[jtbo]

Oh yes, we have here bit over 5 million people in whole country, around 300 dies every year in traffic (most are drunk and large amount is pedestrians, also lately around 2/3rd have been older people), around 10 000 dies from smoking related reasons every year and smokers are minority these days.

Anyway there are around 6000 injuries from traffic accidents.

We have icy roads for half a year, more or less, typical possibility of icy condition is from october to april, but from november to march is typical ice season, which of course plays some part of the picture, but mostly it is alcohol or health issues that are reason for traffic deaths.

Here however traffic deaths are constantly in media and also constantly those are in discussion with politics, but smoking, drinking and accidents at home are here far larger group that end lives prematurely, accidents at home being largest group.

In other countries it can be of course different, but from my understanding at least in euro countries traffic is not as bad as it is given image of being.

Sadly I don't know things so well from US, but I have heard rumours about cars not needing inspection yearly at some states and driver license being almost a formality of putting name in papers at some states, which is bit weird, however if things are so it might have some impact to situation.


That UK knife ban was indeed rather ridiculous, but apparently some parties were serious about it, it is however some sort of nannying that is around here in my country too, put evil thing away and evil does not exists, here we have named it as flower hat lady issue. Problem is usually far more complex than people that like to do something about it like to accept and efforts are made to some visible thing however problem is pretty much ignored.

In traffic safety and also sometimes at traffic emissions there are similar trends, I think it is because trying to see whole picture is not as easy as biting the single aspect of issue, sadly sometimes those in charge make then choices like if they would wear narrow vision device that let's one see only that one aspect and nothing around it and then we get some not so good laws and decisions.


It is interesting that in US traffic deaths are so large part, there must be some reasons for that. If vehicle safety is demanded to be higher than ours by government , it would sound that there are some other reason for those deaths, understanding reason why, would then help to understand if modern vehicle technology even could do anything about it, perhaps some other means could be those that would give better results?

If it would be so, then traffic safety argument of not allowing economical vehicles would be busted.

For emissions, maybe way emissions are measured could be adjusted to reflect better to what emissions are on road. Here we use emissions per driven distance unit, which is kilometers, which is good in there that you can see which vehicle produces least emissions for your typical trip. Then one has to just see what kind use he has for vehicle and which vehicle type is that would do that job, after that is decided it is easy to see which vehicle is producing least emissions.

For me it sounds that if more economical vehicle is banned because of emissions, then method of evaluating emissions might not be best possible.

In US there are of course car industry to protect, lot of tax money and jobs are at stake and if US makers are not able to compete directly it is not impossible that government would try to help industry that is in US by setting such methods to calculate emissions that it keeps too good products out from market.
All countries do that one way or another, it is not really a secret or even conspiracy, however they will sell it to general public with some nice words that are easier to accept than raw reality.

It has always been so that for US market vehicles are sold with bigger engines, for some reason. Some japanese and german cars we here never saw with V6 engine and you never got small I4 engines that we had standard.

1.1 to 1.3 litres were typical engine size still at early 90's, 1.6 litres were big engine. These days I think 1.6 starts to be normal and 2.0 bigger option, anything with turbo is sport model, well except diesels, I think one big part of problem is that those car makers are also thinking that in US only big engines will sell, that might have been so, if things are changing perhaps some congressman might need to know about problem areas and maybe car makers would put some pressure if there would be more contacts from people demanding cars with smaller engines, who knows.


Anyway, any claim about safety and emissions are such that I highly suspect it being bottom of the subject, there is probably something else too.

Has Michael Moore been at it already? He is good at bringing subjects to wider discussion if nothing else :P