Automobile Accidents

In the summer of 1993, I visited with Professor Ed Posner on the campus of Caltech.  He had agreed to be my research advisor when I started graduate school there in the fall.  About a month before my first semester started, however, I was notified that he had been killed while commuting on his bicycle by a drunk driver.

I think I heard that his graduate student was killed in an automobile accident a half a year later.  Within my extended family, I know that one of my brothers-in-law lost a sister to an automobile accident.  Mike Perry, whom I have mentioned a number of times in this weblog, was killed earlier this month by an automobile accident while commuting on foot.

In a previous weblog entry, I noted that the probability of being killed in an automobile accident is about one percent.  Even if the probability of dying on a single round trip is less than one in one million, the cumulative probability can easily reach that one percent mark after half a century of school and work.  The recent death of Mike was a reminder to me that the safest commute is the telecommute.