This is a new one on me: according to the Colorado Department of
Transportation (CDOT)
good weather this winter has caused an increase in traffic
deaths. Usually I feel like people blame bad weather, because poor
visibility and slick roads make driving more dangerous. This whole
article has strong
we’re all trying to find the guy who did this
vibes.
It certainly stands to reason that more people driving means more crashes simply because there are more opportunities for crashes. But it is ridiculous to blame good weather for traffic deaths. Colorado famously (albeit erroneously) has 300 days of sunshine. You can’t rely on winter weather to keep people off the roads and keep traffic deaths down — especially in the face of the climate crisis. It strikes me as criminally negligent of CDOT to curse warm weather and clear roads for killing more people with cars. They have one job.
To provide the best multi-modal transportation system for Colorado that most effectively and safely moves people, goods, and information.
The operant word here being “safely”.
There is no sense that anyone involved — not
CDOT, not the Colorado State Patrol —
feels any real responsibility to do anything about this. In fact,
according to the State Patrol,
it is all of our responsibility to solve these problems.
Ah,
yes, individual responsibility. Why should
CDOT lower speed limits, design safer
roads, and install
traffic calming devices
when we can just blame people for acting irresponsibly.
I mean, look, I agree that people should slow the fuck down, but the
design of streets — for which
CDOT
is responsible — absolutely affects how fast people feel
comfortable driving. And everyone I know thinks it’s perfectly
fine to speed anywhere between 5 and 10 miles per hour over the
speed limit — 9 you’re fine, 10 you’re mine
and all that.
Remind me again who is responsible for enforcing speed limits? Who
decides to let people off the hook for speeding? But yes, we are
all responsible.
And let’s consider for a moment that if good weather can increase traffic deaths significantly enough to be newsworthy because of increased traffic, why is CDOT not putting more effort into creating alternative forms of transportation to reduce traffic year round? After all multi-modal transportation is part of their mission. But no, instead they are still trying to address traffic by [checks notes] creating more traffic. Good job, everyone.
If you’re not familiar with the concept of “induced demand” it
is, in a nutshell, that widening highways does not improve traffic
flows because the wider highway becomes more appealing to more
people, thus inducing them to take the newly widened highway and
creating more traffic. Widening highways temporarily improves
traffic until more people cotton on to the fact that the highway
is moving faster now and then more people start taking the
highway, and we end up back where we started. But,
like Bullwinkle pulling a rabbit out of his hat,
CDOT assures us, this time for sure!
This whole article is rife with car brain. The pig from State Patrol goes out of his way to point out that some of the pedestrians and cyclists who were killed by cars were at fault. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that all of our infrastructure treats anyone outside of a car as second-class citizens. If only they’d been properly deferential to the multi-ton pollution machines to which we have devoted our lives. Alas, what can we do? I guess we just have to pray for some bad weather to keep people off the roads.