Theories for Solving North Carolina Car Accidents – The “Just So Story” Problem
Policymakers, pundits, and others concerned with the tragic problem of North Carolina car accidents are desperate for solutions. We all want to decrease the number of people killed and injured on North Carolina roads. We want to make vehicles safer. We want to engineer roads that will be easier to use, and we want to make driving conditions more “humanistic” – to borrow philosophy from Tom Vanderbilt (author of the opus Traffic).
So, in many senses, we are all on the same team.
Where legislators, pundits, analysts, and others in the North Carolina car accident community disagree is on the tactical/strategic level.
We all have pet theories about what causes car accidents and what you can do to prevent them or at least make them less lethal. Some popular theories address driver distraction: you can be lethally distracted by literally dozens of things, from pure fatigue to the radio to drugs or alcohol. The list goes on. Other theories focus on road design. Still other theories discuss car safety engineering. And yet others ruminate over how engineers can adapt safety mechanisms to coordinate with the “caveman-like” brains of the typical North Carolina drivers. (This is not an insult – we evolved in Paleolithic times to deal with Paleolithic conditions – chasing woolly mammoth and the like, not driving 200 miles per hour in a Ferrari.)
It’s crucial that we, as a community, parse out these various theories, compare them, discuss which strategies work and which don’t, assess them using the best science available, educate the public, and constantly refine and think about various accident prevention paradigms.
Having said all that, we must be mindful of our human tendency to create “just so stories” to support our philosophies about car accident prevention.
Once you become set on a certain way of thinking about car accident prevention, you will tend to see all the data and evidence in terms of that paradigm. If you think distracted driving is the main problem, for instance, you will suddenly be focused on all the science that supports the distracted driving paradigm, and you will ignore work produced by people who favor other hypotheses that focus on road design or on treating other drivers humanely.
In a subsequent post we will probe how to get beyond this “just so story” problem and make real progress toward solving the pernicious problem of auto accidents and injuries and deaths on our state’s roads.
On a more pragmatic and actionable note, if someone you care about has been hurt in a crash, it’s in your interest to connect with the North Carolina car accident law firm to discuss your needs and possible recourse.
More Web Resources:
Tom Vanderbilt’s blog
just so stories
