In 2032, Will Safer Cars Have Led to Fewer Auto Accidents in Charlotte?
How can we reduce the number of auto accidents in Charlotte, North Carolina and elsewhere?
This question obsesses not only policy analysts and auto manufacturers but also road designers and people who have been recently injured in North Carolina car accidents. After all, it’s important for victims and their family members to get justice and fair compensation. (The team here at the law offices of Michael DeMayo can help you, if you or someone you care about has incurred damages.)
We also want to learn from our collective mistakes, so that our world gets safer and easier to navigate.
The problem is that many of the assumptions we hold about what leads to safety may be flawed on fundamental levels.
One of those assumptions is that, if we keep making safer and safer cars, we will eventually reduce accident rates – or at least make accidents less injurious. To a degree, history has borne this idea out. After all, compare today’s auto accident statistics with those from, say, the 1950s. We’ve made progress! We’ve installed seat belts, airbags, antilock brakes, computer assisted safety technologies, et cetera, and we’re collectively doing a lot better, per mile driven, safety wise.
But when we dive deeper into the numbers, the story becomes less clear.
As author Tom Vanderbilt detailed in his ground breaking book, Traffic, the advent of the airbag was one of the most surprising “unsuccess” stories of automotive safety history. The engineers who developed the airbag assumed that the contraption would radically reduce injury rates in serious crashes. An airbag, obviously, should be superior to nothing.
But once drivers grasped that their cars were safer, they “upped” the amount of risk they took on the roads. They felt more confident that the car would “take care of them” and thus adjusted their driving ever so slightly in a risk-wards direction. This unanticipated shift in behavior massively blunted the potential safety power of airbags.
So the question for us is: Will the act of enhancing safety features on automobiles and trucks simply lead drivers to embrace riskier habits and behaviors? If so, might there be other simpler means of generating results?
These are powerful questions – and this North Carolina car accident blog obviously cannot give you all the answers – but hopefully this will get you to start thinking differently about why accidents happen and what can be done after the fact.
