Paradoxically, almost every new sign put up in the U.S. probably makes drivers a little safer on the stretch of road it guards. But collectively, the forests of signs along American roadways, and the multitude of rules to look out for, are quite deadly…
We’re being protected. But I believe policies like this in fact make us all less safe.
I grew up in Great Britain, and over the past five years I’ve split my time between England and the United States. I’ve long found driving in the U.S. to be both annoying and boring. Annoying because of lots of unnecessary waits at stop signs and stoplights, and because of the need to obsess over speed when not waiting. Boring, scenery apart, because to avoid speeding tickets, I feel compelled to set the cruise control on long trips, driving at the same mind-numbing rate, regardless of road conditions.
Relatively recently—these things take a remarkably long time to sink in—I began to notice something else. Often when I return to the U.S. (usually to a suburban area in North Carolina’s Research Triangle), I see a fender bender or two within a few days. Yet I almost never see accidents in the U.K.
This surprised me, since the roads I drive here are generally wider, better marked, and less crowded than in the parts of England that I know best. And so I came to reflect on the mundane details of traffic-control policies in Great Britain and the United States. And I began to think that the American system of traffic control, with its many signs and stops, and with its specific rules tailored to every bend in the road, has had the unintended consequence of causing more accidents than it prevents. Paradoxically, almost every new sign put up in the U.S. probably makes drivers a little safer on the stretch of road it guards. But collectively, the forests of signs along American roadways, and the multitude of rules to look out for, are quite deadly.
Economists and ecologists sometimes speak of the “tragedy of the commons”… But what is the limited resource, the commons, in the case of driving? It’s attention. Attending to a sign competes with attending to the road. The more you look for signs, for police, and at your speedometer, the less attentive you will be to traffic conditions. The limits on attention are much more severe than most people imagine. And it takes only a momentary lapse, at the wrong time, to cause a serious accident.
Prof. Staddon goes on to discuss Smeed’s Law:
the number of deaths in a country per year is given by a simple formula: number of deaths equals .0003 times the two-thirds power of the number of people times the one-third power of the number of cars.
taken from Freeman Dyson’s wonderful commentary in Technology Review, 2006. And many other fascinating unintended consequences of the American obsession with traffic regulation. I think Staddon is right, just based on my own experience driving in the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and most of the continent. Simpler and safer.
So what am I suggesting—abolishing signs and rules? A traffic free-for-all? Actually, I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that. A few European towns and neighborhoods—Drachten in Holland, fashionable Kensington High Street in London, Prince Charles’s village of Poundbury, and a few others—have even gone ahead and tried it. They’ve taken the apparently drastic step of eliminating traffic control more or less completely in a few high-traffic and pedestrian-dense areas. The intention is to create environments in which everyone is more focused, more cautious, and more considerate. Stop signs, stoplights, even sidewalks are mostly gone. The results, by all accounts, have been excellent: pedestrian accidents have been reduced by 40 percent or more in some places, and traffic flows no more slowly than before.
What I propose is more modest: the adoption of something like the British traffic system, which is free of many of the problems that plague American roads. One British alternative to the stop sign is just a dashed line on the pavement, right in front of the driver. It actually means “yield,” not “stop”; it tells the driver which road has the right of way. Another alternative is the roundabout. …
As these examples indicate, traffic signs in the U.K. are often on the road itself, where the driver should be looking. And most right-of-way signs are informational: there are almost no mandatory stops in the U.K. (The dominant motive in the U.S. traffic-control community seems to be distrust, and policies are usually designed to control drivers and reduce their discretion. The British system puts more responsibility on the drivers themselves.)
Speed limits in the U.K. are also simpler and better. They are set by road type, so drivers know what limits to expect on highways, rural roads, and urban roads—usually without any signs to tell them. These limits are relatively high, set assuming optimum driving conditions, in contrast to the U.S. limits, which seem to be set with something in between the best and worst conditions in mind. (Precisely where on this spectrum U.S. limits fall seems to vary from road to road, engendering mistrust of the signs in some drivers.) Nonstandard speed limits in the U.K. are rare, so you tend to take them quite seriously when they appear, and they are posted frequently—so you don’t risk missing them if you’re, say, watching the road ahead of you.
