The words “risk” and “management” sit uncomfortably alongside each other. Many people believe that it is possible to distinguish “real”, “actual” or “objective” risk from “perceived” risk. But all risk is perceived. It is a word that refers to the future, a future that exists only in our imaginations.
Those who call themselves risk managers purport to be able to manage the future. They are oblivious to Woody Allen’s hubris puncturing question “How do you make God laugh?” Answer “Tell him your plans.” Read full essay (PDF).

Can anyone tell me where this event happened, and with what consequences?

I have just found an anonymous, one sentence comment on my blog. It reads: “Your campaign against seat belt wearing has already borne fruit: http://www.stuff.co.nz/4411639a6479.html .”

The link takes you to an interesting story from New Zealand with the headline “Seatbelt subterfuge kills driver”. The driver who was killed, according to the story, was opposed to the law requiring him to wear a seat belt. He had been fined 32 times for not wearing one. At the time of his fatal accident

he was wearing something over his shoulder to create the illusion of a seat belt to fool passing police. The verdict of the coroner was less conclusive than that asserted in the headline: “he may well have survived had he worn one.”

Indeed he might have. A seat belt greatly increases a car occupant’s chances of surviving a crash. This is how I put it in “Risk and Freedom: the record of road safety legislation ” (p50) 23 years ago: “The evidence that the use of a seat belt greatly improves a car occupant’s chances of surviving a crash appears to be overwhelming. That a person traveling at speed inside a hard metal shell will stand a better chance of surviving a crash if he is restrained from rattling about inside the shell is both intuitively obvious and supported by an impressive body of empirical evidence.”

I quote myself from 23 years ago because for the whole of the intervening period I have been accused, by people like our anonymous commentator, of having blood on my hands for questioning the efficacy of seat belt laws. The “fruit” of my “campaign” according to my accusers is fatally toxic: to raise doubts about the life-saving efficacy of seat belt laws is to encourage people not to wear seat belts – leaving me responsible for the deaths of vehicle occupants who die unbelted.

Mr Segedin, the fatally injured driver was, according to the report, driving a car full of rust with an expired warrant, and an autopsy blood test showed he had taken methamphetamine and cannabis – all factors that an insurance company would consider identifiers of a high-risk driver. Yet the story, as reported, identifies the non-wearing of a seat belt as the sole cause of death.

Because seat belts are undeniably effective at reducing death and injury in crashes there is, or was, a mystery. Why in country after country that mandated seat belts was it impossible to see the promised reduction in road accident fatalities? The most plausible explanation is “risk compensation”. It appears that measures that protect drivers from the consequences of bad driving encourage bad driving. The principal effect of seat belt legislation has been a shift in the burden of risk from those already best protected in cars, to the most vulnerable, pedestrians and cyclists, outside cars.

This question is posed by Philip Stott in two recent postings on his blog entitled “Pascal’s Wager And ‘Global Warming’” and “An Obstinate Rationality“ .Stott’s blog is worth adding to your “favourites” and visiting frequently. He used to give an annual lecture to my students and invariably was awarded top marks in the student assessments of the lectures to which they were subjected.

I find him a convincing sceptic. An example from “An Obstinate Rationality”:
“Whenever I hear politicians and activists talking about “stopping climate change”, or “saving the planet”; when I see the rich buying indulgences in the form of carbon credits, or carbon offsets; when I hear politicians talking about “zero-carbon houses”, when no such thing exists; when I hear scientists declaring that we can manage the most complex, coupled, non-linear, semi-chaotic system known to humans by fiddling at the margins with one factor - and to a degree Celsius; when I see the blatant hypocrisy of newspapers like The Independent and The Guardian, which lecture us all, while selling foreign holidays, page after page; when I hear academics planning to fly to another world conference on climate change; when I watch one more hyped-up report, with shelving ice and doleful polar bears, on the tele; when I see yet another celebrity flying in to yet another world gig to tell us how to live the ‘Green’ life; when I hear claims that wind turbines will save the world; ….. an obstinate rationality prevents me from having anything to do with the carbon claptrap of the Global Warming Religion and the trivial pieties of our shallow Age.”

