Over the past fifteen years psychologists have empirically investigated how people perceive technological, consumer and natural hazards. The psychometric attitudes to risk being summarized by three factors: "dread", whether the risk is known, and personal exposure to the risk. The results have been used to suggest that certain types of hazards are viewed very differently from other hazards. The purpose of this paper is somewhat different, in that it investigates whether individual demographic characteristics influence psychometric perceptions of risk. This paper makes use of a large, professionally conducted, survey of a wide cross-section of the residents of metropolitan Chicago. One thousand adults were interviewed in a random-digit dial telephone survey, producing a useable dataset of about 800. Data on the three risk factors mentioned above were obtained on 7 point scales for four common hazards: aviation accidents, fires in the home, automobile accidents and stomach cancer. The survey also collected demographic data on respondents' age, schooling, income, sex and race. Regressions were then conducted to relate the demographic characteristics to risk perceptions. Some strong general conclusions can be drawn. The results suggest that women, people with lower levels of schooling and income, younger people, and blacks have more dread of hazards. The exception being age related illnesses which, not unnaturally, are feared by older people. Unlike previous literature we cannot substantiate the argument that these groups of people are less informed about hazards and thus less accepting of them. The most likely leading explanation of the relationship between demographic factors and dread of a hazard is the perceived personal exposure to the hazard. People with greater perceived exposure to a hazard are more fearful.

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The number of collisions and fatalities at rail-highway intersections in the United States has declined significantly over the past 30 years, despite considerable increases in the volume of rail and highway traffic. This article disaggregates the improvement into its constituent causes. Negative binomial regressions are conducted on a pooled data set for 49 states from 1975 to 2001. The analysis concludes that about two-fifths of the decrease is due to factors such as reduced drunk driving and improved emergency medical response that have improved safety on all parts of the highway network. The installation of gates and/or flashing lights accounts for about a fifth of the reduction. The development in the 1970s and early 1980s of the Operation Lifesaver public education campaign, and the installation of additional lights on locomotives in the mid 1990s, each led to about a seventh of the reduction. Finally, about a tenth is due to closure of crossings resulting from line abandonments or consolidation of little-used crossings.

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This paper models public policies to improve safety within a structural model of the truckload trucking industry. The policies are designed to ameliorate the market failures associated with the myopic ignoring of crash costs by some trucking firms, and institutional constraints that prevent full internalization of the costs of crashes. The paper compares two alternative public policies: (1) levying post-crash fines and making shippers bear secondary liability for damages incurred in crashes, and (2) imposition of a minimum safety standard, in conjunction with a requirement to hold insurance, and assessing penalties for non-compliance with the standard.