Should We Wear Helmets While We Drive? and Other Intriguing North Carolina Car Accident Prevention Questions
The North Carolina car accident prevention experts may be a little too boxed in and wanting for creativity. We typically think about auto safety prevention only in terms of the conventional wisdom about it – that people need to wear seatbelts more often, that drivers need to drive slower, that drivers need to stop text messaging and driving DUI, that roads need to be better built, that car parts need to be more durable and regularly inspected, etc.
There is nothing wrong with these conventional ideas about auto safety – provided that we subject them to rigorous scientific tests and make rational actions based on the data that we collect. But it’s very easy in the world of science and auto accident prevention to make logical errors that can redound to lead to more injuries/deaths… as well as lot of wasted time and opportunity. For instance, as intrepid researcher Tom Vanderbilt argued in his book, Traffic, the wide adoption of air bags should have led to a significant across the board decrease in injuries. But it didn’t. Vanderbilt theorizes that drivers who bought safer cars took extra liberties – drove a little bit faster, followed other cars a little more closely – because they felt safer. This slightly more reckless driving offset the safety related improvements.
The moral is: We need to be very, very careful when it comes to how we think about North Carolina car accident prevention. Along those lines, it certainly wouldn’t hurt us to theorize about “out of the box” solutions for car accident safety, such as:
• Why not mandate that automobile drivers and passengers alike wear helmets for extra protection against head injury?
• Why not publicly humiliate randomly selected “jerk drivers” to dissuade other would-be “jerks” out there from doings things like weaving across four lanes of traffic in one turn without even using a turn signal?
• Why not conduct rigorous experiments to test which highway speed limits lead to the least fatalities and most driver satisfaction?
• Why not experiment with an education campaign to encourage drivers to eliminate not just some distractions (e.g. cell phone conversations) but all distractions in the vehicle — such as conversations, listening to the radio, etc – to see whether a completely “distraction free” environment would enhance safety and driver focus?
These are obviously just speculative strategies. But it is important to think outside of the normal conventional ways of thinking about auto safety, if we want to really make major progress in reducing the terrifying numbers, such as the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration statistic that 40,000 Americans die every year in auto crashes.
For help dealing with a specific accident, connect with North Carolina car crash law firm today.
More Web Resources:
Summary of Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic
Out of the Box Safety Ideas
