That's pretty sad. That means the real question society wants answered before letting these things on the road is not how to avoid deaths, but who pays and how much when deaths aren't avoided.
That, unfortunately, is the reality. There are in the US probably 0 departments of transportation/highways including at the federal level that are focused on reducing car crashes and deaths. The only true focus is expansion of highways to ease congestion.
Why is that?
The staff and engineers at these organizations and all of the contracting companies make a lot of money building additive solutions to existing problems. They can’t build a rail line or a tram line because then they won’t have a job. Sidewalks crumble not because of a lack of funding, but because there is more money to be made widening a highway.
The US Department of Transportation includes minimizing traffic deaths in their planning by assigning a cost of $13.7M as the "Valuation of a Statistical Life":
Sure, but you know that number and how it's treated is bullshit. Want to know why?
In Ohio in 2024 there were around 1,200 fatalities due to car crashes.
The Ohio Department of Transportation's budget is around $11 billion.
Multiple 1,200 by $13,700,000.00 and let me know what number you get. That's just Ohio.
None of these departments operate in any way other than to build and expand highways. If they actually had to be accountable for the number of deaths, they'd do the opposite. They would be tearing down highways and implementing safer and more cost effective alternatives.
If the value of the lives lost in just one state due to car crashes is $5 billion more than the entire budget of the transportation agency, why doesn't the transportation agency take specific actions to get more drivers off the road where they can't be killed? Why does it instead take actions to increase the number of drivers?
And we're just talking about deaths, not even other repercussions or cost including traffic degradation due to accidents.
If we were to take any of these numbers at face value, you're telling me my own state loses out on $16,440,000,000.00 of human lives on an annual basis and we're not doing anything about it but we're spending $11,000,000,000.00 to make the problem worse. Now multiply that across the entire country.
Since we're speaking in generalities here, I can tell you that generally things like crash cost, time delay like when we just had two semi trailers crash and shut down an entire critical interstate, etc. aren't taken into account.
If you wanted to include some of those factors, including travel time and travel time cost, etc. you'd be even more disappointed in the performance of your state and local governments with respect to transportation both in how we move people and money.
And that's just direct costs, we can also start looking at other societal costs, whether that's pollution due to exhaust fumes, the destruction of small businesses, obesity, etc.
Going back to the article though for a second, the CEO of Waymo (or whoever it was) was exactly correct. Society will tolerate these deaths. We tolerate them and their costs en masse today. It's just a matter for Waymo and whoever to figure out liability for crashes and make sure that it doesn't fall on them and that society instead bears that cost like we do for highway crashes and death, etc.
