Merchants Of Doom

Ludicrous Examples

We take it as given that speed on the motorways kill people. But that isn't the whole story. The U.K. serves as a case study as to the dangers of oversimplifying a complex issue:

In March 2000, the [U.K.] government launched a new ‘road safety strategy’, aimed at reducing by 40 per cent the number of people killed or seriously injured on Britain’s roads within a decade. [...] The government, he promised, would now take action, with a strategy that ‘will focus especially on speed’. [...] The evidence the report had cited to support its claim that speed was ‘a major contributory factor in about a third of all road accidents’ simply wasn’t there. [...] The figure given for accidents in which the main causative factor was ‘excessive speed’ was way down the list, at only ‘7.3 per cent’. [...] Initially, a key part of the debate was focused on how the government could justify its inflation of the report’s ‘7.3 per cent’ finding into a claim that speed caused ‘a third of all road accidents’. [...] A leading role in this was to be played by Paul Smith, an engineer turned road safety expert, who was so shocked by the government’s misuse of its own experts’ statistics that in 2001 he set up a website, Safespeed. This was dedicated to exhaustive analysis of why, in his view, the government’s misconceived policy, far from making Britain’s roads safer, could only make them more dangerous.


The more the government’s case was examined, the more statistically dubious it became. [...] In fact its own figures showed that only 30 per cent of accidents attributed to excessive speed actually involved breaking a speed limit. [By] taking their eye off all the other complex causes of accidents, ministers and officials were being dangerously simplistic. [And] a recent study by Avon and Somerset Police themselves had found that in reality only 3 per cent of accidents in their area had been caused by drivers exceeding a speed limit. [Finally] in September 2006 the [...] Department for Transport (DfT) [admitted that] only 5 per cent of road accidents were caused by drivers who were breaking the speed limit.


What the [experts] did not explain was that the average speed at which pedestrians are hit on roads covered by 30 or 40 mph limits is 11 mph, and that, of accidents involving vehicles and pedestrians, only 1.5 per cent are fatal.

Source: Christopher Booker and Richard North. Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth. United Kingdom, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. [x]

Closely related to speed, is the installation of speed traps (or cameras), again in Britain:

In 2003, to justify this policy, the government produced a report purporting to show that, where cameras had been installed, the accident rate had been reduced by ‘35 per cent’. [...] On many sites, cameras had been installed following an atypical blip in the accident rate. When the rate had then fallen back to its previous average level – what statisticians call ‘regression to the mean’ – this allowed the researchers, and the government, to claim that the reduction could be ascribed entirely to the arrival of a camera.


The Transport Research Laboratory [...] found that, where fixed speed cameras were installed at road works, the risk of accidents giving rise to injury was increased by 55 per cent. Where fixed speed cameras were installed on open motorways the risk of accidents giving rise to injury was increased by 31 per cent.

Source: Christopher Booker and Richard North. Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth. United Kingdom, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. [x]

According to some studies: "it is estimated that about two-thirds of the apparent benefit from cameras is due to regression-to-the-mean".1

Sometimes cancel culture is responsible for some weird restrictions in the name of safety:

[British] broadcaster Terry Wogan reported [on] the story of a householder who had been told by his local police to spend more than £1,000 on a safety cover for his swimming pool. This was because, if a burglar should happen to be caught in his property and the police were called, they would not, on ‘health and safety’ grounds, be permitted to run across his garden in pursuit, unless his swimming pool had been fitted with a cover strong enough to bear the weight of more than two persons.

Source: Christopher Booker and Richard North. Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth. United Kingdom, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. [x]

The latest craze in the drug war is stopping "rainbow fentanyl", a product that politicians and the police say are made to market to kids. It's not true. The TV news is all too happy to amplify those fears, showing bag of colorful pills that look like candy. There's even an insinuation that rainbow fentanyl could be disguised as Halloween candy and given out to unsuspecting children, even though no such incidents have ever been reported.

Source: John Oliver, S09E25 (2022).

Sources

1: David Spiegelhalter. The art of statistics: Learning from data. Penguin UK, 2019. [B042]