Here’s an Idea to Stop North Carolina Car Accidents: Get the Worst Polluters Off the Road…
What can we do to reduce the number and severity of North Carolina car accidents?
This blog constantly returns to this question. It’s an important one since, as the adage goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If we can come up with working policy solutions to curtail the worst and most damaging North Carolina car accidents, then our entire state will benefit in ways that we can only imagine.
Of course, coming up with the best policy solutions means thinking creatively – thinking “outside the box.” And maybe one way to do that is to isolate extremely problematic drivers – the ones who cause the most accidents, wreak the most havoc on the road, etc.
Police officers, traffic experts, and other pundits and analysts who look at car accident prevention issues often focus on preventing drivers from talking on their cell phones, text messaging, drinking and driving, doing drugs and driving, rubbernecking, driving while tired, etc. These are all noble, and probably scientifically sound, pieces of advice.
However, there is a kind of driver who may be doing a lot of harm who seems to always escape scrutiny. And that is the polluting driver. It’s the truck driver who fails to get his or her tailpipe inspected and who billows clouds of dark, disgusting, sooty smoke into traffic, choking and suffocating his or her fellow drivers. It’s the motorcyclist who leaves a greenish blue plume of fumes as he or she revs along the interstate. It’s the guy who owns a 30-year old boat of a car that hasn’t passed inspection in a dozen years and stinks up the road with his gross, behemoth auto.
By releasing noxious (and often illegal) emissions, these polluting drivers obviously harm our air quality and possibly even contribute to things like climate change. But this kind of pollution may also have short-term, dangerous effects. Highly publicized studies have linked pollution with heart failure. In other words, drivers who get caught in very polluted traffic are at high risk for suffering a heart attack. If short-term, intense, point source pollution is enough to give people heart attacks, doesn’t it seem reasonable to think that it might cause or at least contribute to some not-insubstantial proportion of injury accidents on the road?
Just a thought.
For effective, sound, practical, and thorough help with your car accident case, get in touch with a North Carolina auto accident law firm.
More web resources:
Toxic traffic fumes linked to heart attacks?
Polluting vehicles should be taken off the roads.
