The Professor Will See You Now: Road deaths
Illustration by Tracy Worrall
4 min read
Lessons in political science. This week: road deaths
In 1954, a British government report estimated that the deaths of women in road traffic accidents had benefited the country to the tune of just over £1.2m.
This is one of the many fascinating details contained in an article recently published in Modern British History thatlooks at the activities of the Road Research Laboratory. This offshoot of the then Department of Scientific and Industrial Research had helped develop the Dambusters’ bouncing bomb during the war and was later to give us the system of giving way to the right on roundabouts. But, as this excellent piece of archival research makes clear, it was also responsible for a much wider revolution in British government.
The catalyst was the M1. In October 1953, the lab was tasked with calculating the return on investment of the proposed motorway. Traditionally, this would be done by thinking purely in economic terms: how much more business would be generated, and so on.
Motorways had another economic consequence, however, because they were also safer, which meant fewer car accidents – and car accidents had an economic cost in lost earnings. But what about those who were not economically active? As an early report bluntly noted: “Their deaths have to be considered a gain to the community, which no longer has to feed, clothe and house them.” This brutal conclusion remained true even after the committee allocated housewives a nominal £280 a year to recognise the value of their domestic labour. Hence the 1954 finding with which I began, that while the previous year’s road traffic accidents had cost the UK £72m overall, those which had specifically killed women had made the UK better off by £1,213,000. It was all a bit Logan’s Run.
It hardly needs saying that the calculus used betrayed objectionable assumptions about value, but the innovative leap made by the committee was to move on from such a narrow interpretation and look in addition at the “social return on capital”. This encompassed both deaths but also, crucially, leisure time. Motorways saved time, which people valued, even though leisure time had no obvious economic benefit. But if you didn’t consider how people wanted to spend their time, you ended up building roads in the wrong places.
The eventual study calculated that every road death prevented by the M1 was worth £2,500 and each saved hour of leisure somewhere between two and 10 shillings. And overall, taken with the economic benefits of the motorway, this generated a return on investment of 10-15 per cent, including 24 saved lives per year and roughly two million hours of Britons’ leisure time.
We often view attempts to monetise the value of things as a neoliberal innovation, yet the author argues that what these civil servants were attempting to do was the exact opposite. They were, he claims, essentially social democratic. The approach became known as cost-benefit analysis and was soon everywhere in government.
It is not the main point of the paper, but the reason I find it so fascinating is because it is an example of how important policy decisions get made in the most surprising of places. This was not a policy fought over at an election or advocated by some big ministerial beast – a prime minister, or even a secretary of state. There were no rows in Cabinet, no marches or campaigns. It’s the antithesis of politics as portrayed in The West Wing. No one has ever commissioned a drama about a group of economists and businessmen sitting around a table in Harmondsworth, arguing about how to measure the value of your free time.
As the author concludes: “The first public authority to formulate ‘the social efficiency of capital’ had for most of its life measured nothing so much as the efficiency of different concrete mixes. Yet by forging cost-benefit analysis such as we recognise it today, the laboratory made what would become one of the most prevalent styles of justification practised by agents of British government.”
Further reading: C Troup, Roads to Economization: Valuing Life, Limb, and Leisure in the Social Democratic State, Modern British History (2025)
