Is Climbing Safer than Driving?

Is Climber Safer than Driving?

I have made a quick estimate of the relative risks of these two activities. All of the data comes from the U.S. Some of the numbers I used are estimates. Some are second-hand (a source was listed, but I couldn't find the original source). If anyone has better numbers (with sources) please let me know and I will update this.

Data:

• Number of climbing fatalities per year: 25 [1]
• Number of climbers who rope up 10 or more days per year: 300,000 [2]
• Number of automobile fatalities per year: 33,000 [3]
• Number of drivers: 250 million [4]
• Total population: 308 million [5]

Calculation:

Divide the number of participants by the number of fatalities. This gives the number of participants per death per year.

Climbing: 1 death per 12,000 participants per year.
Driving: 1 death per 9,000 participants per year.

To make this more meaningful, we really should convert to the number of hours of participation. I had difficulty finding data on the number of hours the average climber spends climbing each year.

Using my own experience as an estimate: I climb about 50 days per year, at about 6 hours per day on average. So I will use 300 hours per year as my estimate.

The number of miles traveled by the average American is given as 14,500 by [4]. From this we can estimate that the average American spends between 200 and 500 hours per year traveling by car (I arrived at these numbers by estimating the average speed being between 25 mph and 75 mph). I think 400 hours per year is probably a reasonable estimate (based on an average travel speed of 36 mph).

This puts climbing and traveling by car at roughly the same relative risk at
1 death per 3.6 million hours of participation
One caveat: The largest unknown in this estimate really is the number of hours spent climbing each year. I am very confident about the rest of the estimates, but I'm just really unsure of the validity of this one.

Sources:

[1] From an article in Obit Magazine. The article lists the AAC as a source, but doesn't provide specifics.
[2] Estimate made by editor John Williams, in the introduction to Accidents in North American Mountaineering 2004.
[3] Fatality Analysis Reporting System, of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Note that I only used the number of fatalities of vehicle occupants, not bystanders such as pedestrians and cyclists killed in traffic accidents. The total number of traffic fatalities per year is 42,000. NHTSA
[4] From a survey by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, of the Department of Transportation. The survey revealed that 88% of Americans age 15 or greater are drivers. From this estimate, I estimated that 250 million Americans drive.
BTS Survey
[5] U.S. & World Population Clock, maintained by the Census Department of the U.S. Federal Government.
U.S. & World Population Clock

Safer than my driving.... but that's not saying much.

Climbing is more efficient than driving too. But I have only lived a few places where you could go climbing without driving to the crag...this makes for a dilema...

Jordan Ramey wrote:Safer than my driving.... but that's not saying much.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^LOL!

Bobby-
That seems like some conclusive research and for many years, I used to tell my mom who lives nearby Los Angeles, that climbing was way safer than driving- but I stopped saying this B.S.

Maybe I'm just unlucky or my friends and acquaintances are, but after 25 yrs. of full-time climbing, I've lost only one friend of a friend in a car accident and more than a a few dozen friends in climbing and skiing (avalanche) accidents...so I stopped saying that driving was safer and so I don't believe these statistics.

Driving sometimes seems more dangerous, especially with folks text messaging, drinking, or just being poor driving all around you...but I believe I am much more likely to die climbing or skiing than in a car. Maybe if I drove more than I climb/ski this 'truth' would be different, but I'm not ready to 'believe' these numbers at this point in time.

But, I will send this information to my mother so that hopefully she can worry a little less about me and sleep a little better.

Such optimism. I wish it were true. I am a former "climbing is safer than driving" person. I used to tout the "climbing is safer than driving" and "the most dangerous part of the climb is the drive". Not anymore. I have come across some stats that put climbing at 4000 times more risky than driving. If I may be blunt, I think your estimates are way off.

You can crash a car at 60 mph and possibly walk away. You can't say that for climbing. I know of 7 local climbers that have died this last year. I don't know of any car deaths (although I'm sure there are many). Not a very useful stat, though. YMMV.

Its also worth noting the huge variety of activities that qualify as "roped climbing." A break down is probably difficult to get statistics on, but I'd wager that in comparison to driving, single pitch top-roping is not all that dangerous, but remote alpine FA's are fantastically more dangerous, as lots of unfortunate news reports in the last year would seem to show.

Between these extremes, a spectrum clearly exists, and the majority of us spend most of our time climbing somewhere on it, so different statements about relative safety will apply to different people.

Greg D wrote:Such optimism. I wish it were true. I am a former "climbing is safer than driving" person. I used to tout the "climbing is safer than driving" and "the most dangerous part of the climb is the drive". Not anymore. I have come across some stats that put climbing at 4000 times more risky than driving. If I may be blunt, I think your estimates are way off. You can crash a car at 60 mph and possibly walk away. You can't say that for climbing. I know of 7 local climbers that have died this last year. I don't know of any car deaths (although I'm sure there are many). Not a very useful stat, though. YMMV.

