Friday, April 20, 2007

What are your chances of being hit by a bus?

To highlight how dependent they might be on a key employee, businesses are often asked what they would do if that employee were run over and killed by a bus (e.g. the Bus Test) - and the answer would point out various problems for disaster recovery and business continuity planning issues.

So what are the odds of someone being killed by a bus? For the UK, we can look at the official statistics (Department for Transport).

For 2004, there were 121 accidents involving buses and causing a death. That doesn't quite mean that 121 people were killed by being hit by a bus as it would include any accident involving a bus where any number of people died (there's a table showing that 3 bus drivers and 17 bus passengers were killed).

This is expressed as a rate per 100 million vehicle kilometres of 2.3. So, on average, any one bus is involved in a fatal accident every 27 million miles of travel.

So, if we assume that there were at most 121 cases of someone being killed by being hit by a bus and if we assume that everyone in the UK (60 million people) has an equal chance of this happening then the odds are something like 2 in a million (per year).

Of course, anyone wandering around in China with their iPod on may have a higher chance.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pah!

If memory serves...I didn't die.

Unknown said...

I believe in second chances, but I don't believe in third or fourth chances. See the link below for more info.


#chances
www.ufgop.org

Disaster Recovery And Business Continuity said...

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Peter said...

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Crouchback said...

Well, if my chances are that good, I can stop looking out for them.