• Car-sharing went up a staggering 117% between 2007 and 2009. According to analysts, a person who drives 12,000 miles a year can save $1,834 annually by forsaking his or her own vehicle and shifting to a car-sharing service. (Treehugger)
• Is it ironic or just sad that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality thinks that tightening emissions standards is “arbitrary, unnecessary and unachievable”? (NYTimes)
• A fashion photographer, a writer, a former mayor, and the chair of London Food share their visions of London in 2030. One imagines compulsory cycling, and lots of white ghost-bicycles. (Guardian)
• New York unveiled “Active Design Guidelines,” an overlay to the livability initiatives of several departments that aims to “promote physical activity and health through design.” (Urban Omnibus)
• “If Texas had had its act together,” said Ray LaHood, “It would have gotten some high-speed rail money.” Zing! (Houston Chronicle)
• A writer at GOOD gives a guided tour of what it’s like to turn a city street into a bicycle corridor. (GOOD)
• And not to be an alarmist, but as it turns out, every hour spent driving takes 20 minutes off your life expectancy. (This is a terribly convoluted way of thinking about things.) (MSN)
February 4th, 2010 at 1:31 pm
Lets see, if you drive 12,000 miles/year, at an average speed of 55 mph, your yearly driving time would be 218 hours. 218 hour would correspond to about 3 days per year. If you did that for 70 years you would lose, on average, about 7 months of life?
That’s not really all that alarmist at all is it? But it sure sounds scary.
(Someone check my math: http://bit.ly/bOFPd4)
February 4th, 2010 at 2:43 pm
I’m not going to bother checking the math because this metric makes no sense at all. The report should have concluded that driving an additional 1mph over the speed limit takes 20 minutes off your life or something. My job is data analyst and I can’t imagine how or why someone thought that this would be a good way to represent their data.
February 4th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
@Rip,
I agree that this is certainly not the best way to express this data, but it’s probably accurate. All this is saying is that by driving a car, you are taking on risk. This risk, on average, will lower your life expectancy -which, if I am not mistaken, is the statistical median years of life. The median is, of course, the point at which 49.5% of people will die before you, and 49.5% of people will die after you.
Anyway, it is a very bad way to present the data, and probably meant to be manipulative. They could have also said that there is one traffic fatality each year for every 10,000 people in America, but that gives people the impression that we are talking abut other people -and it can’t happen to them.
To put that into perspective, the cancer death rate would be 18 deaths per 10,000 people per year. So since that is 18 times the death rate of cars, getting cancer would only take 10.5 years off your expected life. Right?
And then they add! So that if your dive a car AND get cancer, your live expectancy drops further! (Are statistics fun.)
February 5th, 2010 at 10:17 am
Dallas: cancer deaths are disproportionately among old people; car accident deaths are disproportionately among young drivers.