On the first of February 2008 I sent an email to the Department of Transport at - road.safety@dft.gsi.gov.uk. It said:

“In your press release of 31 January you state: “Seatbelts have prevented an estimated 60,000 deaths and 670,000 serious injuries since 31 January 1983 when seatbelts were made mandatory for drivers and front seat passengers.” The 60,000 statistic has been picked up and widely quoted. I would be grateful if you would provide the source of this statistic. I have posted my reasons for doubting it on my blog at http://john-adams.co.uk/2008/01/31/myth-inflation/ . I will be happy to correct it if you can persuade me that I’ve got it wrong.”

I have yet to receive a reply. The claim in the DfT press release of 60,000 lives and 670,000 serious injuries saved by the seat belt law was widely reported - Google “seatbelts 60000 lives”. The press release was, in itself, a minor bit of myth reinforcement. But this is the way that myths are built. Repetition of an unchallenged falsehood establishes the falsehood. Should any reader of this blog succeed in getting a reply to my question from the Department for transport I would like to hear from you.

Anniversaries are convenient occasions on which to reinforce myths. Twenty five years ago, 31 January 1983, it became compulsory for occupants of the front seats of cars in the UK to wear seat belts. Today Britain’s Department for Transport has posted a press release announcing that in the 25 years since the seat belt law came into force it has saved 60000 lives – 2400 per year!

Myths are durable fictions that have wormed their way into popular belief systems. Once established they become impervious to contradicting evidence. They are self-reinforcing. People who know nothing of the evidence routinely repeat the myth to each other. The mythology surrounding the efficacy of seat belt laws belongs to a special category of myth: it is not only durable and self-reinforcing, it is inflating. In October 1985, almost three years after the law came into effect, the Department of Transport put out a press release claiming that the law was saving 200 lives a year. This claim was challenged, not least by the Isles Report (http://john-adams.co.uk/2007/01/04/seat-belt-legislation-and-the-isles-report/), a report produced within the department itself. This report was never published.

Why should the government be so assiduously promoting and inflating this myth? It has ready access to the numbers that disprove it. I offer a simple, cynical, explanation: it feeds the larger myth of the efficacy of government.

The press release can be found at. https://www.gnn.gov.uk/content/detail.asp?ReleaseID=348983&NewsAreaID=2&HUserID=878,793,895,848,780,868,866,845,786,674,677,767,684,762,718,674,708,683,706,718,674 It is particularly recommended for the accompanying photo of the Minister for Road Safety, Jim Fitzpatrick, looking remarkably like a rabbit caught in the headlights. The claim of 60000 lives saved was released in his name, but I strongly suspect he knew nothing about how it was produced.

For some of my analyses of the myth see:

http://john-adams.co.uk/2006/12/16/britains-seat-belt-law-should-be-repealed/

http://john-adams.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2006/SAE%20seatbelts.pdf

http://john-adams.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2006/failure%20of%20seatbelt%20legislation.pdf

http://john-adams.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/Seat%20belts%20for%20significance.pdf

Most risk assessments, warning notices and disclaimers are the legal equivalent of juju charms to ward off lawyers – and probably as effective as the kind that believers wear around their necks. This disclaimer for Nelson Rocks Preserve in West Virginia was sent to me by Paul Winston, editorial director of Business Insurance . It is the most comprehensive I have seen.

It begins
“WARNING

Nature is unpredictable and unsafe. Mountains are dangerous. Many books have been written about these dangers, and there’s no way we can list them all here. Read the books.” For the full disclaimer click here .

Arboricultural Journal 2007, Vol. 30, pp. 95–103

 This is the published version of a paper prepared for a conference on The Future of Tree Risk Management, held in London on 15 September 2006.

