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by jjmarr·2y ago·view on hn ↗
One of the things about evaluating the cost-effectiveness of a safety feature is that there's implicitly a monetary value assigned to human life, when you know the probability of something saving a life and the amount of money that thing costs.

https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/transportation-...

For 2022, the US Department of Transportation benchmarks that at $12.5 million and that's the number used to decide if something is cost-effective.

If one is proposing that society spends more on road-safety, that's more or less saying that $12.5 million should be higher. So what should it be? Are we ok with spending $20 million? $50 million? $100 million? Because that's the question we're implicitly answering when we decide if a proposal such as bollards are cost-effective.

1 comments
The implicit premise in this argument is that safety is an add-on that you buy or install like an antivirus package. If we designed to encourage less dangerous forms of transportation from the start, there may be cost savings that aren’t surfaced in the “add-on safety” cost calculation.