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Stossel, Staddon, & Strahilevitz: eliminate stop signs, speed limits, & road rage

July 16th, 2008
By JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor

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Stop_Sign.jpg

John Stossel reprises Friday’s 20/20 report on TownHall today. He says it’s time to get rid of stop signs:

Rolling through a stop sign in Michigan puts two points on your driving record. That hikes your car insurance premium. Fighting the ticket could cost even more. So to avoid the points and legal fees, most people plead guilty to a lesser offense: impeding traffic. The court sounds like an assembly line, ” … no points … $135 … ”

Last year, the town made half a million dollars from such fines. Some drivers told us it “seems like a moneymaking scam.

I don’t know if that’s true, but when some angry motorists complained to Heather Catallo, reporter for Detroit’s ABC affiliate, she took her cameras out to see if the cops themselves stopped at the stop signs. Most didn’t.

Her expose caused a ruckus in town. The mayor hired a new police commissioner, who told me the cops might have been on emergency calls. “They don’t necessarily have to have their lights and sirens on,” Commissioner William Dwyer said.

I told him the tape showed police cars rolling through stop signs on the way back to the police station.

ABC put cameras by stop signs in Warren, Mich., and in New York City and found that 72 percent of Michigan drivers and 82 percent of New Yorkers did not come to a complete stop. He points to John Staddon in this month’s Atlantic on why stop signs and speed limits endanger Americans:

For one thing, there’s the placement of the signs—off to the side of the road, often amid trees, parked cars, and other road signs; rarely right in front of the driver, where he or she should be looking.

Then there’s the sheer number of them. They sit at almost every intersection in most American neighborhoods. In some, every intersection seems to have a four-way stop. Stop signs are costly to drivers and bad for the environment: stop/start driving uses more gas, and vehicles pollute most when starting up from rest. More to the point, however, the overabundance of stop signs teaches drivers to be less observant of cross traffic and to exercise less judgment when driving—instead, they look for signs and drive according to what the signs tell them to do.

Stossel sticks to stop signs but Staddon moves on to “a more severe safety hazard” the speed limit:

A particularly vexing aspect of the U.S. policy is that speed limits seem to be enforced more when speeding is safe. As a colleague once pointed out, “An empty highway on a sunny day? You’re dead meat!” A more systematic effort to train drivers to ignore road conditions can hardly be imagined. By training drivers to drive according to the signs rather than their judgment in great conditions, the American system also subtly encourages them to rely on the signs rather than judgment in poor conditions, when merely following the signs would be dangerous.

In this Staddon is joined by University of Chicago Law Professor Lior Strahilevitz who took up the topic of traffic law a couple years ago and has found empirical studies documenting that when municipalities have budget woes, traffic fine collections increase. He has not found that when traffic safety measures are implemented fines plummet.

Staddon advocates virtually no traffic signs — any minimal instruction given can be painted on the road itself. He might like the scheme Strahilevitz has concocted and presented in his fascinating paper, “How’s My Driving?” for Everyone (and Everything?):

A few weeks ago, I was driving to the airport in Seattle. Traffic was flowing reasonably well on the freeway. Just two car lengths ahead of me, a driver in a pickup truck began swerving violently between the two leftmost lanes, nearly colliding with a minivan. The minivan blared its horns and the pickup driver proceeded to drive like a maniac for the next half mile or so, violently jerking his car from lane to lane, swerving unpredictably across multiple lanes, and forcing numerous drivers to brake suddenly and become agitated during an otherwise uneventful morning commute. The pickup driver then swerved for the exit ramp, and abruptly left the freeway.

This scenario — atrocious driving on the freeway by an anonymous motorist, observed by dozens of bystanders, yet sanctioned in no meaningful way — plays out thousands of times daily on American freeways. The police can’t be everywhere, we rarely know the people driving near us on the freeways, and this combination of rare surveillance and practical driver anonymity contributes substantially to aggressive driving. Largely as a result, vehicular collisions are the leading killer of Americans aged 15 to 29. I have just posted a brand new paper on SSRN (free download available here), that shows how the law can take much better advantage of the information that you and me obtain about our fellow motorists every day on the roads.

Existing programs reduce accidents between 20 and 53 percent. I was skeptical when I heard it described, but completely sold when I listened to his Chicago’s Best Ideas talk last January:

Before buying a product from an eBay seller, a prospective buyer is likely to examine the seller’s feedback score and peruse the comments of others who previously dealt with that merchant. A strong feedback score enables merchants to fetch more money for their products, and the fear of negative feedback helps keep the overwhelming majority of eBay sellers on their best behavior. Imagine if every driver on the roads had a similar sort of feedback score and these scores were made available to insurance companies. Would aggressive and unsafe behavior on our roadways be reduced? Could drivers and pedestrians do a better job of keeping the roadways safe than the police? Would the feedback be reliable enough? Yes, Yes, and Yes, says Professor Strahilevitz, who will elaborate on this idea and explore applications beyond the roadways.

Here a follow-up post from Strahilevitz with some interesting discussion of extending reputation and feedback systems beyond driving to bring big urban areas some small town qualities.



This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Libertarian, Travel, Law Enforcement. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 12 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    Virginia Introduces $3550 Speeding Ticket

    Got to raise revenue one way or another.
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    In many cases, it's all about money. No doubt about it at all, especially when fines are excessive ("cruel or unusual punishment" should be the court ruling here).

