Differential Rates of Change and Road Accidents in Western Europe and North America

Abstract

The tradition from Malthus, Marx, and Ogburn points to differential rates of change is an important predictor variable. Although normal industrial societies include components changing at highly unequal rates without necess arily revealing maladaptive behavior, it still seems a good strategy to pay at tention to differential rates of change in trying to explain maladaptivity arising in connection with technological innovations or diffusions. Taking annual rate of change in the number of road deaths per capita as dependent variable. and annual rate of change in the number of cars per capita, and annual rate of change in expenditure per caplta devoted to road work as independent variables, it was shown for Britain and Denmark that a considerable increase in such expenditure would be needed to achieve zero growth rate in the de pendent variable. Since data on road expenditures proved hard to provide for most countries the main problem discussed in the paper is the relationship be tween the other two variables mentioned above. This relationship is studied in 13 European and North American nations over approximately 20 years, mostly 1947 to 1966. Deadly accidents on roads were shown to grow more slowly than the number of automobiles, but at a rate rather close to 1/3 of that for automobiles for Europe in general. Data for United States suggest that this dependence between cars and accidents may well be characteristic of nations in their automotive youth and early maturity only.