A new SENSE BC video claims that the government and the media use stats to push an enforcement agenda that’s not necessarily justified by those stats.
The Producer of Speed Kills Your Pocket Book 2: Lying with Statistics says stats can be skewed to justify decisions. Chris Thompson says fines should be based on actual danger as opposed to whether the government needs money or if there’s a particular frustration, like cell phone use. “The government is trying to take easy and bite sized information to try and persuade us that whatever particular policy they want to do, whether that be increasing fines for cellphones or increasing speed enforcement or dropping the speed limits, those numbers they’re using don’t lead us to the thing that they want us to believe.”
Thompson says there seems to be this tension in driving between how rules are enforced and how dangerous being on the road actually is. “The public gets I think a skewed view of the actual safety of driving. And we all have our own confirmation bias that nobody really pays attention to the thousand and thousands of cars around them just getting from A to B doing their thing. Whereas, the one guy who cruises through a stop sign or runs a red light, like yes that’s bad, but that’s what sticks out in peoples minds.”
Thompson says the easiest example is when saying distracted driving is now the number two cause of fatalities on our roads, which is true, but there’s more to that than just numbers. “Fatalities due to impaired driving dropped faster than fatalities due to distracted driving which have also dropped over the last 10 or so years. So it’s not that more people are getting killed as a result of distracted driving it’s just that distracted driving is becoming less of a problem less quickly than impaired driving is becoming less of a problem.”
Thompson says driving should be about safely moving people and products and not about revenue generation for the government. He adds that people should be concerned about how stats are manipulated and misreported to demonize vehicles while driving continues to become safer.
Listen to Chris Thompson’s full interview from the NL Morning News with Howie Reimer below:
