Comment by 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.
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.
Got it, thanks for the correction: it does surprisingly line up!