Archive for January 12th, 2009

More Rumsfeldian parsings from the bizarre world of traffic law:

“Jockers said Danks was driving 59 mph in a 45-mph zone – or 14 mph over the speed limit – but speed alone is not sufficient to level a charge of vehicular homicide, he said. If Danks had been weaving through traffic or changing lanes before the collision, he might have been charged with a more serious offense, Jockers said.

Given that the chances that a pedestrian will live or die when struck by a car rises exponentially with speed, it seems strange to leave it out of the equation.

“His overall driving pattern did not rise to the level of recklessness, which is what you have to have to prove if you want to charge someone with vehicular homicide,” Jockers said. “Speed in and of itself is not reckless.”

Note the the “millionaire DWI killer,” in another case, was said to be going 60 mph in Manhattan. Good thing he didn’t change lanes — they would have thrown the book at him!

There’s an obvious reason traffic fatalities have been dropping recently, in some cases to WW II levels: People can’t afford to do as much driving, or they’re paring back the ‘non-essential’ travel, or actually doing things like carpooling (and we should note that between 196 and 2001 the average number of annual miles traveled per American climbed some 180 percent). On the heels of a previous post, there may be another reason, as this St. Louis Post Dispatch piece notes:

“Thomas A. Garrett, an assistant vice president at the St. Louis Federal Reserve, knew he deserved to be ticketed while on vacation in Pennsylvania a few years ago. But, he wondered, are traffic tickets purely about public safety? Or are other factors at play? Many motorists probably have wondered the same thing sitting on a highway shoulder waiting for a citation. But Garrett turned it into a scholarly pursuit. He decided to conduct a study.

What Garrett and a co-author discovered provides yet another reason to hate a recession.

Traffic tickets go up significantly when local government revenue falls, they found. Their study showed for the first time evidence of how “local governments behave, in part, as though traffic tickets are a revenue tool to help offset periods of fiscal distress.”

No surprise, some ticketed motorists might say. But Garrett and co-author Gary A. Wagner, an economist at the University of Arkansas Little Rock, say they confirmed a connection that seemed to exist only in isolated anecdotes. And they put a number on it: Controlling for other factors, a 1 percentage point drop in local government revenue leads to a roughly .32 percentage point increase in the number of traffic tickets in the following year, a statistically significant connection.”