Traffic Deaths: Perception vs Reality

An interesting tidbit from my trip is people’s perceptions of how dangerous the traffic is either in their own country or in the country where they’re travelling to. It’s a trope of international travel that certain third world countries have “crazy traffic” or that they “drive like maniacs”. This often includes tips of how to avoid problems. For example, for my trips to China, someone said to just walk slowly and steadily through the traffic — nobody will stop but they will all go around you.

Lonely Planet Iran had special warnings about Iran traffic and especially Tehran traffic. Indeed it was pretty horrendous. But nothing like the even more horrendous image I had built up in my head from the reports. Perhaps it’s a macho thing, to say how bad the traffic is where you’ve just travelled.

Then, I get to Israel and everybody is telling me I shouldn’t jaywalk, not even in a quiet street. “You could well get run over!” they’d say. “This isn’t Australia.” When I told them that compared to Iran, Israeli traffic was the height of decorum, people would have none of it. Israelis really seem to believe that they have very dangerous traffic and that it’s a very Israeli thing to have a road accident.

When I got home, I fact checked. Here are some stats from the Wikipedia table on traffic death rates. I’ve pulled out some of the relevant countries for comparison.

So the whole Israel being dangerous is pretty much a myth. True, it has more than double the deaths per vehicle than Australia. But still, both countries are very close together and right at the very safe end of the scale. Compare that to Iran, which has more than TEN times the fatality rate than Israel and TWENTY FIVE times the fatality rate of Australia.

Now, there is one counterargument and that’s that I’m comparing fatalities only and not total accidents or injuries. And you’d expect Israel to have a lower fatality rate than Iran. It’s wealthier per capita and has better medical facilities. Everything is so close that pretty much 100% of the population is within reach of emergency services (especially once rescue helicopters are taken into account). But still, I doubt that this is enough to make up for the difference. Israel is still almost certainly safer than 80-90% of countries

How might the perception of Israel being so dangerous on the road have gotten started? Some possibilities off the top of my head:

• As a form of machoness/bragging rights. It seems common to many (if not most) countries to take a pleasure in outlining how dangerous things are. Australians like to brag about how many deadly creatures there are, ignoring the fact that the death rate is negligible.
• As part of a general cultural trope of Israel being dangerous. This is country-specific: in Israel the more right-wing someone is the more they are invested in the idea of Israel being a very dangerous place to live (for Israelis, obviously in this case). This fits the pattern.
• Israel is a much smaller country than Iran both in area and population. Therefore the percentage of accidents and fatalities that are reported in the national media is going to be much higher than in most countries, certainly much higher than Iran. This leads to a sampling bias and the availability heuristic.
• Israelis tend to compare themselves to “developed” countries like those in Western Europe, North America etc. Israel does have a higher accident rate than many of those countries — certainly it’s higher than the USA which seems higher than most of Western Europe. So it might just be a question of framing — when this is what you’re comparing to, you’re more dangerous.

Either way, traffic accidents like most things provide a great window into our biases.

What do you think? What are some areas where your country generally thinks it’s very dangerous despite the facts?