let’s all be cool. Most teenagers don’t know how to be responsible and don’t usually think when they have other stuff to worry about.
obviously, you must have, or are a kid and know how that is.

A person old enough to operate a vehicle should also be old enough to understand that the purpose of curfew is for safety — and speeding is definitely not safe. It was a dumb decision which tragically ended four people’s lives.

Now, instead of a ticket, he has a nice casket to lie in.

thank you,
Zoey Zukowski, 14.

(This letter is not for publication.)

I want to thank you for printing my letter, and I want to thank you even more for the collection of articles you ran on Sunday, April 30 on this topic. As I’m sure you know, newspapers and other media outlets have a great deal of influence over public opinion, and I truly think that this issue is one where it’s incredibly important for you to use your “bully pulpit” to raise awareness.

The articles you can on Sunday were superb, but I urge you not to let the matter rest there. I would like to see both news articles and editorials in future editions of the Herald addressing the quality of driving on our roads by both teens and adults and what we, as a society, can do to improve the situation and thus reduce the number of unnecessary highway fatalities. For example:

• How many people die every day / week / month / year in traffic accidents compared to other causes of death?
• Why is enforcement of driving rules and regulations so poor?
• Why is the road test which must be passed by Massachusetts drivers so absurdly easy compared to the tests in other states?
• Are there any states which require drivers to periodically retake the road test and eye test? If not, Massachusetts could be at the forefront of the driver safety movement by legislating such a requirement. If such a requirement were legislated across the board, rather than just on senior citizens as has been previously proposed, then the AARP lobby wouldn’t be able to cry discrimination.
• Complaints that increased enforcement efforts, a harder driving test, periodic retesting, etc. would be too expensive, should be met by a comparison of the anticipated cost to how much is spent every year to combat diseases, hazards, etc. that cause far fewer deaths than traffic accidents. For example, how would the cost of driver safety programs compare to how much we spend each year on “homeland security”?

I’m sure there are other areas that could be explored as well.

I urge you to keep this issue in the news, and thus to keep people thinking about it, by publishing a series of articles over an extended period of time, and to support legislation and other governmental efforts to increase driver safety.

Thank you,

Jonathan Kamens

Lots of material in a two-page spread:

• Margery Eagan column: “For loved ones, pain never ends”
• “Deadly Crashes Are Wrecking Young Lives”
• “Teens who have been there offer sage advice to peers”
• “Parents taking action to prevent tragedy”

It’s wonderful to see this. It could just be a flash in the pan, but there’s always hope that this could finally be the time when some sort of critical mass is achieved and there are long-term changes.

Well, not quite inevitably, if there’s a lot of traffic everyone watches the lights and then of course some of them check the traffic and some don’t. And if there’s a lot of pedestrian traffic people who want to obey the lights end up getting swept in the crush of jay-walkers.

But given a scenario where people have a choice you don’t find people patiently waiting for the walk signal when there’s no traffic and then double checking that there’s no traffic before walking.

And in fact if you look at the scary statistics the police put out to discourage jay-walking and divide by population you find east-coast cities where jay-walking is a way of life have no worse rates of car-pedestrian accidents than west-coast cities like seattle where i’m led to believe jay-walking is much less common.

It’s harder to tell why someone is driving the speed they’re driving of course. Unless you follow them for a while and see they’re driving precisely the speed limit or the conditions are particularly poor and they continue to drive the speed limits when that’s too fast.

Really, and you know this how, exactly? It’s easy to make all-encompassing pronouncements about human nature. It’s somewhat more difficult to actually prove them.

But in practice if you watch you’ll see people will universally fall into one or the other category.

Since I both obey speed limits and judge safe speed, trailing distance, etc. based on current conditions, I disprove your statement about where people “universally fall.” I’ll again point out that it’s much easier to make such pronouncements than to prove them. And I’ll again point out that it’s awfully convenient to make pronouncements which prove the validity of your admitted practice of disobeying the law when you find it convenient to do so.

Except that’s not how human nature works. After all that’s what we have today in theory. But in practice if you watch you’ll see people will universally fall into one or the other category.

It’s not hard to see why that’s the case. If you teach someone to judge somethiing for themselves they won’t have much respect for arbitrary rules that they can see are inapplicable. Conversely if you teach someone to respect the rules they won’t expect to have to think for themselves too.

So in practice you must choose one or the other. I claim it’s better to teach people to look both ways before crossing the street than to teach them to obey a WALK signal. Likewise I claim it’s better to teach people about braking distances, reaction times, and sight-lines than it is to post a sign and expect everyone to follow it blindly.

There are those who argue that when one person drives more slowly than everyone else on a highway, that driver can actually cause accidents. I’ve yet to see any statistics to back this up, and I certainly don’t believe that a safe driver going the speed limit in the right lane on a highway is truly a danger to himself or others.

Aside from that, what’s much more interesting is when most people drive more slowly. That’s when the increased safety of the lower speed is most noticeable. That goes back to the point I was making in my letter to the editor, which is that the only real solution to this problem is to change the societal norm that speeding is OK.