 Abstract
Britain, in the view of former Prime Minister Blair, is “in danger of having a wholly disproportionate attitude to the risks we should expect to run as a normal part of life. … The result is a plethora of  rules, guidelines, responses to ‘scandals’ of one nature or another that ends up having utterly perverse consequences.” My introduction to the world of tree risk management in Britain leads me to the conclusion that it is disproportionately risk averse and is having “utterly perverse consequences”. Read full article (PDF)

Draft for WHO Workshop, Rome, 13-14 December 2007. The cost of inaction: economic valuation in environment and health.

Contemplation of the costs of inaction usually provokes questions about the benefits of inaction, which leads to cost-benefit analysis. Cost-benefit analysis, as a method for settling arguments about action or inaction is enormously seductive. You simply add up the benefits of doing something and subtract the costs and if the result is positive you have a case for doing it. What could be wrong with that? In practice quite a lot. ….

The cost of inaction, the title of this workshop, implies the existence of a set of problems within WHO’s sphere of responsibility in which conventional methods of economic evaluation will be able to convince those responsible for taking action that the benefits of action will outweigh the costs. I have my doubts. Read full paper .

In 1971 Mayer Hillman conducted a survey of how English children got about: at what age were they allowed to play in the street, ride a bike, get to school on their own, visit friends and get about the neighbourhood? In 1990 Mayer persuaded me to join him in re-surveying the same schools he had visited in 1971. We discovered a change even more dramatic than we had anticipated. In 1971 80% of 7 and 8 year old children got to school unaccompanied by an adult. By 1990 this had dropped to 9%. The report of the 1990 survey, documenting the demise of the free-range child between 1971 and 1990, is now available online - One False Move … a study of children’s independent mobility
Since 1990 for children things have got much worse. Two new reports document the continuing loss of children’s traditional independence and, one hopes, will inspire a counter-revolution: No Fear- growing up in a risk averse society by Tim Gill , and Risk and Childhood , by Nicola Madge and John Barker.

In October 2007 the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety published a Status Report (PDF: 1MB) complaining about my article “Britain’s Seat Belt Law should be Repealed” (PDF: 0.2MB) (published as “Seat Belt Laws – Repeal them?” in the June 2007 issue of the statistical journal Significance). It went on to denounce all those who invoke the risk compensation effect to question the efficacy of seat belt laws. It concludes: “Don’t believe them, not until they produce credible evidence that people compensate for safety”.

I first produced evidence on the subject sufficiently credible to pass peer review for publication in the Society of Automotive Engineers Transactions in 1982 - “The Efficacy of Seat Belt Legislation” (PDF: 0.2MB). I have revisited the evidence that people monitor their environments for signs of safety or danger, and adjust their behaviour in response to perceived changes, in numerous publications since, including two books: Risk and Freedom: the record of road safety regulation (1985) and Risk (1995).

The idea that people compensate for safety was considered outrageous in 1982,  and still is by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety: “To believe Adams you’d have to believe that people have a certain tolerance for risk and that their levels of risk are regulated by a homeostatic mechanism so that, if forced to “consume” more safety than they voluntarily would choose, people will balance the safety increase by taking more risk. It’s a stretch, isn’t it?” 

The “stretch” appears to be now becoming conventional wisdom. It underpins the increasingly popular concept of shared space (PDF: 15KB); Hans Monderman, the Dutch originator of the concept spoke to an enthusiastic sold-out meeting in London’s City Hall this week. And it is even finding its way into government planning guidance in Britain. This quotation can be found in the Department for Transport’s Manual for Streets: evidence and research (PDF: 10MB): “One of the most important variables that needs to be taken into consideration is ‘risk homeostasis’ – the way in which drivers adjust their behaviour to maintain a consistent level of risk. As drivers feel safer they begin to take more risks, whereas conversely, if road conditions make them feel unsafe, drivers are likely to adjust their behaviour to take fewer risks.”