Everybody going faster than you is a maniac and everybody going slower than you is an idiot: George Carlin
We saw the usual sights this past week while driving I-95 from Florida to Savannah and back.
The maniacs who insist on weaving in and out of every available lane to get ahead of the slower vehicles on either side.
The idiots who want to drive in the left lane at the exact speed limit.
The truckers cutting into your lane who assume you will slow down before their enormous trailers nudge you off the road.
But we saw something else that, candidly, has become an increasingly rare sight on America’s Mad Max freeways:
Cops.
Lots of cops.
Cops pulling over pickups and SUVs. Cops stopping big rigs and compacts alike. Blue lights flashing all over the highway.
Don’t tell me. It must be Operation Southern Slowdown week again.
Yup, that’s it.
This per a Florida Highway Patrol release announcing the annual slow down campaign that stretched across five Southern States:
“Operation Southern Slowdown is a focused, collaborative effort to enforce traffic laws and educate drivers on driving behaviors that lead to fatal crashes, striving to one day experience zero fatalities on our roadways.”
And why not? Excessive speed and associated careless/reckless/distracted driving behaviors are major factors in the nation’s annual 40,000 plus traffic death toll. And anyone who ventures onto the interstates will tell you that speeding, careless, reckless and distracted driving is the rule rather than the exception.
So good on Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama and Tennessee law enforcement for giving their all to crack down on bad driving…
…for one week…
…which of course begs the question:
What about the other 51 weeks of the year?
No reflection on law enforcement, but there are some pretty good reasons why cop-imposed traffic enforcement can’t be a 365/24/7 undertaking.
Like the fact that the Florida Highway Patrol is suffering from an historic manpower shortage. Something like a thousand troopers have retired or quit since 2010, and efforts to replace them is no easy task. As per one news report, “the agency runs three 80-member recruiting classes a year at its academy, and the current one is less than half full.”
No surprise, really. Traffic enforcement is FHP’s job #1. And as a rule police officers dislike doing ticket duty. Even more so in an age of road rage, when an officer can never be sure if an errant driver has a gun and is predisposed to use it.
In any case, the very act of pulling over a vehicle on a high-speed highway posses its own unique public safety risks.
The truth is, officer-intervention is perhaps the least efficient, and least safe way to enforce speed limits. And, as a matter of fact, we have the technology to make our highways safer almost overnight.
All we lack is the political will to deploy it.
For example, look no further than the Florida Turnpike, which uses thousands of cameras for the sole purpose of making sure that drivers pay turnpike tolls whether or not they have Sun Passes.
Florida simply bills vehicle owners by mail, thanks to technology.
What Florida Turnpike authorities don’t do is deploy cameras to identify and ticket speeders.
Why? Wouldn’t be politic.
It’s true that The Great DeSanitizer recently signed into law a bill that allows speed cameras in school zones. But when the Biden Administration wanted to deploy cameras on interstate highways to slow down speeders, the anti-Ron was quick to register his objections.
“They’re spending $15 billion on speed cameras to be able to catch people speeding. I mean, I’m sorry. I don’t want that. That’s bringing us even more surveillance. Like we need more surveillance in our society right now.”
Which is another way of saying: “Let ‘em die, but don’t violate the privacy rights of the drivers who kill ‘em.”
Which goes a long way toward explaining why speeding is the most ignored law in autoAmerica.
As Slate writer Henry Graybar puts it:
The nation’s most disobeyed law is dysfunctional from top to bottom. The speed limit is alternately too low on interstate highways, giving police discretion to make stops at will, and too high on local roads, creating carnage on neighborhood streets. Enforcement is both inadequate and punitive. The cost is enormous…The consensus is: Enforce the speed limit. But not on me, please. Because while it would be nice to save 10,000 lives a year, it sure is fun to drive fast.
It is not an exaggeration to say that police power in the United States is built around the unique conditions created by car culture, in which virtually everyone is breaking the law all the time—with occasionally severe consequences.
So, yeah, by all means. Let’s have a one-week-a-year law enforcement PR campaign in the name of “public safety.”
But let’s not lose sight of the fact that, in autoAmerica, the imperative of drivers to get where they’re going as quickly as possible – like the right to drive armed just in case some other driver gives you a funny look – was certainly intended by our Founders (Ford, Dodge, Chrysler etc.) to be inviolate.
The need for speed being the autoAmerican way.
Be safe out there.
FreeGNV 