    But a lot of anti-stop-sign, anti-speed-limit, anti-camera nonsense is just a bunch of childish people and lowlifes being resentful that they and their self-centeered, often hazardous, and sometimes scummy behavior on the road are being told NO.
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    DLS - first, I wouldn't include the anti-camera group in your rant. Between the multiple instances of cities changing the timing of yellow lights to lengths less than the allowable timing for a given speed limit, strictly to increase the number of drivers caught and fined, to cities passing mandatory, non-refundable fees equal to the cost of the fine for the offense to even be allowed to challenge a camera-based ticket, and not to mention their increased use as Big Brother surveillance, there is a lot to reasonably object to about their use.

    And many speed limits are also changed arbitrarily on stretches of roads, simply to again increase revenue.

    Given the tone of your rant, I hope you have never, not once in your life, sped, rolling-stopped a stop sign, failed to signal before changing lanes, or are guilty of having committed ANY minor or major traffic offense, whether caught and ticketed or not.

    Cause that would make you a hypocritical about also being a childish person and lowlife, and your self-centered, often hazardous, and sometimes scummy behavior!

    :)
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    I haven't rolled through a stop sign, because I'm not a lowlife. But I have sped.

    I'm not engaging in a rant. That's what the childish, self-centered people do.

    I'm perfectly aware that there are scams going on. Right now in parts of Portland, Oregon, the money is being sought like never before. Not only are cops parking down the street from where bars are located and stopping motorists who are seen leaving the bars (hoping for the drunk-driving jackpot -- it may involve now a $10,000 fine), but I've gotten reliable reports that speed limits have deliberately been lowered and cops stationed there at the "fishing holes" just engaged in a train of money-making stops for speeding.

    That said, there is a lot of poor driving out there that is indefensible. It varies from place to place -- I've lived and traveled all over the US and Canada and I know what things are like everywhere -- and part of it truly is cultural. It's a myth that people can police themselves when the culture somewhere involves people driving far too fast and aggressively for safety. In some places I've seen in addition terrible deliberate red-light running seconds after a change to red (complete with trains of runners who follow the runners in front of them with the expectation the cross traffic will be forced to wait for the train to pass by) as well as deliberate, contemptuous-of-law-and-society stop-sign running, often at full speed.

    There is no question they drive far too fast -- on city streets one has to allow for cross traffic, pedestrians, cyclists, etc., not only for other motor vehicles, which precludes high speeds. There is no question that they are wrong to run stop signs, no matter that if they were better drivers and people yield signs would be sufficient. There is no question that they are wrong to run red lights seconds after the light changes to red. There is no question they have no right to complain when those of us who know and are better drivers _and people_ object to being subjected to the hazards their behavior creates.
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    Wow. Better driver = better person. Talk about sanctimonious.
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    [nose in air]

    Attitude and behavior (including behind the wheel on roads shared by others) says a lot. No different in other contexts than on the road and being a feather-foot and a water molecule in a stream versus a self-centered hazard to others or worse, an aggressive person or borderling psychopath behind the wheel (or just one without emotional control, the kind of person who makes the news day after day).
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    DLS... Stossel and Staddon say nothing about cameras, Strahilevitz is all for them. The whole point is to reduce or eliminate "childish people and lowlifes being resentful [and] self-centeered, often hazardous, and sometimes scummy ... on the road."

    Click through those links!!! The ideas that they present are darned good ones!

    If we HARNESS the critiques we ALREADY MAKE of others on the road, and if others knew that those critiques COUNTED AGAINST INSURANCE COSTS (say, for example, that instead of everyone under 25, or everyone over 65, or all males, only those with the most bad feedback ratings were charged the higher premiums) we might begin to be more careful about our driving attitudes.

    Oh, and, the feedback system would permit positive feedback on drivers as well...
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    "Stossel and Staddon say nothing about cameras"

    I know, but many who object in the most ridiculous ways to the notion that people should stop at stop signs and not violate reasonable speed limits also are those who make the worst statements about cameras.

    Cameras not at hazard sites but elsewhere or more sinister, 100% real-time tracking (with GPS and such) to grade one's performance is something I'd find unreasonable. (Note that "intelligent driving systems" which take control from incompetent drivers when it comes to things like tailgating and such presents the possibility of such tracking but does not assure this would happen and overreaction to it is unmerited.)

    I realize it's subject to misuse or overuse just like traffic control devices, but traffic calming can be a good thing, too, for example.

    Sadly, many won't care about their driving attitudes and will continue endangering others as well as themselves.
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    Reasonable speed limits? What do you define that as?

    The US highway system is designed to be safe at 85 MPH speed limits. Are limits less than that on US highways reasonable?

    Speed limits for identical situations and road conditions vary state by state on non-US highways and roads. Are all state speed limits by default reasonable? Based on earlier parts of this discussion, the answer seems to obviously be no.

    So, do you advocate that violating unreasonable speed limits is OK, as you keep phrasing it as 'not violate reasonable speed limits'?

    So who gets to decide if a speed limit is reasonable, and if not, that it is OK to speed, and to what extent? You? Me?

    And, studies have found that changing the speed limits on highways, up or down, has little to no effect on either actual speeds driven, or accident rates, as this one shows - http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel.html.