The Sûreté du Québec has just published its traffic collision statistics1 and my goodness, it’s like Plato’s allegory of the cave. We are still prisoners of a cave where puppeteers try to maintain the illusion. Only the knowledge acquired through education allows prisoners to get out of the cave, to see the light of day, and to get in touch with reality.
The Sûreté du Québec compares the results of the year 2022 with those of 2021. We could not find more lame. The 2021 curfew was in effect from January 9 to May 28. He prohibited anyone from being outside his residence between 8 p.m. and 5 a.m. That of 2022, which had never been requested by Public Health, was only in effect for 18 days.
Two factors explain the variations in road tolls. The region-specific risk factor and exposure to that factor. Driving in Quebec is terribly safe despite the statistics that are thrown at us. Unfortunately, we still do not compile the only statistic that allows fair comparisons from one year to the next, namely the number of victims per 160 million kilometers travelled. Our record should be as good, if not better than that of the Americans with a minimal total of 1.34 deaths per 160 million kilometers.
Stephen J. Dubner and Stephen D. Levitt, radio show writers Freakonomics, cleverly pictured it: “Incredibly low [le risque de conduire une automobile]. If the only thing that could kill you was driving, and all you did was drive your car day and night, you could expect to live to be 250 years old. »
Decode the numbers
As indicated by the title of Sylvie Lidgi’s book All offenders?, we are allowed to ask ourselves if our leaders mean it in veiled terms but express it openly with the new road repression measures that are constantly being introduced. In 2015, the Minister of Transport at the time, Robert Poëti, announced the withdrawal of the device which he had called the most profitable “ticket trap” and which brought in more than all 14 other photo radars in the first wave. If a radar can prove that road users travel a little faster than the posted limit, it can also very well prove in an irrefutable way the very secondary role of speed. The Minister admitted that this radar was not in an accident zone.
Speed is not the main cause in 95% of road collisions, as reported in a 2006 study by the Transport Research Laboratory. During its last year of operation, 15 South’s photo radar had flashed 31,000 drivers who weren’t attentive enough to notice traffic signs. “The road speaks to you, listen to it”, to use this good slogan of the Ministry of Transport.
The Sûreté du Québec adds a layer. Distracted driving would have resulted in 1 in 10 fatal collisions. However, in 2016, Transport Canada estimated that inattention caused 21% of fatal collisions and 27% of collisions with at least one serious injury. Who is telling the truth?
In an effort to keep us under the illusion of the relative high danger of driving on our roads, the Sûreté du Québec says that 2022 has been the worst year in a decade. If only the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ) compiled the statistics for the number of deaths per 160 million kilometers, there is a possibility that the results for 2022 will be the best.
There is a variable that weighed heavily in the results of 2022, and it is also the same one that had emptied the coffers of the SAAQ 20 years earlier with the dollar which was trading at US$0.62. Quebecers took their summer vacations here. The summer vacation period weighs on the road balance sheets of the countries. Kilometers of road are accumulated which exponentially increase the number of interactions between the different users, thus increasing the risk of fatal accidents.
Whenever we try to convince you of an observation with statistics, take it with a grain of salt. Ronald Harry Coase, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, once said: “If we torture the data enough, they will eventually confess. »