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Re: safety in cars, speed limits, and motorcycles
In article <3n6fag$2uo@civ.civ.net> joel@civ.net (Joel Upchurch) writes:
>> With motorcycles, though there is less chance of getting in an accident
>> (there are less accidents/cycle vs accidents/car), accidents are much
>> much more severe.
>I don't think this is quite correct. When you compare the accident rates
>on a vehicle mile basis, motorcycle have several times as many accidents
>as automobiles. Here are some stats I computed a few years ago.
>Cycle 83 84 85 86 87 Average
>Veh Miles 10^6 8760 8784 9086 9397 9855
>Fatalities 4045 4378 4342 4209 3781
>Per 10^8 Miles 46.18 49.84 47.79 44.79 38.37 45.39
>Total Accidents 530,000 570,000 480,000 440,000 380,000
>acc/fatal 131.03 130.20 110.55 104.54 100.50 115
>miles/acc 16,528 15,411 18,929 21,357 25,934 19632
>Mot Veh Ac 10^6 18.3 18.8 19.3 17.7 20.8
>Veh Miles 10^6 1.65E+6 1.72E+6 1.77E+6 1.84E+6 1.92E+06
>miles/acc 90,328 91,489 91,917 103,842 92,500 94015
>Fatal Acc 37,976 39,631 39,168 41,062 41,434
>acc/fatal 481.88 474.38 492.75 431.06 502.00 476
>Per 10^8 Miles 2.30 2.30 2.21 2.23 2.15 2.24
20.27
>Now this table is a bit obscure, but you can see that automobiles
>were driven about 94k miles per accident and motorcycles about 19.
>The fatality rate per mile driven was 20 times higher for
>motorcycles (45per 10^8 miles versus 2.24 for cars).
>This doesn't necessarily contradict what Mr. Simon was saying, since
>motorcycles tend to driven a lot less miles per years on the average.
What did Walt Whitman say? :) Lies/damn lies/statistics
Teddy Wang
CSC Consulting
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