BBC article on cycling accidents

By looking at what is spent on improving safety on the roads, you can calculate an implied value of life, and i seem to remember hearing that you get numbers in the range from tens to hundreds of thousands of pounds.

In the rail industry, they make explicit calculations of whether safety improvements are worth it, using 1.4 million per life (when i was working there, it has gone up since), but they also try to factor in 'societal concern' as extra multiplicative factors that apply in certain circumstances. Lots of people dying at once is one case were societal concern applies strongly, but risk falling disproportionally on a vulnerable group is another that might apply to the current discussion.

yeah, what you did there was take my point and make it better :)
Societal cocern is a phrase i didn't have but it's exactly what i mean. One death barely gets a mention in the media, if as part of a campiagn you can group them it can become an "issue" and therefore news