Speed limits, seat belts, ABS, airbags, crumple zones,
roll over bars, BRS, parachutes, and ejector seats
have nothing whatsoever to do with preventing accidents,
they are only there to mitigate the outcome. Every
accident has the potential to cause death or serious
injury, whether that occurs is really a matter of pure
blind chance. People are the cause of accidents and
the only way to prevent them is to edjucate so that
they do not happen. All the gadgets do is reduce the
chance of injury when we screw up.
Far too often the outcome of the accident is considered
the priority in any investigation instead of the cause.

At 14:12 27 April 2004, Tom Seim wrote:
I'm not saying this is a good tradeoff or a poor one,
but it's
disingenuous to pretend it's not there. It's equally
disingenuous to
pretend that we couldn't prevent 95% of highway fatalities
quite
easily. All it would take is a 35 mph speed limit
for divided
highways and a 17 mph speed limit for other roads
- and draconian
enforcement. It wouldn't prevent the accidents, but
it would
eliminate most of the fatalities. Of course we don't
do this because
we want to get where we are going quickly.

Michael

This has been the argument against raising the speed
limits on our
highways, ever since they were lowered by that benevolent
dictator
Jimmy Carter. The only problem, the argument is wrong!
We learned that
after raising the limits and watched the fatality rates
continue to
drop.

Common wisdom is, sometimes, uncommon nonsense.

I think the problem is tunnel vision safety analysis
by 'experts' that
vastly overrate their abilities. Part of the problem
with the speed
limits is that drivers weren't obeying the limits to
begin with.
Raising the limits merely reflected the reality of
the situation.
Draconian enforcement simply won't work, at least not
(fortunately) in
the U.S., because law enforcement works only by voluntary
compliance.
There simply are not enough cops and jails out there
to impose a law
that the vast majority of the population won't accept.
This clearly
happened with the poorly thought out national speed
limit. But there
still is a group that, even with all of the evidence
to the contrary,
thinks that it will work.

Instead, we should put the effort into things that
do work. The most
dramatic example of this is mandatory seat belt usage.
In Washington
state this became a primary law (you can be stopped
for it), which
resulted in compliance rates in the 85-90% range (instead
of 15-20%
before there was any law). No changes were required
to cars since the
belts were already there. Most people have accepted
the law, but there
is still a vociferous minority that reject it. Everybody
benefits,
besides being safer, with lower insurance rates.

Tom Seim