Yes, Tony, coincides... although Sivak is willing to speculate as to the actual cause:
The study's author, Michael Sivak, said that high fuel costs have not only kept more cars off the road, they have transformed the way people drive. There is evidence that many motorists are slowing down to conserve fuel, which contributes to fewer and less severe crashes, he said.
In addition, drivers are cutting back on nonessential trips and leisure driving, which tend to occur at night and on weekends when driving is more hazardous than during a slow commute. And low-income teens and seniors, who have been hit harder by high prices and tend to have more crashes, are driving less to save money, Sivak said.
"There's a major behavioral change afoot," he said. Such decreases in fatalities are "unheard of in traffic safety literature" [Jonathan Mummulo, "Study Links Increasing Fuel Costs to Steep Drop in Traffic Fatalities," Washington Post, 2008.08.26, p. B03].
So even if drilling here and drilling now would restore our God-given right to cheap gas, it could well mean more deaths on the highway. If gas prices slide, maybe we should compensate with a gas tax to keep those highway deaths going down. (Commenters, knock yourselves out with that cost-benefit analysis!)
Funny how a combination of common-sense conservatism (drive less, drive more slowly) and a supposedly "liberal" policy (raise the gas tax to discourage consumption) could be a practical pro-life position.
Review Sivak's numbers yourself—here's his original report (in PDF format):
Michael Sivak, "Is the U.S. on the Path to the Lowest Motor Vehicle Fatalities in Decades?" Report No. UMTRI-2008-39, The University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, Ann Arbor, Michigan, July 2008.
Why not quadruple the gas tax, slap a 25% sales surtax on SUVs, and make all leisure driving illegal?
ReplyDelete... ad hominet.
ReplyDeleteLess people are driving because they can't afford to, and thus the highway fatalities go down. Not to hard to explain.
ReplyDeleteLess people would be obese if the cost of food were raised out of sight. Let's tax food even higher!
Less people would die if less people were born. Let's limit couples to one child per.
Good grief. I like the idea of people slowing down a little in driving and not wasting gas as much, but raising the gas tax to achieve this?? That would hurt the poor the most and would be the complete antithesis to what Obama et al are preaching that they care for.