Live fast, die fast
WHILE Emmanuel Macron’s conflict with the strikers may be the hottest topic of conversation in French cities, la France profonde is exercised about another aspect of presidential authority. From July 1st, the limit on single-carriageway rural roads will be reduced from 90kph (55mph) to 80kph (see article). The government maintains that this will save 300-400 lives a year. But opinion amid the pastis and theboules is solidly against the reduction.
This decision is no Jupiterian decree, imposed arbitrarily by the powers in Paris on resentful rurals. Humanity’s love of speed needs to be tempered by considerations of safety and pollution. So the government set the costs of reducing the speed limit on various sorts of roads against the benefits, and found that the sums came out in favour of a lower limit. Such cost-benefit analyses may seem cold-hearted. They involve putting a price on life and balancing it against time gained. But France is right to make a decision involving such trade-offs. Would that other countries were so rational.
Getting their kicks
Because road deaths have neither much annual variation nor a politically interesting cause, they get little attention. Yet they are still the world’s eighth-biggest cause of death. Even in rich countries, where they are in long-term decline, they remain significant. That is particularly true in America, where 40,327 people died on the roads in 2016, around the same number as were killed by breast cancer. Road deaths have fallen more slowly in America than in the rest of the rich world—by less in percentage terms between 1972 and 2011 than in any of the other 25 countries studied in a paper in the American Journal of Public Health. Had they fallen as fast as in the top seven performers, America would have avoided 20,000 deaths a year.
That is partly because speed limits have been going up in America, offsetting the gains from safer cars. In 1974, in response to the oil crisis, the federal government took control of speed limits and set them at 55mph; the law was relaxed in 1987 and repealed in 1995, with power to set speed limits being returned to the states. Since then they have, by and large, been rising. Six states now have maximums of 80mph; in Texas, the maximum is 85mph.
No doubt America’s size, self-image and love of freedom lie behind those increases, but they have also been encouraged by the way speed limits are set. The main factor which state authorities look at is how fast people drive. Speed limits are set at the 85th percentile of prevailing speeds. That has the advantage of keeping the law in line with the behaviour of the majority of drivers. But, as the National Transportation Safety Board pointed out in a report last year, it can lead to an “undesirable cycle” whereby the speed limit goes up, so people drive faster, so the speed limit is raised. A cost-benefit analysis of increases from 1987 to 1996 carried out by an academic suggests that they should not have been allowed. It seems likely that current limits on many roads are too high.
Of course, down is not always the right direction for speed limits. In the end, the only really safe speed for a car is zero, but people are prepared to take risks to get about, and speed limits need to take that into account. “Vision Zero”, an initiative which started in Sweden and is spreading, envisages the abolition of road deaths, which is implausible: even self-driving cars, which are likely to be far safer than fallible (especially when drunk) humans, are sometimes going to kill people.
Countries value lives differently. Britain sets the price below the French level of €3m ($3.5m), America’s federal government above. Whatever its level, that number needs to be fed into a reckoning of the costs and benefits of speed. Only then should people be allowed to step on it.