John,

On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 18:34:21 -0400, John Hansen wrote:

> I have seen in a number of places that US highways are the safest in the world... certainly much safer than 
those in Europe.  I do think that you have to be very careful of highway statistics.

Quite!  For a start, "Europe" is a large number (and growing) of different countries, with differing laws, 
standards of road design, building and maintenance, and national "personalities", leading to different 
statistics.  France, for example, has about the same number of drivers as the UK, but has twice as many 
fatalities.  Having seen driving there that looked almost suicidal, I can understand why!  :-)

Driving from Calais to Amsterdam (about 200 miles, if I remember rightly) you pass through three countries, 
with different speed limits and laws.  There's a little sign at each border (not much more than that and 
another sign with the name of the country, incidentally) that tells you the speed limits pictorially.  France 
has a limit of 130kph in the dry, 110 in the wet.  Sounds like a good idea, but I'm not aware of any other 
country that does this.

Motorways in the UK are the "safest" of all types of road here, but I wonder how they define "safe"?  It could 
be deaths per mile travelled, or per mile that exists, or any number of other ways to calculate it.  (The 
other thing that springs to mind: more people die on the hard shoulder of Motoryways than on the road itself!)  

Because of the size of the place and the relative average sparsity of traffic as a result, it's probably 
inevitable that the USA has lower accident-per-mile figures.

Remember "Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics"!  :-)

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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