…The miseducation that U.S. drivers are receiving is not as explicit as the instructions to these students, but it extends over years and is in some ways more forceful: the legal penalties for failing to notice traffic signs are severe. I believe that U.S. traffic policies are inducing a form of inattentional blindness in American drivers. When so many drivers say, after an accident, “I didn’t see him,” they’re not all lying.
And thanks to Prof. Cowen for the link.
Evidently there is a media frenzy underway on “What Happened” — here is some useful background and perspective:
You can tell the Democratic presidential race is all but over. Cable television has returned to 24/7 coverage of whether President Bush lied us into war in Iraq. The latest peg is the Texan-bites-Bush story of former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s memoir.
By now you know the news, if that’s the word for it: Mr. McClellan dutifully supported the war as presidential spokesman from 2003-2006, but he has since “become genuinely convinced” it was wrong. He has also had a revelation that the Administration used “propaganda” to sell the war, though this means he himself was chief propaganda minister for three years during which he expressed no similar qualms. Mr. McClellan settles various personal scores, and in particular seems bitter about former deputy chief of staff Karl Rove. White House aides can defend themselves, and we’ll let others speculate about Mr. McClellan’s motives for turning on his friends.
We’d merely note that the book’s publisher is PublicAffairs, an imprint founded by left-wing editor Peter Osnos and which has published six books by George Soros. PublicAffairs is owned by Perseus Books, which is owned by Perseus LLC, a merchant bank whose board includes Democrats Richard Holbrooke and Jim Johnson, who is now doing Barack Obama’s vice presidential vetting. One of Perseus’s investment funds, Perseus-Soros Biopharmaceutical, is co-managed with Mr. Soros.
Mr. Osnos, who is “editor-at-large” at PublicAffairs, told liberal blogger Rachel Sklar that he “worked very closely” with Mr. McClellan and his editor, Lisa Kaufman. Readers can guess what advice Mr. Osnos gave them about how to make headlines and sell a book six months before a presidential election in which Iraq will be a major issue.
And make no mistake, Iraq is the reason this book is getting so much political attention. Mr. Obama has staked out a position for immediate troop withdrawal that looks increasingly untenable amid the success of the “surge” and improving security in Baghdad and Basra. John McCain was a key supporter of the surge, so Democrats now want to change the subject and claim the war was a mistake in the first place and sold under false pretenses. Mr. McClellan’s confessions fit neatly into this political narrative.
The problem is that Mr. McClellan presents no major new detail to support his conclusions about Iraq, or even about the Administration’s deliberations about how to sell the war. This may be because he was the deputy press secretary for domestic issues during the run-up to war and thus rarely attended war strategy sessions. His talking points are merely the well-trod claims that the Administration oversold the evidence about WMD and al Qaeda.
Three independent investigations have looked into these claims, and all of them concluded that political actors did not skew intelligence to sell the war. These include the Senate Intelligence Committee report of 2004, the Robb-Silberman report of 2005, and Britain’s Butler report. They explain that U.S. – and all Western – intelligence was mistaken but not distorted. Saddam Hussein himself told U.S. interrogators that he kept the fact that he lacked WMD even from many of his own generals.
As for the “propaganda” claim, any U.S. President has no choice but to make his case for going to war. It is an obligation of democracy. In Iraq, the long march to the 2003 invasion included months of debate at the U.N. and in Congress. Far from rushing to war, Mr. Bush heeded Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Prime Minister Tony Blair and sought U.N. approval. That required longer debate and a heavy reliance on WMD claims because the U.N.’s Iraq resolutions were mainly concerned with WMD after the first Gulf War. That too was a mistake, but it wasn’t a lie.
RTWT.
