In 2009 traffic fatalities dropped by 9% from 2008 on U.S. highways, making highway fatalities the lowest they have been in 55 years. The question is what has been making fatalities decrease? Who you ask will determine the answer you get. A highway patrolman, for example, has “credited state legislative initiatives such as increased drunken-driving penalties, red light cameras and speed camera,” as well as the “well-publicized multistate law enforcement efforts such as the ‘Click It or Ticket’ seat belt campaign or the push against drunken driving called ‘Over the Limit, Under Arrest’”. This, of course, does follow economic theory. If the penalty for a person’s actions is made clear, and that penalty is high enough, the person will change their behavior in order to avoid the penalty. This, however, is only the opinion of a highway patrolman as to why the fatality rate has decreased. In truth, economists and others are predicting that there are two bigger reasons that the rate has decreased in the past year.
The first reason is because of the recession. People simply do not have money to wantonly drive. The recession has also made it so that people will most likely not go “bar hopping” because they do not have the money to spend. The first type of spending that is shed during a recession is for superfluous things. These economic hard-times are making it so that the behaviors that people would normally risk in order to enjoy life are not being risked. It is neither ex-post nor ex-ante laws that are causing people to change their behavior. Rather, it is a consequence of what people are either choosing to do to save on money, or forced to do because they don’t have the money.
The second reason that is drastically affecting the fatality rate is the safety of cars driven in America. Over the past few years consumers have wanted cars that are both safer to drive and more efficient. Car companies have responded. Aside from a few debacles, such as Toyota’s recent one (which is being responded to quickly and hopes for a safer new release already underway) cars have never been safer to drive. And, even with these tragedies, such as Toyota, the government fines are so strict that companies must avoid them at all cost. Thus, car companies have an incentive to build safer cars to both give the customer what they want, and to avoid being penalized by the government.
Because of the success of these two things, I can’t help but wonder if government restrictions on companies, more than people, would help in curbing behavior. If, after all, people do not have a choice in a behavior, they can not do that thing. Take texting while driving for an example. As of now, the government has laws set in place to punish the individual a person chooses to text while they drive. Yet, people will hide their phones, and according to law enforcement in Utah, unless there is an accident, it is nearly impossible to enforce such a law. Consider what would happen, however, if cell phone companies were given incentives to install software on all of their phones that would deactivate the texting feature of the phone if the phone is moving more than 15 MPH (this software already exists). If all cell phone companies did this, money would not be wasted trying to enforce a law, but the action trying to be regulated would be diminished in a much wider way. They only way that someone would be able to text and drive would be to hack the software, something most people can’t do. The behavior, therefore, is stopped and there is no waste of money or effort. While it may not always be possible, perhaps the best way to actually change behavior is in a similar fashion, at least, whenever it is possible.
We can’t control behavior, or shouldn’t because of ethics, by keeping people economically unstable so that they can’t do certain risky behaviors. We could, however, make companies responsible for their products and reward them when they make them safer for the public to use.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/commuting/bal-md.cm.traffic12mar12,0,3726697.story
http://www.detnews.com/article/20100311/BIZ/3110459/1148/AUTO01/Traffic+deaths+at+lowest+level+since++54
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/business/12traffic.html?ref=todayspaper