Greg, first of all, I was not trying to imply that climbing is safer than driving. In fact, I believe the opposite to be true.

I agree that some of my estimates might be off (I even said so in my original post).

I set out writing this because I had also seen such stats that put climbing at a much more risky activity than driving. But none of those cited sources, which is why I wanted to do the calculation myself.

The following data is irrefutable:

• Number of auto-related fatalities per year: 42,000. I got this number directly from the NHTSA website.
• Total Population of the U.S.: 300 million. From the census bureau.
• Average distance traveled by car per person each year: 14,500. From the Department of Transportation.

The data regarding climbing is where estimates were made:

• Number of climbing deaths per year: 25. The American Alpine Club was cited as the source, but I couldn't find the original source. However, this number seems about right.
• Number of climbers in the U.S.: 300,000. This was an estimate made by another source. It also seems reasonable. My initial estimate was 100,000.
• Number of hours per year an average climber spends climbing: 300. This was an estimate based on my own climbing.

Note that any of the following would contribute to a low assessment of risk for climbing (in other words, if any of the following are true, then climbing is more dangerous than my estimate above):

• The average number of climbing fatalities per year is more than 25. I strongly believe this estimate to be valid within a factor of 2.
• The number of climbers in the U.S. who rope up 10 or more times per year is less than 300,000. (That is 1 person in 1000 among the general public)
• The average climber spends less than 300 hours per year climbing.

The last two are probably off. However, for the result "Climbing is 4000 times as dangerous as driving," these need to be off by a total factor of 4000.

I bet I could easily convince you that there are at least 10,000 climbers who climb at least 30 hours per year. If this is the case, then my estimate of the relative risk of climbing is off by less than a factor of 300, and this is assuming there aren't any other climbers.

In summary,

• I was not trying to imply that climbing is safer than driving; I don't believe it is.
• I was trying to show that climbing is at least as dangerous as driving. I believe this to be the case.
• I don't believe that climbing is 3 orders of magnitude riskier than driving.
• Based on the calculations, I would estimate climbing to be about 10 to 100 (not 4000) times as risky as driving.

If anyone has any original-source data, please cite it, and I will revise the analysis.

Bobby, thanks for all your effort to put forth some meaningful stats. If I can find the source for the stats I came across I will certainly post it. Do you have any stats to compare climbing to other sports such as mountain biking, road biking, football, motocross, etc. This has always been more curious to me than a comparison to driving.

I'd be interested to see injury rates, i know football, boxing etc. have super high injury, specifically brain injury rates and how often do climbers get injured besides gobi's and torn palms :-) Anyone have any stats on these? because i'd be willing to bet that climbing is typically safer than high contact sports.

This article reports statistics for the Grand Teton National Park. For the 1981-86 period, they estimated 130.2 deaths per million of hours. This rate is over 400 times higher than the one for driving. As already pointed out, mountaineering in the Tetons is far more dangerous than climbing at the gym, and less dangerous than scaling Annapurna, but I think the article helps one to put things in perspective.

Concerning the number of climbing-related fatalities in the US, a table at the back of the 2009 Accidents in North American Mountaineering lists numbers of fatalities from 1951 to 2008. A value of 25 is a reasonable average for the last several years. The possible catch is that the numbers refer to reported accidents. Someone more familiar with how those data are collected may shed some light on how they relate to the totals.

I would say climbing and 4x4ing are more of an equal in danger than climbing and driving. I think driving is a lot safer when you factor in the chance of coming out of a crash okay.

I would also say your numbers are off on the amount of time climbing. Way off in fact from a statistic building standpoint. I have climbed 7 of the past 12 days, this would total out to about 35 hours of approach, being at the climb, belaying and so on though even if I said I was able to climb 20% of the time I was there that only totals 7 hours.

By contrast I have maybe driven 15 hours in the same time period however all 15 hours were spent driving the car. So from a risk standpoint I have been in risk of injury twice as much time with driving than climbing though I've spent twice as much time climbing as I have driving. This may not be factoring in a rock killing me while I'm on belay but you get what I'm saying.

Nice stats to check out though, good job gathering info :)

Just don't say climbing is safer on an accident-per-distance-traveled basis, no one's going to buy that.
I'd say being slightly paranoid as to safety in both climbing and driving isn't a bad idea.

Eli Helmuth wrote:Driving sometimes seems more dangerous, especially with folks text messaging, drinking, or just being poor driving all around you...

this is the real issue - how are the people around me behaving? i can be as safety-minded as i want to but that doesn't stop anybody from trundling rock down on my head or t-boning my car as they run a red light...

@Adam: I am only comparing fatalities to fatalities, not accident rates.

