Traffic Safety

I'm currently reading some interesting papers on changing the "traffic safety culture" in the U.S. Basically, the idea is that Americans are far too willing to accept the loss of life that accompanies vehicular travel - currently about 43,000 deaths per year.

One of the papers discusses the usefulness (pro and con) of the law in affecting drivers' behaviors. A great quote was this: "...rules are society’s way of telling its citizens how to learn from the mistakes of others. This is necessary because people do not directly experience the risks evidenced by accident statistics. Individual levels of perceived risk are low". I think this is spot on. A driver who witnesses a crash on the roads typically will not change his own behavior - because he subconsciously thinks that it will never happen to him. It's a common fallacy that I have witnessed in people. They think that because they do 'X' and they have never gotten into a crash, there's no reason to stop doing 'X'.

It's similar to things you hear from our parents' generation about the things they were allowed to do that are now outlawed, such as not using seat belts or child safety seats. You will hear people say, "It was never a problem for us". Yea, but that's the point of statistics - everybody does some dangerous behavior, but only some suffer the consequences. It's still a dangerous behavior. Governmental regulation (as much I dislike the idea) got people to stop their dangerous behaviors before they became a statistic themselves.

Man, I wish my blog posts had a little more structure and not so much train of thought. Well folks, you get what you pay for.