It's time to apply uncubed thought to fix what's accepted on our roadways. In Praise of Traffic Tickets. Don't roll your eyes. They're good for you in more ways than you think.

Reposted for old blog..

115,000 alchol related traffic deaths since 9/11. I'd say it's time to live different more ecocentric lives. A very thought provoking article on reducing horendous traffic related deaths on Slates website. (One use to say accident but impaired driving is no accident.)
By Tom Vanderbilt
Posted Friday, Aug. 28, 2009, at 1:36 PM ET in Slate.


Selected paragraphs taken from article...

Even the most socially abhorrent driving crimes, like a fatal crash involving an alcohol-impaired driver, often evoke curiously lenient legal responses. Consider the nonautomotive case of Plaxico Burress, who accidentally shot himself with an unregistered, concealed gun. Stupid? Yes. Illegal. Yes. End result? A painful leg injury (to himself)—and two years in jail. Now compare that with fellow NFL player Leonard Little, who in 1998 ran a red light and smashed into a car whose driver died the next day from her injuries. Little was found to have a BAC of 0.19, more than twice the legal limit in the state of Missouri. Stupid? Yes. Illegal? Yes. End result? Another person lost her life. Little's sentence, compared with Burress', was minor: 90 days. He missed only eight football games and was able to keep his license.*

One often hears, in cases like this, comments along the lines of "his guilty conscience will be punishment enough." But ex post facto regret is worthless from the perspective of public health, which seeks preventative measures to stop people from dying. Which raises the second benefit of traffic tickets: They help keep people—drivers and those outside the car—alive. Several studies have found a "negative correlation" between someone receiving a traffic violation and their subsequent involvement in a fatal traffic crash.


The consequences of not issuing tickets were shown in a recent study of traffic violations in New York City. From 2001 to 2006, the number of fatalities in which speeding was implicated rose 11 percent. During the same period, the number of speeding summons issued by the NYPD dropped 11 percent. Similarly, summonses for red-light-running violations dropped 13 percent between 2006 and 2008, even as the number of crashes increased. As an alternative approach, consider France, where the dangerous driver is as storied a cliché as a beret on the head and a baguette under the arm. As the ITE Journal notes, since 2000, France has reduced its road fatality rate by an incredible 43 percent. Instrumental in that reduction has been a roll-out of automated speed cameras and a toughening of penalties. For example, negligent driving resulting in a death, which often results in little punishment in the United States, carries a penalty of five years in prison and a 75,000-euro fine.

The program recalls the "broken windows" theory, made famous by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, which argued, using the metaphor of one broken window on a building inexorably leading to more, that not enforcing smaller, "quality-of-life" issues encourages larger transgressions:

Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.

Link here to get to full article or cut and past e address.. 
http://www.slate.com/id/2226509/?yahoo=y