Will We Ever Truly Eliminate North Carolina Car Accidents?

August 16, 2011, by Michael A. DeMayo

The perennial quest to nibble away at the rates of North Carolina car accidents obsesses bloggers, pundits, and policymakers in equal measure. Theories abound about how to improve the situation. Some policymakers suggest doing things like lowering the speed limit. Others argue that we need better safety features. Still others argue that we need more to move to an electric car system, or even to more fanciful solutions like setting up a magnetic road system that strips drivers from their autonomy (and capacity to make mistakes) and automates all of our driving through a massive, hyperintelligent computer grid. All very interesting. All plausible, even if those solutions might take 100 or 1,000 years to implement.

But, in the midst of all this exciting planning and speculation, we tend to think more in terms of how North Carolina car accidents (and crashes across the nation) can be contained instead of what’s causing these accidents.

The Sticky Evolution Problem

Human beings for 99.9% of their evolutionary history lived as hunter-gatherers. We lack the ability to travel more than around 20 miles per hour, so we did not evolve the cognitive apparati to manage the risks of going over 20 miles per hour. So when you put these caveman-type people into vehicles capable of traveling 120 miles per hour or greater, you fry their circuits. And this is, ultimately, what the problem is about. As Tom Vanderbilt astutely pointed out in his landmark opus, Traffic, part of the main root cause of traffic accidents is the fact that drivers fail to see other drivers as humans. In other words, something about driving at fast speeds strips us of our ability to see one another as human beings and that may be at the heart of many of our problems. And if Vanderbilt’s thesis is correct, the problem ultimately is an evolutionary problem.

So it’s really an evolutionary question. It’s a prickly one because we can’t completely rewire the human brain just for the purposes of improving road safety. That obviously makes no sense. But if this conundrum is going to persist, no matter how many safety features we add to the cars, there might never be a full solution – 100 years, 1,000 years, 10,000 years in the future. It may not matter how many fancy, speculative engineering fixes we develop and deploy.

And this is something we’ll have to get used to. This doesn’t mean that we can’t improve safety. It doesn’t mean that we can’t significantly reduce injuries and accidents, improve the quality and comfort of rides, reduce stress on environment, and so forth. But it does mean that we are going to run into this fundamental limit because of the capacity of our brains.

On a less speculative note, and a more pragmatic one, if you or someone you care about has been recently involved in a motor vehicle collision, a North Carolina car accident law firm can help.

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Roads guided by magnets?