Positive Liberty

The Atlantic recently posted a fascinating article by John Staddon entitled “Distracting Miss Daisy.” Staddon, who grew up in Great Britain, argues that the seemingly ubiquitous presence of stop signs and speed limits on U.S. roads actually distracts drivers’ attention, conditions them into relying more on compliance than concentrating on actual road conditions and leads, as a result, to more accidents.

These are the sorts of arguments that warm the cockles of a libertarian’s heart assuming, of course, that libertarian hearts have cockles. Staddon reminded me also of the perfectly obvious point – obvious once made, that is – that because seat belts and air bags reduce the “cost” of unsafe driving, drivers will on average be more reckless as a result. This is called “risk compensation,” but it is really just another example of the notion that, in general, the quantity demanded of any good will rise as the price of that good decreases. Lowering the driver’s odds of injury in case of an accident makes the prospect of such accidents that much more “affordable.” (Volvo drivers excepted, perhaps. I am convinced that Volvo’s much touted safety history is as significantly the result of safety-obsessed owners and drivers as it is of the car’s engineering. Compare the likely Volvo buyer with the likely Porsche buyer. I rest my case.)

Staddon also makes the passing comment (no pun intended) that the use of stop signs at practically every secondary street intersection and our inexplicably popular 4-way stop intersections, however egalitarian they may be, waste a great deal of energy. I have no idea whether there are any studies out there to demonstrate our increased fuel consumption as a result, but anything that might cause a policy war between environmentalists and traffic safety fanatics (MADD springs to mind here) should certainly be explored.

The article is well worth a read, but I’m a bit dubious about the extent to which Staddon’s argument springs from anecdotal evidence of his experiences driving in the U.S. and in Britain. I don’t know what the actual accident rate comparisons would be, but my anecdotal experience of driving in the U.K. [insert lame joke about driving on wrong side of the road here] is that the British drive far more slowly than Americans do and that, outside London and its other major cities, there is far less traffic in Great Britain in the first place.

Moreover, driving behavior is at least partially influenced by culture. I lived in Italy for several years and can testify to the fact that neither the presence nor the absence of traffic signs has anything more than an aesthetic effect on Italian roads and highways. Whatever their intended purpose, they certainly don’t influence Italian drivers in the slightest. In Germany, where I also lived, there are only two driving speeds throughout the entire nation: too damned fast and too damned slow. Germans are also indifferent to whether traffic signs are posted or not, having had the rules of the road drilled into them with a ruthless efficiency as part of the drivers’ licensing process. Besides, there’s very little crime in Germany, anyway, because … wait for it … it’s against the law.

I will pick one semi-major nit with Staddon’s article. He begins with an example from, of all places, my home town, as follows:

There is a stretch of North Glebe Road, in Arlington, Virginia, that epitomizes the American approach to road safety. It’s a sloping curve, beginning on a four-lane divided highway and running down to Chain Bridge, on the Potomac River. Most drivers, absent a speed limit, would probably take the curve at 30 or 35 mph in good weather. But it has a 25-mph speed limit, vigorously enforced. As you approach the curve, a sign with flashing lights suggests slowing further, to 15 mph. A little later, another sign makes the same suggestion. Great! the neighborhood’s more cautious residents might think.

Later in the article he continues:

Which brings me back to North Glebe Road in Arlington. It turns out that the speed signs do perform an important safety function: in wet weather, many drivers had taken the curve too fast; traffic authorities have substantially reduced accidents on the curve by adding the 15-mph warning sign, and they would be foolish to remove it, absent larger changes in American traffic policy.

Now, in the first place, I’ve been taking that curve at closer to 50 mph all my life. More to the point, I’ve spent the bulk of my life residing in the People’s Republic of Arlington. I guarantee that, whatever dubious and quite possibly cooked statistics Arlington’s bureaucratic weasels traffic authorities may have dished up, the fact is that those speed limits are set as they are because the “more cautious residents” in one of Arlington’s most affluent neighborhoods simply wanted to dissuade teenage drivers from racing near their million dollar plus homes. Not that Arlington’s totalitarian nanny state Democrats aren’t safety fanatics, mind you. If just two more speed bumps were added to the typical neighborhood street it would become perfectly flat again.

But I digress. Further proof, I suppose, that I shouldn’t drive and type on my laptop at the same time.

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