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Berkeley ECON 100A - How Many Lives Did Dale Earnhardt Save

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How Many Lives Did Dale Earnhardt Save?By Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt. Calculating a Driver's Risk Five years ago this weekend, Dale Earnhardt crashed into a wall during thefinal lap of the Daytona 500 and was instantly killed. One of the mostsuccessful, beloved and intimidating drivers in Nascar history, Earnhardt isstill actively mourned. (If you watch today's Daytona 500, the first and mostprominent race of the Nascar season, you will surely see his No. 3 everywhere.)Earnhardt's death was to Nascar as 9/11 was to the federal government: a wake-upcall leading to a radical overhaul of safety measures. ''There were three orfour bad accidents in a row there over two or three years,'' says Matt Kenseth,an elite Nascar driver. ''Nascar was always working hard on safety, but that''-- Earnhardt's death -- ''really sped things up.'' Driving a race car is an obviously hazardous pursuit. When Earnhardt died, hewas the seventh driver within Nascar's three major divisions -- the CraftsmanTruck Series, the Busch Series and the premier circuit now known as the NextelCup Series -- to die within a period of seven years. And how many drivers have been killed since his death in 2001? Zero. In more than six million miles of racing -- and many, many miles inpractice and qualifying laps, which are plenty dangerous -- not a single driverin Nascar's three top divisions has died. On U.S. roads, meanwhile, roughly 185,000 drivers, passengers andmotorcyclists have been killed during this same time frame. Those 185,000deaths, though, came over the course of nearly 15 trillion miles driven. Thistranslates into one fatality for every 81 million miles driven. Although trafficaccidents are the leading cause of death for Americans from ages 3 to 33, thiswould seem to be a pretty low death rate (especially since it includesmotorcycles, which are far more dangerous than cars or trucks). How long mightit take one person to drive 81 million miles? Let's say that for a solid yearyou did nothing but drive, 24 hours a day, at 60 miles per hour. In one year,you'd cover 525,600 miles; to reach 81 million miles, you'd have to drive aroundthe clock for 154 years. In other words, a lot of people die on U.S. roads eachyear not because driving is so dangerous, but because an awful lot of people aredriving an awful lot of miles. So Nascar's record of zero deaths in five years over six million miles isperhaps not as remarkable as it first sounded. Still, driving a race car wouldseem to be substantially more dangerous than taking a trip to the supermarket.What has Nascar done to produce its zero-fatality record?It's a long list. Well before Earnhardt was killed, each driver was alreadywearing a helmet, fireproof suit and shoes and a five-point safety harness.Months after Earnhardt's death, Nascar began requiring the use of ahead-and-neck restraint that is tethered to a driver's helmet and prevents hishead from flying forward or sideways in a crash. (Like many race-car drivers whoare killed, Earnhardt suffered a fracture to the base of the skull.) It erectedsafer walls on its race tracks. And it began to zealously collect crash data.This Incident Database (which Nascar politely declined to let us examine) isgleaned from two main sources: a black box now mounted on every vehicle and thework of a new Field Investigation unit. These field investigators meticulouslytake key measurements on every car before every race, and then if a car isinvolved in a crash, they retake those measurements. ''In the past, a car would be in an accident, the driver would have noinjuries and the team would load up the car and go home,'' says Gary Nelson, whoruns Nascar's research and development center. ''But now they measure every carin certain areas, and we make a log of that. Like the width of the seat -- itseems simple, the width of the headrest from left to right. But in an accident,those things can bend, and the amount they bend can help us understand theenergy involved. When we began, we thought our seats were adequately strong, butwe found these things to be bending more than we thought. So we've come backsince and rewritten the regulations.'' Although it is wildly reductive to put it this way, a Nascar driver has twomain goals: to win a race and to not be killed. Nascar's recent safety measuresseem to have considerably reduced the likelihood of being killed. So could it bethat drivers are now willing to be more reckless? When crashing is made lesscostly, an economist would fully expect drivers to be crashing like crazy; couldit be that Nascar's safety measures have led to fewer deaths but more crashes? A quick look at the data seems to suggest so. In last year's Nextel Cupraces, there were 345 cars involved in crashes, an all-time high. But, as MattKenseth points out, the two cup races held during 2005 at Lowe's Motor Speedwaynear Charlotte, N.C., were unusually brutal -- the track had a new surface thatcaused numerous flat tires -- and may have aberrationally affected the crashcount. ''In Charlotte, pretty much everybody wrecked in both races,'' he says. ''It was the fault of the track and the tires -- but if you take those races outof it, crashes are probably about even.'' And there were actually fewer crashesin 2004 than there were in 2003. While the number of overall crashes are up abit since Earnhardt's death (Nascar will not release annual crash counts, butone official did confirm this trend), they haven't increased nearly as much asan economist might have predicted based on how Nascar's safety measures wouldseem to have shifted a driver's incentives. Maybe that's because there are other, perhaps stronger, incentives at play.The first is that Nascar has increased its penalties for reckless driving, notonly fining drivers but also subtracting points in their race for the cupchampionship. The other lies in how the cup championship itself has beenrestructured. Two years ago, Nascar gave its 36-race season a playoff format. Inorder to qualify for the playoffs -- and have a chance at winning the $6million-plus cup championship -- a driver must be among the points leaders afterthe first 26 races of the season. While a couple of 20th-place finishes duringthose first 26 races won't necessary ruin your championship hopes (each racefields a slate of 43 cars), a few bad crashes might. So Nascar has reduced a danger incentive but imposed a financial incentive,thus maintaining the delicate and masterful


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Berkeley ECON 100A - How Many Lives Did Dale Earnhardt Save

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