It All Depends How You Look at it

Coming back from Belgium after a short holiday with Mrs Lola fast asleep alongside (in the passenger seat, before you ask) I whiled away the time doing some mental sums, spurred on by the generally very good (except French) driving standards.

In the UK we are hectored all the time with factoids like '3500 people die on Britains roads each year - that's nearly 68 each week'. I think that the actual road deaths are about 3000 now, but we'll use 3,500 to be generous.

Now, it seems to me entirely erroneous to take road deaths per week as your measure of 'safety' I mean, we could all sit in our cars on our drives or parked and not drive anywhere and there would be no deaths. Would it not be better to measure road deaths by passenger mile? So let's do some sums.

I am going to take only passenger cars and ignore everything else. There are about 33m road vehicles, of which about 17m are cars.

We each do about 12,000 miles per year.

That's 2.04 X 10 to the eleventh power passenger miles per year.

Divide that by 3500 and you get 52,845,714 car miles per fatality.

Since the average driver does 12,000 miles per year and if we assume a 60 year driving life the total miles travelled would be - 720,000.

Personally I reckon that's pretty low odds that I'll kill someone or be kiled by someone on the roads.