What Schools of Fish Can Teach Us about North Carolina Auto Accidents
As a recent Charlotte auto accident victim, you likely need immediate and thorough help to handle an upcoming conversation with an insurance adjuster or other crisis/situation. To that end, it’s probably a good idea for you to get in touch with DeMayo Law or another competent and results-proven North Carolina auto accident law firm.
That being said, you also likely harbor deeper concerns about why your accident occurred… and what you can do to prevent accidents in the future.
To get good answers to those deep questions, we need to stretch our thinking a bit. To that end, here’s a good thought experiment. Why don’t schools of fish get into debilitating accidents more?
Watching swarms of fish (or swarms of birds or bugs, for that matter) navigate their turbulent environments is awe-inspiring. Our oceans and streams don’t have highway dividers or dotted white lines, last time anyone looked. So how do these fish navigate so well, without smacking into each other all the time? Schools of fish can also pivot at a moment’s notice at the sight of a predator or a turbulent current… it’s almost as if the school can exhibit a kind of mind of its own.
Highway traffic seems to exhibit similar elements – there is a kind of intelligence to traffic, especially when you look at the so called rubbernecking effect – how an accident creates a kind of ripples through lanes of traffic, much like a rock thrown into a school of fish creates a rippling effect among the fish.
But there is a big difference between North Carolina drivers and fish: Fish are designed to swim in schools; whereas people are NOT designed to drive in traffic.
That might seem like a trite, overly obvious point to make. But understand that human beings did not evolve to drive at speeds of 60 to 80 miles per hour in 2-ton (or 18-ton) vehicles. As a result, we cannot trust our evolutionary intuition when we navigate in and out of traffic. Although our traffic systems mimic how schools of fish (and flocks of birds, etc) react to stimuli, it’s an imperfect mimicry.
This metaphor doesn’t necessarily suggest a solution to traffic accidents, but it does help to put them into context – i.e. help us understand why they might occur.
