I'm always baffled by the casual acceptance of road fatalities. A mathematical breakdown really highlights the absurdity. It's usually a progression like this: bringing down speed limits by, say, five miles per hour everywhere would make the roads safer. If the roads were safer, at least one life would be saved every year (and probably more). But it would also add extra time to everyone's car trips. If the average American drives at thirty miles per hour, bringing everyone down to twenty-five miles per hour would add about twenty percent to each person's driving time. So... I guess since I never see speed limits go down, this must mean the status quo is OK?
You could call me pessimistic about my expectations for future changes in driving norms (1). It seems like the votes are in and we've settled on a plan - in exchange for every driver spending a little less time on the road each year through higher speed limits, some people will continue to die in crashes as an indirect result of all this extra zipping around.
Footnotes / sources cited...
0. Sources for some of the numbers...
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration via this link.
The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (apparently different from the above) via Wikipedia.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention via Livestrong.
1. But is Cambridge a good representative for America as a whole?
Boston and Cambridge, the two cities I spend the most time in, recently implemented new 'citywide' twenty-five mile per hour limits. That will probably help. But I recognize these two cities hardly represent the mean, median, and mode of driving policy.
