Cars kill far more people than trains.
The chart illustrates the remarkable contradiction between the perception and reality of different means of getting from A to B Of course, it does not give the whole story. Walking is not inherently dangerous; it’s what others do to pedestrians that drives up the numbers. Nor do accident rates based on miles travelled reflect the risks experienced over any particular period, since we cover many more kilometres per hour in trains, cars or planes than on foot. Even so, this pattern is not a fact of life, sent like weather from heaven. It raises real questions about policy.We spend up to 150 times as much to save a life on the railways as on the roads. Nor is transport is the only field where illogicality seems to rule. Why does the health service spend fortunes on complex operations, when a fraction of that money spent on controlling the spread of infection in hospitals might save many more lives? Why, in general, does the burden of regulation correspond so erratically to actual risks involved? Why doesn’t government use those natty little maps of the likelihood and severity of risk, spreading like measles through corporate boardrooms?Well – government does Up to a point.

But risk management in government is a peculiar science, whose oddities cannot all be put down to daft policy making. The public sector is fundamentally risk-averse, despite being largely protected from the financial consequences of risky decisions. Their tax-raising powers, after all, make it hard for governments actually to go bust. The explanation is that government’s bottom line is not money, but public opinion. And public opinion likes certainty, not probability.Accidents must never happen again Safety must be 100 per cent Stable doors must be slammed behind every bolting horse. The public may, of course, suffer a reaction when they pay the price of certainty (no T-bone steaks, slow trains) but it is hard to predict when and where this will happen. Far safer, if you are a civil servant, to gold-plate every European directive than risk public evisceration for a perceived lack of preventative zeal.Such attitudes stifle innovation.

Paradoxically, they may also make the system slow to respond to new risks, because everyone knows that regulations are easier to add than subtract. And they make virtually impossible the solution of such problems as the disposal of high-level nuclear waste, still piling up homeless in the United Kingdom.Such pressures may explain a tendency to over-regulate, but not the patchiness of the public sector’s risk management. This stems partly from what one observer calls “the problem of time and space”. If the thousands of people who die from smoking every year were to keel over simultaneously outside the Palace of Westminster, rather than cough their lives away in hospitals and old people’s homes, policy would be very different. Ten separate deaths on lonely country roads are ten personal tragedies; a railway accident is a disaster. Public opinion – and hence policy – is focused on disasters.Now, this is not entirely illogical. The fact that so many people may be killed at one go in a railway accident does make it reasonable to expect more safety mechanisms to be put in place in drivers’ cabs than on the handlebars of my bicycle.

But this highlights another feature of public attitudes to risk. We are far less risk-averse when it comes to choices we make ourselves than with respect to things we see as done to us by someone else. Paragliding, rock-climbing, cross-country riding competitions – all involve the voluntary taking of obvious risk. Yet (so far at least, thank God) governments have steered clear of detailed legal regulation.This important principle makes its impact on the overall level of accidental death, particularly amongst two groups – the young and the old. The second chart shows a dramatic fall in these rates since the beginning of the century.

The easiest way to get these down further would be to tackle the causes of accidents in the home. To do so, however, would involve driving regulation even deeper into people’s private lives, demanding more fire-doors or hand-rails, banning high cupboards, insisting on “safe” cooking methods. The most zealous civil servant must balk at that.Sadly, however, the boundary is being advanced. It is driving regulation into parts of the informal economy (rent-a-room, Women’s Institute sales) to a degree that is both ridiculous and a barrier to entry into certain markets. We do better to rely, as far as possible, on the principle of choice.This will, of course, mean that we should not expect policy-makers to deliver the same risk ratios across all forms of human activity.