Highway Safety and the End of the Auto Age

Highway safety programs might be good, but they do not work.
Highway safety programs have nothing to do with the decline in highway deaths this year.

Despite numerous email requests to four DOT officials in our state last week, none of them could provide any data or evidence that their highway safety programs contributed to the decline in highway deaths this year.

The reality is that a decline in driving accounts for the drop in deaths. You cannot die if you are not on the road.

One official cited their motor cycle safety programs. Apparently a decline motor cycle deaths was an important part in the highway fatality decline.  But motor cycle sales have plummeted in the last few years.  And few of those buyers are young people.  Plus, motor cycle riding declines significantly after age 65, and with older riders the biggest portion of riders, every day thousands of Boomers hit 65 and then their cycling days drop hugely.

Instead, drivers make mistakes.  We make hundreds of decisions and judgments every few minutes.  Some of those are wrong decisions.  Every 61,000 miles, one of those wrong judgments leads to a crash. There's nothing anyone can do about human nature. That's just how it is.

Comments

[D. P. Lubic]

From what I can tell, the only thing that would have helped reduce driving deaths would be much, MUCH more intensive driver training and MUCH more demanding licensing requirements.

Bill Mauldin, famous for his "Willie and Joe" characters from the WW II era in "Stars and Stripes" (US Army official newspaper), had a book about his return to civilian life after the war. This book, titled "Back Home," has a whole chapter on motoring in America in 1947. One of the most interesting parts of that chapter are some comments made by an unnamed former bomber pilot.

In this man's opinion, driving was much more demanding than flying--and if I recall correctly, this was a former bomber pilot, meaning a multi-engined aircraft of considerable complexity.

As he saw it, take-offs and landings required a good deal of skill, but once in the air, all you had to do was correct your course every so often and keep an eye on the engines via their gauges. There normally wasn't much in the sky with you, and if there was somebody or if something went wrong, you had the whole sky to move around in.

In contrast, an automobile in this time didn't have much in the way of power assist, and very few had automatic transmissions. This vehicle had to be operated in a constrained space, on a course that required constant correction, in close proximity to other vehicles, most of which passed our subject at a high rate of speed while running in the opposite direction.

[driving school Pershore]

At some point, though we drive the safest way we can, unexpected things may still occur. We cannot predict future things, likewise, we cannot stop negative things to come up. Just drive safely.