So…another day, another car accident. Read about it here, here and here.
Let`s recap.
“At 4.25 two car crashed. Opel Vectra with seven (7) passengers and VW Golf with two (2) passengers. The result was 6 injured, three of them died. ”
OK. Read that again. Yes. 7 people. It almost sounds like a joke, right? “How do you get seven people into a Vectra?” and a follow up question, “Just how drunk were they?”
OK, let`s not be too quick on the judging trigger. Maybe they went to a practice session. 4.25 in the morning? On sunday?
Ahem.
Again, the comments are more interesting than the news itself. “Up the fines!” is the overall winner. And I cannot help wondering just what kind of people write such things. What will higher fines do? It`s like a Butalci (A classic slovene literature) scene where they were arguing what to write on a board that forbidd the Turks from entering our territories. Should it be “Forbidden“, “Strictly forbidden” or “Any entrance forbidden at the strickest!“?
Fines never do any good. Or, they have a very limited effect. And seriously, fines only effect a smaller part of the population. You think assholes care about 50 or even 100 thousand tollar fines? You think it even stops them to reconsider?
Here`s my solution to the problem. First of all, all new drivers should stay in the driving school program for at least 60 hours. Yes. 60. Unlike the current situation, where people brag about how they passed an exam with only 15 hours of driving. Second, fines should not be monetary but in the shape of freelance working. With casualites that survived a car accident and are now cripples. Or cleaning up toilets. Or both. Third, anybody caught causing an accident which resulted in at least one death, should get a life sentence. Screw honor drivers, if you kill a person, you have no honour. And fourth, extreme psyhological evaluation for every single person who wants to move around in a 2+ tons of steel. And I mean extreme. We need to weed out the jerks before they can weed out themselves and take someone else with them.
I have a beef with the police on this matter too. They should up their salaries and make them more motivated. I`ll never forget a scene where we were walking home at three o`clock in the morning and we stopped in front of the traffic light, just as a police car stopped too. And then a car blasted through the intersection, and cops in the police car only stood there watching. And as we pointed into the direction of the racing car, they just shook their heads and drove off. I ask you…what the fuck?
If you ask me, this is Darwin of the 21st century.
I have a slightly different proposal on what to do about the problem of traffic accidents.
Namely: do nothing.
I personally think that the deaths of a couple of hundred people every year are an eminently reasonable price for us as a society to pay for the unprecedented degree of mobility that we get by driving motorized vehicles.
Besides, if we genuinely wish to improve safety on the roads, we must go deeper than these surface measures (such as fines or psychological evaluation). For example, why do people drive drunk? Because, after they get drunk (which they need to do because, in a world as miserable as this one, it’s next to impossible to be both sober and happy at the same time), they still need to get home somehow. Walking or using public transport is both unpleasant and humiliating to an extreme degree (due to the wait, slowness, discomfort, and the need to share space with strangers), while taking a taxi is far too expensive. Thus if we as a society wish to reduce the number of drunk drivers, instituting a kind of state-subsidised inexpensive taxicab service system would be a very appropriate step. Similarly, if we wish to dissuade people from driving recklessly, we must realize that the reason for such driving is that our increasingly oppressive, regimented and unfree society leaves most people with almost no other convenient outlets for the expression of their adventurous spirit. Thus, a suitable approach is not to oppress them still further (as you propose with your draconian punishment scheme) but to institute a less oppresive society (e.g. by doing away with hierachical and command-based structures in the workplace, thereby reducing the amount of stress which people currently absorb and consequently have to take out in the form of unsafe driving) and to improve access to other adventuresome activities besides reckless driving (e.g. convenient, inexpensive state-sponsored access to sports facilities, video games, adrenaline-oriented theme parks, etc.).
But of course, the proposals I outline below require us as a society to actually do something, to take action with a view to improving the situation. It is of course so much easier to take the seemingly easier way out and just forbid everything and punish everyone all over the place. Why o why is freedom so odious to us? Why is slavery so sweet?
P.S. Incidentally, I’ll never quite understand why everybody is so obsessed about safety on the roads at the very same time when other, far more important forms of safety such as social security and health care are being systematically demolished. Why not worry about the more important things first? Surely this is a classic case of a red herring: get people worried about fundamentally inconsequential matters such as traffic safety and thus ensure they overlook much more serious issues.
Keep them killing each other, it’s called natural selection. The bad thing of course is that the innocent bystander always gets hit too.
Seriously, the cars in the past used to be way less safer than today. To have a car accident usually meant to be killed or to kill someone. I think car safety is nothing but connivance. If the cars were less safe, people would tend to drive more carefully since they would be more afraid for their lives.