Based on the calculations, you can expect 1 person to die in an automobile accident for every 3.6 million person-hours.

You don't need to factor in the ratio of time you spend actually "at risk" while climbing. Here's why:
Suppose we knew a priori what the true relative risk of climbing is, say for the sake of argument it is
1 death per 100 million hours climbing.

One way to interpret this is that if 100 million people went climbing for an hour, we could expect 1 fatality.

If they spent only 20% of their time "at risk" that just means that it will be during that 12-minute period that they will die. It does not mean that the actual risk is 5 times higher (or 5 times lower).

Look at it this way:
Suppose we play a game where you roll a single fair die once every hour. If you roll a 6, I am supposed to give you a dollar. You are only "at risk" for rolling a 6 for a very short amount of time each hour, but the expected rate that I will pay you is still 1 dollar per 6 hours of the game.

The concept of use statistics for these matters is somewhat faulty in my mind. Basically I see 2 flaws:

1) Risk Management - I spend most of my time climbing moderates that I know ahead of time to protect well. While I know a lot of accidents occur on "easy" routes, I think my risk percentage is likely lower than a lot of the people really pushing the limits on X and R rated routes. Shit...I don't even like falling in the gym yet :) Anyways, I think there are a lot of people for who climbing is more dangerous than driving but for other it may be safer...

2) Driver Numbers - These numbers are likely valid but have you taken into account all the times you are a passenger in a car? Many of the 30,000 auto fatalities are from passengers killed while "not technically driving". If you wish to include those you should probably revise the average # of hours/miles driven value to include average # of hours/miles as a passenger. This will greatly enhance the pool while keeping accidents constant, thus reducing the total risk.

Just my thoughts...

"Is Climbing Safer than Driving?"

what's that smell.... cooking books? JK.

I used to say that.....no more. 3 dead friends in last 2 years all climbing. 0 driving.

Bobby, I hate and fear driving and I do agree that it is dangerous. In climbing we don't get as many 2nd chances.

EMT you bring up another interesting point...inadvertantly

Age Dependency:

I am 21 and in the Last 5 years I have had 4 kids who I knew my from high school (total enrollment of 600) die in automobile accidents.

I think risk factors or statistics need to consider the experience level of the participants. Hell, even in climbing, when I first started I had more close calls in the first 6 months than the next 12 months. All interesting points I guess but all it makes me think is that statistics in this situation may be amusing though probably not very applicable.

John Maguire wrote:The concept of use statistics for these matters is somewhat faulty in my mind. Basically I see 2 flaws: 1) Risk Management - I spend most of my time climbing moderates that I know ahead of time to protect well. While I know a lot of accidents occur on "easy" routes, I think my risk percentage is likely lower than a lot of the people really pushing the limits on X and R rated routes. Shit...I don't even like falling in the gym yet :) Anyways, I think there are a lot of people for who climbing is more dangerous than driving but for other it may be safer...

Relative risk statistics such as these are not intended to be applied to an individual, only to groups. When you get past that, you will see that your first point is immaterial.

John Maguire wrote:2) Driver Numbers - These numbers are likely valid but have you taken into account all the times you are a passenger in a car? Many of the 30,000 auto fatalities are from passengers killed while "not technically driving". If you wish to include those you should probably revise the average # of hours/miles driven value to include average # of hours/miles as a passenger. This will greatly enhance the pool while keeping accidents constant, thus reducing the total risk. Just my thoughts...

By "participant," I meant all passengers in a car. No adjustments need to be made. For every 3.6 million person-hours spent in automobiles, we can expect 1 fatality.

Bobby Hanson wrote: * Number of climbers who rope up 10 or more days per year: 300,000 [2]

[2] Estimate made by editor John Williams, in the introduction to Accidents in North American Mountaineering 2004. 

Here is a link showing the 300,000 source, without explanation: Accidents in North American Mountaineering 2004

I stand by the estimate of about 300,000 climbers (people who rope up ten days or more a year)

Presumably the estimate was explained in an earlier edition?

Most sources have much higher estimates, such as AAC:

In 2014, it was estimated that there were 7.7 million participants in climbing, up 6% over the previous year.

Access Fund:

Today, there are millions of climbers visiting our climbing areas

Founded in 1990, the Access Fund supports and represents over 7 million climbers nationwide

Climbing Magazine:

It has been estimated that rock climbing is now enjoyed by more than 9 million people in the U.S. each year.

Outdoor Industry Association:

• Sport/Boulder is 2,290,000
• Trad/Ice/Mountaineering is 2,456,000

Total of 4.7 million outdoor climbers would make climbing ~20 times as safe as driving.

I'd love to know which source is wrong...

Um, you're replying to a 13 year old thread and using sources from 1, 5, and 12 years newer than the original post.