The More We Drive The Safer We Get

My 14-year-old grandson got his Idaho driver’s permit this month. He has to log 50 hours with an experienced driver before he can get a regular license. Since he is driving my trusty old Jeep with 225,000 miles I volunteered to ride along for a few practice trips. I made sure my life insurance premiums were current and buckled in. Soon I realized how fast people can learn to drive and how much safer cars have become in the last 50 years since I started my career behind the wheel in 1972.

The statistics confirm these trends. The blue line indicates the 10s of billions of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and the red line is the deaths per VMT. According to the U.S. Department Transportation from 1972 to 2022 vehicle miles traveled increased 167 percent from 1.2 trillion to 3.2 trillion. During this same period deaths per billion VMT has dropped 69 percent from 4.33 to 1.35.

Hopefully my grandson can figure out how to parallel park before his final test. Then he can begin adding new valuable knowledge to driving even safer.

Tip of the Hat: Jason Crawford

Learn how learning curves benefit all of us in Superabundance, available at Amazon. Dr. Jordan Peterson calls it a profoundly optimistic book.

Gale Pooley is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a board member at Human Progress.