June 2, 2014
Stat of the Week Competition Discussion: May 31 – June 6 2014
If you’d like to comment on or debate any of this week’s Stat of the Week nominations, please do so below!
Rachel Cunliffe is the co-director of CensusAtSchool and currently consults for the Department of Statistics. Her interests include statistical literacy, social media and blogging. See all posts by Rachel Cunliffe »
Further to Donald McDonald’s nomination about the foreign driver accident rate, I am interested in John Key’s broad statement (made here: http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/no-big-issue-over-foreign-drivers-john-key-5988642) that “If you look at the accident rate of tourists who come and drive in New Zealand versus the New Zealanders themselves, it’s pretty consistent. They’re about the same sort of accident rate per capita, so I don’t think that’s a big issue,” he told Seven Sharp.
I don’t know his source but he seems to imply that the number of accidents as a proportion of total tourist numbers is similar to the number of accidents as a proportion of total domestic population. This may be true. However it doesn’t take into account how long those tourists are in the country. If the average length of stay is, say, one week, the tourists are involved in as many accidents in that one week (proportionally) as the rest of the population is in one year i.e. their risk is 52 times as great.
Or maybe I’m misunderstanding John Key’s words (wouldn’t be the first time…).
10 years ago
He’s not that badly wrong.
The number of visits is about 2.5 million/year. The median length of stay is about 9 days, but the mean would be more. If the mean were, say, 14 days, just over 2.1% of the people physically in NZ would be short-term visitors.
That’s less than the 5-6% of accidents, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the age profile of visitors explained a lot of the difference.
Also, one of the accidents this weekend was allegedly caused by an international student, and they aren’t in the short-term visitor data. There are about 100,000 international students here more or less full time, and that makes up another couple of percent.
So, the Prime Minister appears to be accurate on this one. Not that it really matters, because there’s no way in the world that NZ is withdrawing from the treaty that makes international driver’s licences valid.
10 years ago
Though, interestingly, the PRC has neither ratified the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic nor recognises International Driving Permits.
We could require tests for visitors from the PRC (and Brazil, and a few touristically less significant countries) without withdrawing from the Convention. It’s still not going to happen.
10 years ago