August 4, 2011Dear Sir,While your correspondent ‘Streetwalker' is to be applauded for drawing attention to poor driving habits around the Island, his/her letter exhibited superlatives and a tone of alarm that seem unwarranted. S/he made the assertion that “Bermuda must have the most single vehicle accidents for population size”. Since single vehicle accidents do not harm anyone else beside the occupants of the vehicle in question (except financially, via higher insurance costs, as your correspondent mentioned). The true danger of our roads should be measured in traffic-related deaths. Using our nearest neighbours for the sake of example (they keep good statistics), they experienced 33,808 road fatalities in 2009, a decrease on the previous year. Calculating their per-capita ratio using the admittedly imprecise figure of 300 million people, the USA experienced 1.1269 road deaths per capita.Last year, Bermuda witnessed 13 road fatalities, and using an equally imprecise, and probably low, figure of 65,000 people, that gives our country a per-capita road fatality rate of just 0.0002. It seems that our roads are hardly deathtraps, and that the concerns of Streetwalker lie mostly in his/her wallet, rather than the well-being of motorists. I write only to put some perspective on the situation — Streetwalker's desire to promote safer driving remains unassailably just, operating a motor vehicle while drunk remains foolish, and the rule of “Thirty-five, stay alive” remains true, if inconveniently boring.HAPPY TO SWERVE YOUDevonshire