Better Than Drudge

recent posts

about

Regulating Us to Death

Vukx071000016
By Selwyn Duke

Perhaps I should be chagrinned to admit it, but I failed my first
road test. I was about 18 years old, and I still remember the sinking
feeling of sitting in the vehicle and coldly being informed that I
missed a stop sign. Curious, I subsequently drove the route with my
mother and found the octagonal red menace, barely visible amidst a sea
of leaves, with just a few splotches of color showing through. My first
thought was, "Are they kidding? Am I supposed to be watching the road
or scouring the sidewalk, performing something akin to a ‘What’s wrong
with this picture’ exercise?"

This is just one of the factors
cited by Duke University professor John Staddon, who contends that the
traffic accident rate is higher in the United States than Great Britain
— despite the former having wider roads, better cars and lower
population density — because of our penchant for micromanaging traffic.
As for the stop sign, Staddon writes:

Read the rest here.

Posted in , ,

One response to “Regulating Us to Death”

  1. Ray Hicks Avatar
    Ray Hicks

    If there is one thing Americans can be said to universally favor, it is controlled- regulated traffic. At least, in their own neighborhoods that is. They want the pace of the street on their block to be as deliberate and orderly as that of a silent drill team. They want traffic marching down their manicured lanes as choreographed as the Joffery Ballet, so that little Skyler and Bethany can romp free as any forest animal in play, anywhere their precocious fancies take them.
    And you want that to stop? You monster!
    You want to open the sedate byways of Hometown American to the unbridled discretion of random motorcycle gangs, furiously jockey-shifting down Main Street, in a hedonist reverie of free will and the abandon of individual choice? Risking the life and health of every preschooler in the community, just because once in another millennium, you busted a stop sign and got caught?
    My dear fellow, stop and consider just what you are proposing here. Opening the roads to the whim of the average home grown motorist and that of newly arrived, unlicensed, uninsured and faintly intoxicated Senior Gonzales is madness. It’s bad enough that we have to endure the reckless adventures of sixteen-year-old Skipper, in his mother’s Escalade, bounding down the street at warp speed. (To be fair, no amount of traffic regulation or the threat of enforcement thereof is going to stop that pimply manic from driving ninety miles an hour anywhere he goes.)
    But, to suggest that everyone have the liberty to decide just how they are going to negotiate the ride home from work or back from the organic market is…well, my friend…Nuts.
    No, it is that simple traffic control device; the speed limit sign or the stop sign that you so carelessly disdain and the traffic cop hiding in the bushes, doing his very best to look like a nineteen-year-old with a boot camp haircut, that insures that you and I do not become the victims of another tragic traffic mishap.
    I know you hate and despise the government. Well, who doesn’t? But let it continue to do the one solitary thing it does do well…Post signs, construct traffic lights at every possible intersection imaginable and issue the billions of traffic tickets they do every year.
    Trust me on this one; it’s better to keep their minds occupied.

    Like

    Reply

Let us know what you think, dear reader. We value your input!