I tracked down a transcript of the segment of the January Obama interview that has so enraged the left. This is what he actuallly said:
“I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what’s different are the times. I do think that, for example, the 1980 election was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.
“He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the 60s and the 70s, and government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people just tapped into — he tapped into what people were already feeling, which was, we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.
“I think Kennedy, 20 years earlier, moved the country in a fundamentally different direction. So I think a lot of it just has to do with the times.
“I think we are in one of those times right now, where people feel like things as they are going, aren’t working, that we’re bogged down in the same arguments that we’ve been having and they’re not useful. And the Republican approach I think has played itself out.
“I think it’s fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom. Now, you’ve heard it all before. You look at the economic policies that are being debated among the presidential candidates, it’s all tax cuts. Well, we’ve done that. We’ve tried it. It’s not really going to solve our energy problems, for example…so some of it’s the times.”
I’m still not sure who Obama is, or what he plans to do with his power besides wield it. But I think it is interesting that he can mention Reagan in the context of positive change; also saying that at one time the “party of ideas” were the other guys.
I think we know that Obama is intelligent, and he seems to be able to innovate in certain areas. The outstanding example of innovation is his Amazing Money Machine. At this time we don’t know whether Obama just fell into this cornucopia of wealth pouring out of Silicon Valley, or whether he somehow made it happen. I lean to the former based on what I know so far, but remain open to the possibility that he is a skilled political innovator as well as a skilled orator and machine politician.
A good piece on US judgeships bu Alex Tabarrok — this is how it really works. There are plenty of studies demonstrating the difference, within the US, or elected vs. appointed judge behavior.
…As one judge put it bluntly:
As long as I am allowed to redistribute wealth from out-of-state companies to injured in-state plaintiffs, I shall continue to do so. Not only is my sleep enhanced when I give someone’s else money away, but so is my job security, because the in-state plaintiffs, their families, and their friends will reelect me.”
Richard Neely (1988), West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals.
As a great Democratic Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, once warned “no people in history have ever survived, who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies.” This is a lesson that today’s Democratic Party leaders need to relearn.
The dinner was May 18, the lecture by Senator Joseph Lieberman — on the true history of the Democratic Party. Good stuff, and accurate so far as I know. In these excerpts you’ll see that Sen. Joe doesn’t pull any punches:
…From its patriotic principles, COMMENTARY has consistently summoned the courage to draw the moral distinctions that matter most. It is a magazine that has always understood the difference between freedom and slavery, democracy and dictatorship, and good and evil, and it has never been seduced by a moral equivalency that confuses the two.
That is why Norman Podhoretz broke with the Democratic Party nearly forty years ago when he saw too many of his colleagues on the Left unwilling or unable to draw these distinctions.
Unfortunately, today, I see some of that same confusion in the Democratic Party, on the most important questions of foreign policy and national security.
…And this was also the party of COMMENTARY, which from the very dawn of the Cold War provided intellectual artillery for those on the frontlines of the fight against Communist totalitarianism. The magazine was unmistakably a star in the constellation of American liberalism. And it was precisely because of its commitment to liberalism that it saw so clearly the evil of communism and was so determined to combat it. As early as 1946, in fact, COMMENTARY warned that the Soviet Union was “the greatest challenge democracy has ever confronted.”
This worldview—the policies of the Cold War Democrats who guided American foreign policy under President Truman and President Kennedy, and who created COMMENTARY—began to come apart in the late 1960s, around the war in Vietnam. In its place, a very different view of the world took root in the Democratic Party.
Rather than seeing the Cold War as an ideological contest between the free nations of the West and the repressive regimes of the Communist world, including the one in South Vietnam, this rival political philosophy saw America as the aggressor—a morally bankrupt, imperialist power whose militarism and “inordinate fear of communism” represented the real threat to world peace.
