Some governments mistakenly believe that higher road speeds boost the economy, ignoring the detrimental effects on road safety.
This seems like a critical but unsupported claim in the report. Your ‘Speedup backwards BOTEC’ implicitly assumes there is literally zero cost to reducing speed limits—it just compares a BOTEC for lives saved vs the lobbying cost. But there clearly is a cost to lower speed limits: it takes longer for people to get to their destinations! Presumably you agree than a 10mph speed limit would be a disaster for the economy, and impose huge human suffering, by making everyone sit around driving all day, and leaving more distant locations totally unreachable. If so, you need some positive argument for why the speed limit reductions you propose are not merely quantitatively but qualitatively different, and I do not see what that argument could be.
Moreover, I suspect this cost could be quite large. I don’t really understand your methodology—how much speed limits are falling to produce the 8% drop in fatalities—but lets try to use some totally made up illustrative numbers.
According to the first result on Google, Americans spend around an hour driving each day. If speed limits are reduced by 10%, and this is binding for 20% of the time people drive, that’s a 2% reduction in speed, or about 1.2 minutes per day per person. Looking at the country most similar (in my subjective opinion) to the US in your table, Mexico, it suggests a DALY saving of 66,000 from speed limit reforms, vs a population of around 128m, or 365*24*60*66/128000/365 = 0.7 minutes per person per day.
These two numbers are extremely close, I think basically purely by chance. They are produced by a very ad hoc process and could easily be off by multiple orders of magnitude. It is quite possible that reducing speed limits is still a very desirable policy change, even after taking into account this cost. But I think they do suggest that we do need to do some work here. There is a reason people drive fast—to get places—and preventing them doing so is a real cost that we need to grapple with.
Part of the reason I wrote this comment is because I think this is an example of a broader issue in EA policy analysis—namely quite extreme paternalism that ascribes literally zero value in the CBA to people’s desire, and their reasons for desiring, to do the thing we are considering banning. CEARCH were rightly criticized for their poor methodology when trying to account for this with a soda ban, but at least they tried to take this into account, and I want to make sure that ‘implicitly treat coercion as zero cost by ignoring it’ isn’t the path of least social resistance for EA analysis.
Your broader point is a fair one, and I appreciate that you’ve raised it. This is generally hard to do, and speaks to a larger question about how to measure across different “benefits”—how do you measure freedom versus DALYs, or climate effects, or animal welfare. Of course that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it—with or without social resistance! Cross-cause work is something we’d like to do more at RP.
In the case you’ve mentioned above, I wonder if QALYs might be relevant. (This may be your point about quantitative vs qualitative). Your example calculations directly compare the 1.2 minutes of extra driving to 0.7 minutes of being alive. But how does the time driving compare to the additional time you would spend at your destination? I would imagine that the gap between those two states is smaller than “alive (at some average level of happiness) vs dead”. As you note, the calculations are rough enough that it’s hard to work out what the overall conclusion is, but I think we’d probably need to apply another factor to the 1.2 minutes to capture that the time spent in the car is unlikely to be worse than death.
Separately—and more as a point of interest—I wonder what would actually happen if speed limits were drastically reduced in the way that you mention. Yes, there would definitely be negative effects like you describe, but I think peoples’ habits would also change so that they can avoid sitting around driving all day. (To clarify, I’m not in favour of such a drastic change, I just find it interesting to consider)
This seems like a critical but unsupported claim in the report. Your ‘Speedup backwards BOTEC’ implicitly assumes there is literally zero cost to reducing speed limits—it just compares a BOTEC for lives saved vs the lobbying cost. But there clearly is a cost to lower speed limits: it takes longer for people to get to their destinations! Presumably you agree than a 10mph speed limit would be a disaster for the economy, and impose huge human suffering, by making everyone sit around driving all day, and leaving more distant locations totally unreachable. If so, you need some positive argument for why the speed limit reductions you propose are not merely quantitatively but qualitatively different, and I do not see what that argument could be.
Moreover, I suspect this cost could be quite large. I don’t really understand your methodology—how much speed limits are falling to produce the 8% drop in fatalities—but lets try to use some totally made up illustrative numbers.
According to the first result on Google, Americans spend around an hour driving each day. If speed limits are reduced by 10%, and this is binding for 20% of the time people drive, that’s a 2% reduction in speed, or about 1.2 minutes per day per person. Looking at the country most similar (in my subjective opinion) to the US in your table, Mexico, it suggests a DALY saving of 66,000 from speed limit reforms, vs a population of around 128m, or 365*24*60*66/128000/365 = 0.7 minutes per person per day.
These two numbers are extremely close, I think basically purely by chance. They are produced by a very ad hoc process and could easily be off by multiple orders of magnitude. It is quite possible that reducing speed limits is still a very desirable policy change, even after taking into account this cost. But I think they do suggest that we do need to do some work here. There is a reason people drive fast—to get places—and preventing them doing so is a real cost that we need to grapple with.
Part of the reason I wrote this comment is because I think this is an example of a broader issue in EA policy analysis—namely quite extreme paternalism that ascribes literally zero value in the CBA to people’s desire, and their reasons for desiring, to do the thing we are considering banning. CEARCH were rightly criticized for their poor methodology when trying to account for this with a soda ban, but at least they tried to take this into account, and I want to make sure that ‘implicitly treat coercion as zero cost by ignoring it’ isn’t the path of least social resistance for EA analysis.
Your broader point is a fair one, and I appreciate that you’ve raised it. This is generally hard to do, and speaks to a larger question about how to measure across different “benefits”—how do you measure freedom versus DALYs, or climate effects, or animal welfare. Of course that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it—with or without social resistance! Cross-cause work is something we’d like to do more at RP.
In the case you’ve mentioned above, I wonder if QALYs might be relevant. (This may be your point about quantitative vs qualitative). Your example calculations directly compare the 1.2 minutes of extra driving to 0.7 minutes of being alive. But how does the time driving compare to the additional time you would spend at your destination? I would imagine that the gap between those two states is smaller than “alive (at some average level of happiness) vs dead”. As you note, the calculations are rough enough that it’s hard to work out what the overall conclusion is, but I think we’d probably need to apply another factor to the 1.2 minutes to capture that the time spent in the car is unlikely to be worse than death.
Separately—and more as a point of interest—I wonder what would actually happen if speed limits were drastically reduced in the way that you mention. Yes, there would definitely be negative effects like you describe, but I think peoples’ habits would also change so that they can avoid sitting around driving all day. (To clarify, I’m not in favour of such a drastic change, I just find it interesting to consider)