I accidentally watched a bit of the local news last night, which featured this story:
Police in Cary triple speeding tickets to keep us safe
I can’t find the story online, but as far as I remember, the story consisted of exactly two facts:
- In the past week, the Cary police have issued 666 (no, really) speeding tickets. The same week last year, they issued 238.
- There have been 1245 accidents so far this year.
There are so many things wrong here, it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s start by looking at the things they are not telling us.
- They are not giving us a large enough context about the number of speeding tickets issued. Has the number of tickets been slowing increasing since last year? Does it go in waves? Are there spikes? Was there something special about this week last year that caused the number to be abnormally low?
- They are not giving us any context at all on the number of total accidents. 1200 accidents? Is that normal, or more than we expected? Is it more or less than the same time frame in previous years? How does it compare to other cities of the same size and population? And how many of those accidents involved speeding at all?
- They are not telling us how bad the speeding problem is. There was a quote from a police officer giving anecdotal evidence that one of the tickets issued was for going 61 in a 45. What about the other 665? And again, is the severity of the speeding getting better or worse over time? I didn’t know, and after watching this “news”, I still don’t.
- They are not telling us how much money this is making, and where that money is going. Speeding tickets are one of those things that get all sorts of taxes and fees added on to them, mostly because it’s a politically easy way to raise some money for a pet cause. Have you looked at a speeding ticket recently? (Honestly, I haven’t; I haven’t gotten one in years, but the situation was bad then and I can’t imagine it’s gotten any better. The last time I got one, over half the ticket price was in “additional” fees for various itemized special interests. These people are worse than Ticketmaster.)
- Most importantly, they’re not telling us if it’s working. OK, maybe it’s too soon to tell, but I’d love to see a follow-up story in a few months, saying that the police cracked down on speeding all summer and speeding-related accidents were down X percent. But I bet they won’t do that story, because I bet it won’t make a damn bit of difference.
I believe people’s driving habits are highly inelastic. That is, it takes a huge price difference to get them to change their habits; they do not respond to small to moderate price changes. In the same summer where a person might get one $250 speeding ticket, they will spend $1000 on gas in their SUV (or more, if gas prices keep going up). If price mattered, we’d all be driving hybrid electric cars that get 50 miles to the gallon. So I’m not holding my breath for that follow-up news story, because I bet all this speeding “crackdown” won’t make a damn bit of difference in the stated goal, keeping us safe. I don’t have any statistics to back up that belief, but would you be more inclined to believe me if I did?
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