by Ron McLinden, Ozark Chapter Transportation Committee Chair
Bring up the topic of highways in out-state Missouri and you are undoubtedly going to hear about building more four-lane highways and how many lives they will save. Chances are somebody will repeat the mantra, “Safety equals four-lane highways.”
Most people would agree that four-lane highways are safer than two-lane highways. At the very least they are more “forgiving.” However, there isn’t enough money to build all the four-lanes that everybody wants, and nobody expects to raise taxes enough to do so during this century.
Each year some 1000 lives are lost to traffic crashes on Missouri roads – about three every day. The troubling thing is not that highway safety is a problem in Missouri, but that so many people appear to focus so single-mindedly on four-lane highways as the way to save lives.
Roads may be inherently “more safe” or “less safe.” But safety depends more on driver behavior than on how the road is constructed.
At a November 27 hearing of the Senate Transportation Committee, Kansas Secretary of Transportation Dean Carlson spoke of the “Three E’s” of highway safety: Engineering, Education, and Enforcement. He went on to outline nearly a dozen specific physical modifications to highways and the percent reduction in crashes that they would achieve. He described a one-day public awareness event on safety that Kansas had participated in, and he spoke of enforcement by uttering that word exactly once. It was pretty clear where his biases lay.
Missouri has a seatbelt law, but like a number of states it cannot be enforced unless a law enforcement officer observes another offense. As a result, Missouri has a lower rate of seatbelt use than other states that have a “primary” seatbelt law, under which traffic stops can be made solely for failure to use a seatbelt.
We don’t usually think about highway safety as an environmental issue. However, every traffic crash, every disabling injury, and every single death constitutes a loss of human and material investment. Hospitalization and car repair might, through a perversity in how we calculate our economic well being, constitute an addition to the economy, but they are losses, both in human and environmental resource terms.
Last year the Missouri General Assembly reduced the blood alcohol content level used to define intoxication. This year they should enact a “primary seatbelt law” for Missouri, and Governor Holden should include that among his legislative priorities. If the experience of other states holds, the result should be a ten percentage point increase in seatbelt usage, and that will translate into fewer traffic deaths and injuries.
Missouri should take other steps to make our highways safer: lower speed limits, stricter enforcement, and greater use of cameras and other electronic devices to supplement enforcement and warn drivers when they are speeding. And there should be a greater commitment to public education campaigns to promote safe, unimpaired, and civil driving habits.
Yes, we should spend more to modify our highways so they are safer by design. But anyone who advocates doing that, without in the same breath calling for actions to improve driver behavior, is engaging in one of the meanest forms of hypocracy.