Coronavirus, Traffic Deaths, and Building a Strong Town

There is a pseudo-intellectual idea floating around the past few days in the urbanism space. I call it “intellectual” because it is generally asserted by people who seemingly want to sound too intelligent to panic about the coronavirus while simultaneously demonstrating enlightened concerned for pedestrian safety, traffic deaths, auto emissions, and other similar topics familiar to urban advocates. I add the prefix “pseudo” because the assertion is also ridiculous.

I’m not going to call anyone out here just to slam dunk on them—after you read this, go ahead and delete your old tweets and Facebook posts (we want our readers to be smart and to look the part)—so let me assert the idea here on my own as you may see it represented in other places:

In January, the coronavirus killed only X number of people yet the automobile killed 100X that many people during the same time. All you people panicking about a virus you’ll never get, turn and fight the menace right in front of you.

I’m going to dwell on this today first because I think this fundamental misunderstanding underlies so many concepts that professionals, and those they advise, get wrong about a great many things, but especially about cities. A second but no less important reason, is that it makes us sound ridiculous, and appear as fanatics and frauds, to people outside of our conversation bubble.

Nobody who is panicked about coronavirus is panicked because it has killed X number of people. Few are uptight because they think it might kill 100x people. The thing that is panic-inducing about the coronavirus is not the floor but the ceiling, the notion that millions or tens of millions or even hundreds of millions could die in a pandemic.

If I told you that 32,000 died in auto-related incidents last year, we could all agree that was a senseless tragedy, something we should be doing far more to address. If I told you that, if we didn’t do anything, deaths would rise to 35,000 this year, you’d probably join me in dismay at this needless loss of life. However, if I told you that there was a chance that next year 10 million people would die from auto crashes, you (along with everyone else) would lose your mind. And you’d probably never drive or even go near a car.

Statistically, there is essentially zero chance that auto deaths will climb into the millions next year, and everyone understands that. Auto deaths are non-scalable. They can be quantified, understood, and even predicted from year-to-year with a respectable level of macro-precision. They lie in what Patron Saint of Strong Towns Thinking Nassim Taleb calls “Mediocristan.” In The Black Swan, Taleb describes Mediocristan this way:

Let's play the following thought experiment. Assume you round up a thousand people randomly selected from the general public and have them stand next to each other in a stadium. Imagine the heaviest person you can think of and add him to that sample. Assuming he weighs three times the average, between four hundred and five hundred pounds, he will rarely represent more than a very small fraction of the weight of the entire population (in this case, about a half a percent.)

You can get even more aggressive. If you picked the heaviest biologically possible human on the planet (who yet can still be called a human), he would not represent more than, say, 0.6 percent of the total, a very negligible increase. And if you had ten thousand persons, his contribution would be vanishingly small.

Have a massive car crash, a record-breaking incident with autos piling up along the stroad, and it statistically will barely register on the nation’s annual death toll for auto-related fatalities. That’s Mediocristan, which is very different than Extremistan, the land of the scalable incidents. The Black Swan builds on the prior thought experiment by describing Extremistan in this way:

Consider by comparison the net worth of the thousand people you lined up in the stadium. Add to them the wealthiest person to be found on the planet —say Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. Assume his net worth to be close to $80 billion—with the total capital of the others around a few million. How much of the total wealth would he represent? 99.9 percent?

Have a flu breakout year after year after year and it starts to seem a lot like auto crashes. Have false alarm after false alarm on the threat of a pandemic and maybe you start to believe that something like coronavirus can be compared to something like auto deaths, like comparing weight to net-worth if you have not seriously thought about the potential for Bill Gates.

Yet, the existence of the Bill-Gates-of-viral-outbreak should be well known, especially to the highly educated. The Spanish Influenza of 1918 infected an estimated half-a-billion people worldwide. One out of every five people in the world were infected. Estimates vary, but it is consensus that tens of millions of people died in a few short months. That’s Extremistan. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing…. explosion.

We see the same thinking applied in domains like economics (looks like we ended the business cycle, again) and politics (remember how confident of the outcome everyone was going into the 2016 presidential election) and climate studies (models based on projections of other models based on the projections of other models). In these domains, people who speak in absolutes—or who make specious correlations that defy common outsider knowledge—tend to be discounted. Or worse.

Taleb is known to be a little bit cranky, especially on Twitter. As a Lebanese-New Yorker, his approach is a bit coarser than the typical engineer from small town Minnesota. Yet, I find Taleb endearing, and I empathize with his frustration. The subset of people who don’t understand this tends to highly correlate with the subset of people who are highly educated, have domain-specific expertise or passions, and have a high opinion of their own abilities (lack humility). They are easily called out as frauds by the likes of Taleb (he calls them “fragilistas” because their ideas make the world more fragile, and they rarely share in that downside risk).

Let me say this simply: There is no better way to discredit a campaign to reduce auto fatalities than to compare the risk of death by auto crash to the risk of death by viral pandemic. It is like comparing the risk of a handgun accident to the threat of global nuclear war; they are not in the same domain and it sounds preposterously fanatical to most people to suggest otherwise.

Thinking this way also robs us of our agency, our capacity to be proactive and fix what is wrong in our places.

Statistically, while the odds of any single virus resulting in pandemic is small, a future viral pandemic of global scale is almost a certainty. Your odds of escaping it are not good (doubt that: read about the remote and practically isolated Inuit during the 1918 pandemic), but they can be dramatically reduced by supporting things like a free press in authoritarian countries, strong world health organizations, a spirit of open and collaborative scientific inquiry (not distorted by partisan politics), and aggressive steps by international bodies during early stages of potential outbreaks. In the spirit of the first habit of highly effective people, these are not exactly things most of us are positioned to be proactive on.

We can immediately be proactive and highly effective, however, when it comes to taking action to reduce auto fatalities in our own communities. And we can build momentum for those changes by communicating both the risks and the benefits of those actions—which go beyond even saving the lives of families, friends, and neighbors—to those around us.

Eliminating stroads, slowing traffic on our streets, and making our neighborhoods more walkable all require sober, rational, and sustained action. Don’t blow your credibility by being a fanatic (someone who can’t change their mind and won’t change the subject). Instead, build a Strong Town by being the thoughtful, informed, persistent, yet humble leader in the room. Over the long term, that’s what it’s going to take.

Top image from the U.S. Air Force

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