Driving may shorten life
link Driving may shorten life.
Some of these stories are so preposterous that I first have to check to see whether they were first posted on the Onion. Sadly no, for in this case, like many others, a questionable study is foisted upon the public again as a news story. In line with the campaign to make illegal the use of cellphones in cars, now we have a study that purports to show that driving in and of itself is harmful to you.
Just doing the math in the article is enough to make you want to avoid your car like a caterpillar sandwich, until you reallydo the math. You will notice the article refers to “complex models” whatever that means, but you can be sure that no one understands them. So, using these complex models, every hour of driving decreases your life expectancy by 20 minutes?? Maybe in Iraq or Afghanistan or in Vancouver where rules of the road are viewed as mere suggestions.
But if this model is to be believed, for simplicity, an average commuter, driving an hour a day going back and forth to work yields 2 hours, or 10 hours a week. This means his life expectancy was reduced by 200 minutes a week or just a little over 3 hours. Let’s not count the time spent driving to pick up cigarettes or beer on the weekends. So in a year, discounting statutory holidays, our hero loses 150 hours of his life. In an average work life of 45 years, he has lost 6750 hours of his life or 281 days, not quite a full year. If you add in the time driving to the lake house, to Disneyland or the Grand Canyon, a year disappears for sure. So, for the convenience of accessing far flung places by car, you “give up” a year in your life.
Still sounds reasonable. How about long haul truck drivers who drive 8 to 10 hours PER DAY? Applying the same calculation reveals that these poor guys lose about 31 days of their lives PER YEAR. Not exactly motivation to get into the long haul business. Heck, it’s enough to discourage people from being soccer moms. If you had to think about these statistics while driving, you’d have to smoke to calm your nerves and talk on the cell phone to your pals for comfort.
So? So the point is, there seems to be a popular past-time, organized or coincidental which aims to remove all vestiges and conveniences of our modern society for fear of harm to self or to everyone else. Typically, to back up assertions are “scientific studies” which show the desired conclusions. All this junk science is reminiscent of the old joke about a researcher studying the ability of bugs to respond to stimulus. He plucks out the legs of the insect one by one while issuing commands to it and of course the bug moves after each such incident. Eventually, the bug runs out of legs and when it does not respond to the sound of the researcher’s voice, he concludes that when you remove all the legs of a bug, it goes deaf.
In the case of all the hazards associated with driving a car, I actually tend to agree with people who claim that distractions are dangerous when driving. So is cooking with bare feet in the kitchen. So are backyard barbecues. The real problem with drivers is that licenses are too easy to get. In the controlled environment of a driver’s exam, anyone breathing can pass, as Vancouver proves. The test should be reconfigured to simulate real life examples. In this case, the candidate has to talk on a cell phone, have the radio on and have friends in the car pointing out pretty chicks on the street while successfully and safely navigating a car. If they can pass these real life situations, then they show some normal human skills and driving for them is not the equivalent of an IQ test. If they fail, public transport is the way to go for every one’s sake and the world is safer.
Long haul drivers can thank me later.