Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Well, at least we'd save money on radar traps...

...if we just made cars that could not travel faster than 75 miles per hour.

That's the suggestion from Kent Sepkowitz in the New York Times:

SPEEDING is the cause of 30 percent of all traffic deaths in the United States — about 13,000 people a year. By comparison, alcohol is blamed 39 percent of the time, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But unlike drinking, which requires the police, breathalyzers and coercion to improve drivers’ behavior, there’s a simple way to prevent speeding: quit building cars that can exceed the speed limit.

Kent also thinks you should get automatic speeding tickets:

Imagine, for a moment, if E-ZPass kept track of exactly when each car entered one toll booth and exited another, which would allow local governments to do some basic math, dividing distance traveled by time spent. If this calculation showed you to be a speeder, the authorities would send you a traffic ticket.

At this point I was thinking, "Who is this jerk?"

This is who:

Kent A. Sepkowitz is vice-chairman of medicine at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Ok, just proof once again that expertise in a narrow technical field (even if it's medicine) is not a sound foundation for public policy advocacy.

[h/t Kids Prefer Cheese]


Duffy said...

You know what would really save lives? Making the drinking age 55 and the speed limit 21. Won't someone please think of the children?

Shirley Vandever said...

As someone involved in biker rights, we hear the same kind of knee-jerk solutions about motorcycle fatalities from the same sources.

Yet, biker groups still ride for hospitals and their lobbying minions, only to face them in hearings later.

Ironic, isn't it?

The Mudslinger said...

Shoot, just stop in the middle and take a short nap, which drops the speed to legal limit or less...speeding tix are always about revenue