It argued that the Soviets and their allies were our enemies not because they were inspired by a totalitarian ideology fundamentally hostile to our way of life, or because they nursed ambitions of global conquest. Rather, the Soviets were our enemy, they said, because we had provoked them, because we threatened them, and because we failed to sit down and accord them the respect they deserved. In other words, the Cold War was mostly America’s fault.
This was the ideology that Jeane Kirkpatrick, in a brilliant piece in COMMENTARY in 1979, skewered and indicted as a “conception of national interest [that] borders on double think” because it “finds friendly powers to be guilty representatives of the status quo and views the triumph of unfriendly groups as beneficial to America’s ‘true interests.’”
Norman Podhoretz witnessed firsthand the seizure of the Democratic Party by the advocates of this ideology. “Never,” he wrote in National Review thirty years later, “will I get over my amazement at the speed with which this point of view spread from the margin to the mainstream. Within five years, the radical perspective had become the conventional wisdom.” Today, I regret to say I have the same sense of amazement about the speed with which similar ideas have again spread to the Democratic mainstream.
…The Clinton administration, he wrote then, “has at last long done what those who founded the Coalition for a Democratic Majority more than a quarter-of-a-century ago were unable to bring about: He has all but de-McGovernized the Democratic Party.”
This happy development continued into the 2000 campaign, when the Democratic candidate Vice President Al Gore championed a freedom-focused foreign policy, confident of America’s moral responsibilities in the world, and unafraid to use our military power. He pledged to increase the defense budget by $50 billion more than his Republican opponent—and, to the dismay of the Democratic Left, made sure that the Party’s platform endorsed a national missile defense.
…If the Democratic Party had stayed where it was in 2000, America could have confronted the terrorists with unity and strength in the years after 9/11.
But instead a debate soon began within the Democratic Party about how to respond to President Bush. I was at the center of it in my unsuccessful Presidential campaign of 2004, and my tumultuous but ultimately successful campaign for reelection to the Senate in 2006.
I felt strongly that we Democrats should embrace the basic framework that President Bush had advanced for the war on terror as our own, because it was our own. It was our party’s legacy from Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Clinton.
…But when total victory did not come quickly in Iraq, the old voices of partisanship and peace at any price began to assert themselves at the grassroots of the Democratic Party. Despite all of the successful efforts of New Democrats during the 1990s to rebuild a strong centrist Democratic Party, the pillars of our achievement were soon falling like dominoes.
And so the pacifist, protectionist, and isolationist sentiments that President Bill Clinton and we New Democrats worked so hard to banish from the mainstream of the Democratic Party are today back with a vengeance. They are a galvanizing force among a significant segment of the Democratic base, and a major part of the Democratic Party’s platform.
By considering centrism to be collaboration with the enemy—not Bin Laden, but Bush—these activists have successfully pulled the Democratic Party farther to the left than it has been at any point in the last twenty years.
Instead of challenging their opinions, far too many Democratic leaders have kowtowed to them. And that, not surprisingly, includes my Senate colleague Barack Obama, who, contrary to his rhetorical invocations of bipartisan change, has not been willing to stand up to his party’s left-wing on a single significant issue in this campaign, nor for that matter has he worked with Republicans in the Senate during his three and a half years there to forge the tough, bipartisan compromises that produce results for the American people.
In this, Barack Obama stands in stark contrast to John McCain, who has shown the political courage throughout his career to do what he thinks is right – regardless of its popularity in his party or outside it, to take on the status quo in our government when it is not working, and to reach across party lines to get things done for our country.
John also understands something else that too many Democrats seem to have become confused about lately—and that is the difference between America’s friends and America’s enemies.
Now, there are of course times when it makes sense to engage in tough diplomacy with hostile governments, times when it is in our interest as well as theirs, and there is some prospect of progress. But what Senator Obama has proposed is not such selective engagement, but a blanket policy of meeting personally as President, without preconditions, in his first year in office, with the leaders of the most vicious, anti-American rogue regimes on the planet.
