The current Atlantic Monthly magazine announces itself as the first "ideas issue." That is usually a sign that you can expect anything but ideas. But it more than lives up to that conception. Consider what is in it:
An article arguing that the destruction of large housing projects in major cities has only succeeded in flushing criminal behavior into surrounding suburbs. I hadn't heard about that, and I am guessing that neither have you. But it is a fascinating and disturbing read.
It has an article entitled "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" Professor Schaff will like this one. I have to say that it backs up his concerns about the internet and education.
It has an article arguing that Donald Rumsfeld, for all his faults, has accomplished a major restructuring of the American military that makes it much more fit for the future strategic environment.
All three are important articles, and I expect that the first will cited for many years to come as a turning point in thinking about social policy.
But I was most impressed with "Distracting Miss Daisy," by John Staddon. Staddon claims that drivers and their cars are much safer in Britain than in the United States, and that this is largely because American roads are much more heavily regulated than British roads.
Consider the stop sign. It seems innocuous enough; we do need to stop from time to time. But think about how the signs are actually set up and used. For one thing, there’s the placement of the signs—off to the side of the road, often amid trees, parked cars, and other road signs; rarely right in front of the driver, where he or she should be looking.
Then there’s the sheer number of them. They sit at almost every intersection in most American neighborhoods. In some, every intersection seems to have a four-way stop. Stop signs are costly to drivers and bad for the environment: stop/start driving uses more gas, and vehicles pollute most when starting up from rest. More to the point, however, the overabundance of stop signs teaches drivers to be less observant of cross traffic and to exercise less judgment when driving—instead, they look for signs and drive according to what the signs tell them to do.
And then there is my favorite: speed limits.
Speed limits in the U.S. are perhaps a more severe safety hazard than stop signs. In many places, they change too frequently—sometimes every few hundred yards—once again training drivers to look for signs, not at the road. What’s more, many speed limits in the U.S. are set in arbitrary and irrational ways. An eight-lane interstate can have a limit of 50 to 70 mph or more. What makes the difference? A necessarily imperfect guess at probable traffic conditions. The road may sometimes be busy—so the limit is set low. But sometimes the road is not busy, and the safe speed is then much higher than the limit.
A particularly vexing aspect of the U.S. policy is that speed limits seem to be enforced more when speeding is safe. As a colleague once pointed out, “An empty highway on a sunny day? You’re dead meat!” A more systematic effort to train drivers to ignore road conditions can hardly be imagined. By training drivers to drive according to the signs rather than their judgment in great conditions, the American system also subtly encourages them to rely on the signs rather than judgment in poor conditions, when merely following the signs would be dangerous.
Sometimes regulation is good. It's a good thing that buildings in California have to be constructed to withstand earthquakes. But maybe too many regulations can be a bad thing. Safety on the roads depends only a little on the physical characteristics of the roads and the cars. It depends almost entirely on driver judgment and attention. Maybe the Brits are right about this one.
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