| Something that is often missed is that the number of lives saved numbers are often low - eg NSW apparently had "only" 354 deaths in 2018; but the under-reported number (imo, as an Australia) is the number of injuries (whether serious or not) which are not talked about. Apparently NSW had ~10950 serious road injuries in 2018. That's a lot more. And, at least to my perception, the impact of serious injuries is under-appreciated (wrt it be under-reported) - in some ways it can be more impactful to those around the victim than death. Then there are minor (or unreported) injuries which can often align well with the mobile-phone-usage/distraction type cause. Anecdotally, about a month ago I was nearly hit by a car that went through a very red light (ie had been red for a long time, it hadn't just changed) at a pedestrian crossing in front of me and I could see that they were looking at a phone. Luckily they didn't hit anyone. But depending on timing; they may have hit me (probably a non-serious-but-not-fun-injury) or they could have hit a child (probable death to my very untrained eye - it was after-school time and there were a lot of (young) primary school students on the same street). I don't see how 88 million dollars is going to stop cars from injuring or killing the things they hit. Who knows the actual efficacy of the 88 million; but the costs of car injuries/deaths look pretty expensive on the after-the-fact side (just found some US stats): > On average, each crash-related ED visit costs about $3,300 and each hospitalization costs about $57,000 over a person’s lifetime > There were more than 32,000 crash deaths in the US in 2013. These deaths cost more than $380 million in direct medical costs. Of note, I'm very anti phones-while-driving, because to my (biased) perception, whenever I see a car doing something that seemed dumb/unsafe/ill-considered, I very (very) often see them using a phone or playing with a gps etc at the same time. https://www.budgetdirect.com.au/car-insurance/research/car-a... https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/crash-injuries/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle-safety/index.ht... |