on 50 people a day on any other day, well 287 is worse than average but not massively so. Around 22% more assuming a 5 day counting period.
What isn't clear from the numbers quoted is how many of the fatalities are caused by pedestrians. And I haven't seen the classification of the numbers by vehicle type etc etc.
But a stat that was given that seems to have caused a bit of debate was that 70% involved black male drivers. Is there any significance in this? Well, without any context, not really. And no context was given by Peters.
If blacks are around 80% of the population then the number of pretty positive assuming accidents are, well, accidents. Blacks are proportionally less involved in accidents than sheer demographics would suggest. But males? Seeing that we're about 48% of the population it would seem that we're definitely worse drivers.
But we don't have a proportional representation of the population on our roads over Easter (or at any time really). I'd say that the percentage of male drivers is going to be in the high 90s. This means that the 70% black male figure quoted is meaningless in trying to determine if sex has anything to do with the accident rate. The other 30% could all be purple males.
Does being black have anything to do with it? Well, this is where the debate could become quite pointed. I'd say that on any given normal day the majority of drivers on the roads would be black (Truck and other delivery vehicles). Come Easter there is a shift to more middle class drivers which would have been predominantly white some years back, but now all folk have holidays. And there would also be more taxis and buses. I don't have a breakdown but a thumbsuck would cause me to say that the black male percentage is actually significant when considering the population of drivers on the roads over Easter.
However, I think that I would like to also know the distances travelled as I think that black folk travel further than purple folk. Then we could look at that 70% in the context of driver distance.
Why all of this? Well, I think that driver fatigue is the biggest contributor to accidents.
But, of course, maybe black males are more likely to drive an unroadworthy vehicle.
There must be an answer to tackling road deaths in the numbers.
Thoughts?
