kwackers wrote:So your average motorist can persist in risky behaviour and never experience causing anything further up and thus consider themselves 'safe' (since the odds rapidly work out in his/her favour).
I read somewhere (not sure whether I can find it, may have been in
Death on the Streets) an estimate of the
mean time between accidents for drivers. Can't remember how serious those accidents would be. However, it was a very large number*.
The implication of this would be that an absence of accidents is normal even for below-average drivers, and no indicator of whether we're actually any good on the roads. If we've had one accident, we may have been unlucky. If we're ten times more likely than average to crash, we've still only got a rather better than evens chance of ever having an accident in an entire driving career.
This does not mean that anyone who has had multiple accidents is a terrible driver - can still just be bad luck, that's how statistics works.
However, it should give any of us pause for thought while driving.
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* I suppose you could look at it this way. According to
this link, there are 30 million licence holders in the UK(!)
Let's make some really simplistic assumptions. Let's say that every crash requires two drivers, that every driver is going to crash once in a 40-year driving career, and that the number of licence holders never changes. Let's ignore anything about severity of crash (or that some drivers do hundreds of times more distance than others, giving hundreds of times more opportunity to crash).
Then one in 40 drivers crashes each year, so 750,000 drivers crash. However, each crash takes two drivers, so there are something like 400,000 crashes a year (keeping the numbers simple because this is a very simplistic approach).
In reality,
this link says that there were about 140,000 reported crashes in 2013. Many of those must have been minor.
There will have been many more unreported ones. There again, if an accident is not serious enough to report, we may not count it in our minds as a "real" accident (like the time that, as a relatively new driver, I bumped someone in a traffic queue with no damage on either side, or the slight dent that someone put in our new car
) I'm going to ignore unreported crashes.
So, in this very simplistic world, the average driver is going to crash once in every two or three driving careers. Which makes it difficult ever to say that my driving record is evidence that I am any good at all. Maybe if I've done very high mileages for many years...