Search

Stromboli is one of the most active volcanoes on the planet; it has also become a tourist hotspot for just over half a century.The recent eruptive paroxysms of summer 2019 have spectacularly highlighted this paradoxical situation because, for the first time in its history, this paroxysm occurred during the tourist season. A quite happy combinations of circumstances made possible to avoid a balance which could have been catastrophic, but it also revealed the limits of the Aeolian tourism system which has partly built its international notoriety on the volcanic attraction.This article therefore questions the relationship between the unpredictability of a potentially fatal, but very exceptional risk, and the management of an intense tourist frequentation during the season, little or not informed about the reality of the risks.

Despite efforts to reduce them, traffic accidents continue to increase and bypass reduction targets. The costs of traffic accidents are enormous, killing 1.35 million people every year and costing 3% of most countries’ GDP. Recent research aims to target interventions at high-accident-density locations, called accident hotspots. New methods and technologies can systematically identify hotspots, but it remains unclear whether hotspots contribute to accident costs as well as volume. This paper investigates the monetary and human costs of accident hotspots. We analyze a dataset of all accidents from 2011 - 2017 in Switzerland. We identify hotspots, then analyze their contributions to traffic accident costs. We find that hotspot accidents are not different in monetary costliness or injury rates from non-hotspot accidents, so hotspots drive costs along with accident volume. However, hotspot accidents are less fatal, so hotspot targeting might not be best for fatalities. If hotspots are reduced to normal road conditions, total monetary costs can be reduced by up to 5% per year as a theoretical upper bound. Targeting the top 10% most frequent, costly, injurious, or deadly hotspots yeilds different results for different cost types, with accident number and monetary cost targets creating the highest reductions overall.