Clean air cuts accident levels
Well if I wasn’t just bestowing the virtues of electric cars last week... This week I find out that a 30% drop in nitrogen dioxide levels could cut accidents by 5%.
The link was spotted by a clever PhD student at the London School of Economics (LSE). Through studying data from between 2009 and 2014, he saw that in areas where nitrogen dioxide concentration rose by just one microgramme per cubic metre, the average number of accidents increased by 2%. Unsurprisingly, the link was particularly prominent in cities.
The student, called Lutz Sager, put some of the increase in accidents down to the physical distractions that pollution could cause, such as limited visibility. But his main theory was that the increase in poor air affected the drivers’ health and ability to carry out mental tasks.
And as keen a driver I am, I can believe that. Driving through a busy city at rush hour, in the rain, perhaps when you don’t know where you’re going… It’s exhausting! Just because we jump in the cars every day, we can underestimate how much it takes out of us, but driving requires us to perceive and process heaps of information while carrying out complex actions in response!
To come up with the figure of how we could cut accidents by 5%, Sager looking at an area that contained the most polluted air – west London - and calculated that a 30% decrease in nitrogen dioxide could reduce road traffic accidents everyday by 5%. Considering that 1,730 road deaths occurred in 2015 this is an area of study that I hope will be picked up.
I don’t have an electric car just yet (kind of saving for an Austin Mini to be converted), but I’ll definitely be inclined to go for a petrol over a diesel car next time I’m looking. And I’m not alone - in a recent RAC survey, four in 10 people said they’d avoid diesels with more than a third saying this is due to city pollution.
Let’s keep our cities clean and safe!
The link was spotted by a clever PhD student at the London School of Economics (LSE). Through studying data from between 2009 and 2014, he saw that in areas where nitrogen dioxide concentration rose by just one microgramme per cubic metre, the average number of accidents increased by 2%. Unsurprisingly, the link was particularly prominent in cities.
The student, called Lutz Sager, put some of the increase in accidents down to the physical distractions that pollution could cause, such as limited visibility. But his main theory was that the increase in poor air affected the drivers’ health and ability to carry out mental tasks.
And as keen a driver I am, I can believe that. Driving through a busy city at rush hour, in the rain, perhaps when you don’t know where you’re going… It’s exhausting! Just because we jump in the cars every day, we can underestimate how much it takes out of us, but driving requires us to perceive and process heaps of information while carrying out complex actions in response!
To come up with the figure of how we could cut accidents by 5%, Sager looking at an area that contained the most polluted air – west London - and calculated that a 30% decrease in nitrogen dioxide could reduce road traffic accidents everyday by 5%. Considering that 1,730 road deaths occurred in 2015 this is an area of study that I hope will be picked up.
I don’t have an electric car just yet (kind of saving for an Austin Mini to be converted), but I’ll definitely be inclined to go for a petrol over a diesel car next time I’m looking. And I’m not alone - in a recent RAC survey, four in 10 people said they’d avoid diesels with more than a third saying this is due to city pollution.
Let’s keep our cities clean and safe!
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