← Back to context

Comment by Dylan16807

11 days ago

> I am pretty sure speeding ticket fines have never been established based on economic or emotional harm

Probably not, but we can look at the averages anyway.

> how much does 200 lives lost cost? is it their accumulated net worth? expected earnings through what would have been left of their careers? how about lost limbs, emotional damage etc?

200 statistical lives are worth about 2 billion dollars. That question has an easy to look up expert answer, and you don't worry about the details of each case.

> how can you even be sure how much has speeding and not something else mainly contributed to the harm

We have some useful numbers on the impact of speeding, and for something like this assume the worst plausible impact.

Edit: If there's around 1 death per hundred million vehicle miles and it's worth ten million dollars, that's ten cents of death per mile. If a quarter of deaths have speeding as a factor and we exaggerate that to 100% blame, that's 2.5 cents per mile divided by how rare speeding is. If we guess 15% of people are speeding at any moment, that's 17 cents of damage per mile. To pay double they'd need a $200 ticket every 600 miles of speeding.

3 comments

Dylan16807

Reply
necovek  10 days ago

I am not saying it's impossible to come up with numbers, but that they will be somewhat made-up.

You'd also need to amortize the damages over years, and then spread it to all the speeding tickets issued.

So I'd actually simplify it: if we say $40000 billion (11k deaths annually times $2b plus non-deaths too and financial damages to cars and infrastructure) of damages amortized over 10 years and spread to 40M tickets annually in USA, that's actually around $100k average per speeding ticket.

I'd also note that we can't assume worst possible impact as there will be combined offenses too — eg. simultaneous drunk driving and speeding — and this means that some damages need to be covered by drunk driving ticket instead :)

Edit: update numbers to reflect annual deaths attributed to speeding in US.

  • Dylan16807  10 days ago

    2 billion dollars per 200 deaths, not per death. So that immediately drops your rough calculation to $500 per ticket, not too far off from actual ticket values.