Bag's Rants

Statistics and bias.

I always wonder when people are pulling together statistics how much they actually tell you compared with the bias set out in the article.

This article on 'Bosses warned over road crashes' is a case in point.

It appears that 26.5% of crashes last year involved employees at work. Now that is involved not caused by.

Now as working drivers must spend more time behind the wheel than your average driver you would expect they would have proportionally more accidents. After all four hours driving must be more of a risk than an hours driving. So either there are significantly more commuters than business users, very likely, which then skewed the results and allows 26.5% to be an issue. Of course I don't know that and the article doesn't tell you so you have to assume that the government has the statistics and less than 26.5% of the road users proportionally, taking into account driving hours is an issue.

Could be. I have no idea but one thing is certain I don't trust the government bias. I would like to see accidents per mile for business users and commuters. That would be more telling. But as usual we get propaganda. Probably because they want to increase taxes for business drivers.

Now working with all available statistics I have found that 100% of the accidents mentioned involved drivers. This clearly means that we need to reeducate them to ensure that they are sufficiently scared to stick to 20mph. I call for every driver to be shown horrific videos and compulsory yearly tests. The lowering of all speed limits and speed cameras every five yards until we can put recording devices in every car. In line with latest government policy all driving instructors will need to be government approved and hold a special license. No unlicensed instructors can teach someone to drive.

posted by Bag @ 1:24 pm