Are North Carolina Truck Accident Prevention Experts Focusing on the Right Things?
North Carolina truck accident prevention is a high priority for everyone who uses roads in Charlotte and beyond. If you’ve personally been injured — or if a loved one has been hurt or killed in a truck crash — you likely have a visceral understanding of what out-of-control truckers and trucks can do.
In addition to your quest for justice (which our team here at the Charlotte truck accident law firm of DeMayo Law can help with) you probably also want to understand your accident in context. How is it possible that regulatory agencies, businesses, and generally the whole system could have let you down so badly? Moreover, what can be done to prevent accidents like yours from happening to you or other people in the future?
These ponderables are important. The answers may be pretty counterintuitive.
A lot of effort currently goes into enforcing trucker regulations, designing trucks to be safer, designing the highway systems to be more easily navigable, etc. In other words, many people are working on a lot of very potentially important accident prevention projects.
But part of the problem is that it is very difficult to do controlled experiments to determine which safety features or mechanisms work and which ones don’t. To do a truly scientific experiment, you need to set up a situation wherein you create two groups and then change one variable between those two groups to test a hypothesis. Your aim is to disprove that hypothesis or to fail to disprove it. Doing good science is hard in any field. It’s harder still to be objective when you’re dealing with emotionally fraught concerns, like truck accident prevention, where human lives are in line.
We all want to “do something – anything” to solve our problems or at least move in the direction of actively solving our problems. Thus, we’re happy to take any action as long as it offers a vague promise of getting us to results we want. The trouble with this approach is a) it’s not scientific and b) it has the potential to backfire because it creates opportunity costs.
Here’s why. Say we determine that XYZ technology might be potentially useful at reducing truck crash rates by 5% every year. But we really don’t know, and it’s going to cost $30 million to test the hypothesis. If we dump $30 million into that hypothesis and spend time really testing it, that means we’ve invested $30 million, plus however long the study takes — time and money no longer available to research other safety initiatives.
At the end of the day, people want results.
What works in terms of North Carolina auto and truck accident prevention? Let’s definitely be bold and diverse in exploring possible solutions, but let’s also be humbled by the difficulties that doing truly good science presents for us.
