Is Traffic Racist?

Recently, while doing some unrelated research, I came across the article below. Black kids are more likely to be injured or killed by traffic than whites, Asians or any other ethnicity.

At this point, we usually hear the cry of racism, but the woman who highlighted this anomaly stopped short of that, although she did figure that poverty and deprivation might have something to do with it.

The first thing anyone with any mathematical training will notice is that this is a very small sample from a very small area, so is statistically not very meaningful. One can also play all sorts of games with statistics, for example if one year there is one serious accident involving a child in a particular area and the following year there are two, that is an increase of 100%, which sounds horrifying but is well within the norms.

A different statistic, one that is truly horrifying, is that between August 2011 and June 2015, no fewer than 16 female cyclists were killed on London’s roads, and every single one of those deaths was the result of a collision with a lorry. That is something that cannot be explained away as a statistical anomaly.

The point of these observations is that sometimes there are innocent reasons for statistical differences between populations in all manner of fields, other times there may be factors that need to be addressed.

Still on the subject of traffic fatalities, here are some statistics that will probably surprise you. In 1931, there were 1,342 deaths from street accidents in London while in 1930, there were 6,317 such deaths in England and Wales, figures extracted from Whitaker’s Almanack, 1933, page 653.

Yet, according to the Government website, in 2023, there were only 1,624 such fatalities in Great Britain. Obviously, there is a lot more traffic on the roads nine decades on, and although it may not move as fast in some places, this staggering but welcome drop in fatalities requires some explaining. One is that drivers are trained better and pedestrians are, if not smarter, then more aware, better educated about how to cross the road. Again, there is no need to factor in any presumed discrimination, be it racial, sexual, or anything else.

Now apply this kind of logic to other things – like the professions, wealth distribution, crime statistics, etc - and the sinister human factors will largely disappear.