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The True Cost of Car Crashes

Posted by Leigh Sims

06/29/2006 02:00 AM

A high toll for driving.

Even a fender bender can have a big impact on your week, and your wallet. But more serious crashes are taking their toll on the Northwest--car crashes are the leading cause of death of northwesterners under the age of 45, killing about 5 people a day in the region and injuring many more. These individuals tragedies add up to staggering proportions--2,000 deaths a year in the Northwest and an economic drain of more than $8 billion per year.

We've created a counter that shows the high personal and economic toll of our car-centered lives adding up in real time for the Northwest:

Car crashes, by the numbers

Even if your life has never been affected by an accident (and you'd be one of the few), it's a strong argument for building cities that give people other options than driving (the more you drive, the higher your risk), and provide access to transit (mile of mile, the bus is 10 times safer than driving). Here are some of the ways we can get there.

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Comments

Posted by jack 06/29/2006 04:55 PM

Can you explain how you calculated this $8 billion figure?

Posted by Clark Williams-Derry 06/29/2006 07:06 PM

Sure. The National Safety Council estimates that each car crash death corresponds to $5.2 million dollars in direct economic losses (medical costs, productivity and wage losses, property damage, etc.). That figure includes the cost of each fatal crash, plus the cost of the roughly 52 nonfatal injury accidents and 200 property-damage only crashes that occur per crash fatality.

The $8 billion is roughly the safety council's estimate cost per crash fatality, times the number of fatal crashes in the region.

See here:
http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/estcost.htm

In some ways this is a conservative estimate, since it doesn't account for pain and suffering costs, or for what people would be willing to pay to avoid injury or death in a car crash. Washington's transportation department estimated that, when you include those costs (using the methods and estimates that the Federal Highway Administration recommends), crashes resulted in $5.6 billion in economic losses in Washington alone in 2002. I've looked at those figures, and they seem to use a lower number for statewide crash fatalities than I've seen elsewhere, so I think that this estimate may be low. Regardless, adjusted for inflation, that's about $6 billion per year in 2006 dollars, just for Washington state alone. You should roughly double that to account for deaths in Oregon and Idaho.

More here.