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Incentives

Via the San Francisco Chronicle:

Planning to drink and drive this New Year’s? A north Georgia funeral home has a deal for you. Between now and noon Thursday, drivers can visit McGuire, Jennings and Miller Funeral Home in Rome to sign a contract stating they plan to drink or take drugs and then drive on New Year’s Eve. If they die in a wreck that day, the funeral home will give them a free burial.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 at 7:56 am and is filed under Etc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Incentives”

  1. Pete Warnock Says:
    December 30th, 2009 at 10:30 am

    I like the idea of priming drivers’ minds to “think before you drink”.

    The problem is that drunks often survive while the innocent die.

  2. John Says:
    December 30th, 2009 at 3:38 pm

    Wow, they could save their loved ones thousands of dollars!

  3. John Says:
    December 30th, 2009 at 3:39 pm

    In other words, are they serious? A contract?

  4. Ian McCracken Says:
    January 1st, 2010 at 3:11 am

    I’m surprised they don’t offer a free guns for surviving relatives also:)

    Trying to stop drunk driving should be all stick and no carrots imo; I live in Norway where people are often jailed for 30 days, fined $20,000 and lose their license for 2 yrs. There are very few drunk drivers. The UK has managed to make drunk driving offences about as socially acceptable as child molestations charges (at least since the late ’80s). I lived in California for 20 yrs and people seem to often drive drunk - there seems to be no social sense of wrong and punishment is mild in comparison to most European countries.

  5. John Says:
    January 3rd, 2010 at 7:45 pm

    Mr. McCracken,

    I feel that what you observe is from Americans relying too much on sarcasm– witness not only the radio station’s decision-making, but then the article giving it press.

    I do not admire sarcasm, which is basically saying the opposite of what you intend. Truths are lost this way. Yet I’ve seen it grow, and be considered “sophisticated” humor, in the last 30 or so years.

    John

  6. Rosa Says:
    January 4th, 2010 at 10:58 am

    How about for the other victims of any crash that ensues?

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

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