Risk and Safety

This is taken from chapter notes for a book project about ropeways (aerial tramways) for use in mountainous areas of the Third World.
Safety and Risk
Inasmuch as an unreasonable standard of safety can kill a meritorious ropeway project, it is worth devoting the necessary space to a discussion of the related—but very different—concepts of risk and safety.
Risk is quantifiable, provided that the necessary data are available. It is simply the probability that a certain type of loss, or a certain level of loss, will occur over a certain span of operating time or output.
Actuaries compile these figures and use them to compute, among other things, the premiums to be charged for insurance against the loss whose probability they have computed.
Safety, however, is not the inverse of risk. Risk, as we have seen, is quantifiable and objective, while safety ultimately rests on a value judgment—a subjective appraisal that will differ from place to place and from individual to individual. Typically, a standard of safety is expressed in terms of a maximum risk level deemed acceptable by the individual or organization concerned, and is determined by comparison to available alternatives.
For example, suppose that we are offered a ride on a single span, single car, to-and-fro ropeway with an open car that carries the rider over a deep gorge swept by high, cold winds. Such a ropeway, if installed in a developed country, would likely carry only goods if it were allowed to exist at all; there would likely be other, more comfortable and less risky alternatives available for carrying passengers, and the rickety mechanism would be condemned out of hand as “unsafe.”
Transplant the same rig to a remote corner of Nepal or Bhutan, where the only alternative is a five-hour walk on a narrow, icy windswept path with a vertical cliff face on one side and a sheer drop on the other, and it will be praised as the acme of safety and comfort!
The risk is the same in both hypothetical cases, but the “safety” value judgment is very different. None of this causes a problem, so long as the individuals and groups directly concerned are free to choose the risk levels that they will accept.
Unfortunately, we live in an age where government has arrogated itself the authority to make these decisions for us, even in countries generally considered “free.” The result is that government workers with secure, high-paying jobs, living and working in relatively low-risk environments, are making risk-acceptance decisions for people in very different circumstances. In most cases the bureaucrats mean well, but have little knowledge of conditions in the areas affected by their decisions and do not understand the adverse consequences of risk-averse regulation.
Tragically, one consistent consequence of applying arbitrary “safety” standards is higher risk. This paradoxical result arises as follows.

1. A novel, previously unapproved transport method is proposed, usually to supplant or supplement an existing transport medium. For our example, let the new method be a ropeway across a gorge, and the existing one a footpath and ford.
2. The new method is not part of the traditional infrastructure, so it must be studied and approved by competent authority. Said authority imposes safety requirements that it deems reasonable, including the provision of safety interlocks to prevent the ropeway from operating unless the car’s loading gate is latched, high factors of safety for the cables, redundant brake mechanisms and so forth.
3. The proponents of the ropeway find that they cannot afford to build to the standards imposed. In some cases, they may find that supporting infrastructure (e.g. electrical power), costing many times the price of the ropeway itself, will have to be provided to meet the requirements.
4. Result: the existing method remains the only one available, even though it is far more risky than even a very crude ropeway. Inevitably, some people will die in falls or by drowning who would have survived if the ropeway had been available, and they will die because because someone living far, far away had the power to deprive them of a less risky alternative…in the name of safety.