Banning bikes is the only answer

PETER Stangherlin (Mail 26 July) asks about my apparent lack of concern for the victims, other than motorcyclists, of road trauma.
Yes I am concerned about all death and injury on the road and as a CFA member come up close with too often.
Peter’s well written letter does however open the door on two concepts of society, the ‘social cost/social benefit ratio’ and ‘diminshing returns’.
Two inescapable facts are these:
(a) Motorcycle riders are many times more likely to be injured or killed than car drivers.
(b) An easy alternative to riding motorcycles exists, that is, a car.
It follows therefore that putting all riders in cars would save 30 to 40 Victorian lives per year with a nil impact on 97 per cent of road users.
Looking at social cost versus social value; everything we do has a cost and a value. In the case of cars the value of the lifelong amenity they provide far outweighs the cost in trauma to society.
As motorcycles are a far more dangerous place to be than a car (in an accident), the social advantage/cost ratio is much smaller and in fact is a negative.
The other immutable rule is diminishing returns, that is, that the last 10 per cent benefit in any thing takes a lot more effort to achieve than the first 10 per cent.
A relevant example is seat belts/airbags. The compulsion of belts in Victoria saw the road toll drop quickly and dramatically from the infamous 1061 fatalities in 1970.
Helmets saved lives on bikes, that was the early big, cheap, advantage change, but no amount of expensive training and awareness advertising will prevent all bike collisions and the subsequent deaths from those that do occur.
As I indicated early in this discussion, the quick, costeffective fix has only one solution, eliminate bikes by what ever means. Any other solution is just tweaking the edges of the problem.
John Nieman
Monbulk