Senator Obama has said that in proposing this, he is following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy. But Kennedy never met with Castro, and Reagan never met with Khomeini. And can anyone imagine Presidents Kennedy or Reagan sitting down unconditionally with Ahmadinejad or Chavez? I certainly cannot.
If a President ever embraced our worst enemies in this way, he would strengthen them and undermine our most steadfast allies. In some critical regions of the world, Senator Obama already seems to be doing that.
If you’re electing Democrats to control government spending, then you’re marrying Angelina Jolie for her brains.
P.J. O’Rourke gave this speech at the 2008 Cato Benefactor Summit. Don’t miss it!
…That’s why we need a Republican president—not because Republi- cans are good but because we need gridlock. I love gridlock. Gridlock means government can’t do things.
The two most frightening words in Washington are “bipartisan consen- sus.” Bipartisan consensus is when my doctor and my lawyer agree with my wife that I need help.
O’Rourke had a lot to say about health care reform…
…Well, we’ll learn to fix prices. Because that’s all that health care reform really is. It’s just price-fixing. Price-fixing works great in Cuba and North Korea and in rent-controlled apartments in New York. Everybody knows how easy it is to find an inexpen- sive apartment in a nice neighborhood in New York City. Another thing that gets me about Hillary is this: why is price-fixing such a great thing when she does it, but if a couple of business- men get together on a golf course that’s a big crime?
…This week we learned the limit of a dream in American politics. At Barack Obama’s darkest hour, not one prominent ally came forward to support him. Everyone abandoned Everyman.
No prominent black clergyman came forth to make even the simple point that Jeremiah Wright’s notion of the “black church” is but one point on a spectrum of faith. Rev. Wright, now written off as a virtual nut case, got more support from black clergymen than did Obama.
Barack Obama was bleeding by Monday and needed cover. Where, when he could have used them, were Obama’s oh-so-famous endorsers: Jesse Jackson, Ted Kennedy, Oprah, John Kerry, Chris Dodd, Patrick Leahy, Tom Daschle, Amy Klobuchar, Claire McCaskill, Jay Rockefeller, John Lewis, Toni Morrison, Roger Wilkins, Eric Holder, Robert Reich, Ted Sorenson, Alice Walker, David Wilhelm, Cornel West, Clifford Alexander, Donald McHenry, Patricia Wald, Newton Minow?
Where were all the big-city mayors who went over to the Obama camp: Chicago’s Richard Daley, Cleveland’s Frank Jackson, Atlanta’s Shirley Franklin, Washington’s Adrian Fenty, Newark’s Cory Booker, Baltimore’s Sheila Dixon?
More from Daniel Henninger…
The Kauffman Foundation asks the essential questions on economic policy — do you know how each candidate would answer?
…The central economic challenge for all policymakers is thus to answer this critical question: “What plans do they have, if any, to get the economy’s long-run growth rate back up to the 4 percent range?” (The difference between 4 percent and 3 percent growth, for example, can mean a difference in average living standards in 30 years time of roughly 40 percent.)
…The following questions are offered to help the public educate itself about how the candidates might propose to address this challenge.
1. How will the candidates ensure a skilled workforce to sustain strong long-term economic growth?
2. What are the candidates’ proposals, if any, regarding how immigration policies should treat highly skilled legal immigrants in light of their impact on our economy?
3. What will the candidates do to curb growing health care costs, which are especially burdensome to small and growing firms and deter would-be entrepreneurs from starting new businesses?
4. What are the candidates’ views about financial reporting and corporate governance requirements (incorporated in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act) that may be dampening entrepreneurship?
5. What is each candidate’s position on the global economy/market, which has fostered growth for America’s most successful entrepreneurial firms?
6. How do the candidates propose to deal with the long-run fiscal challenges posed by retiring baby boomers and the continued escalation of health care costs (which are driving up the costs of Medicare)? In particular, how can the nation craft a solution to this challenge without discouraging future entrepreneurship and innovation?
See the bulletin for more background on each question. And please let me know if you discover that a candidate has addressed any of the above.
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