On Cost Benefit Analysis

The 777 is an airplane built by Boeing, it is not the largest aircraft or the fastest, but it is a well engineered airplane. During its design phase PBS made a documentary about the aircraft and being that I always have been a total aerospace geek I watched the documentary with rapt attention.

I recall very clearly an engineer noting that the safest airplane design possible would have emergency exits at every row. Such a design "feature" would add a huge amount of weight to the airplane, so much in fact the thing might not be able to clear the runway and if it did get wheels up the fuel economy would be appalling. So a cost benefit analysis is done. Factor in the probability of a crash times the chance of survival with n number of exit doors, how many lives are saved? Assign a monetary value to a human life and it becomes trivial to determine how many doors to install. Most people find the notion of assigning a monetary value to their life distasteful, to put things mildly, but then we do it all the time, it is called Life Insurance.

Anyway here is an even simpler calculation, assign a monetary value to your time, now subtract the probability of being busted by a member of Toronto's Finest for a moving violation, like say driving a car in the bike lane of Bay Street, times the cost of a ticket and potential hike in auto insurance, if you come out with a positive number it makes sense to put my life (as a cyclist who uses Bay Street) at risk. This calculation is something that drivers do subconsciously all the time, often to my personal detriment.

I have an idea. The city should hire one hundred new police officers who are required to bust, say an average 25 moving violations a day, 20 days a month, or 6000 tickets per cop/year, roughly one in six people would have a ticket a year in a population of three million drivers. Such a ratio would quickly put a stop to a lot of the dangerous driving I see every day. There would be 100 police standing around thus reducing police response time and probability of crime. Finally a cash strapped city collecting on say one in ten tickets (probably, by personal observation, closer to one in two but let's be conservative) and further assume each ticket nets say, $50, that works out to $3 million a year in net new money. It would piss off drivers, but then didn't you hear? Drivers are at war with everyone already anyway.