Roadguy received the following e-mail last week from alert reader Paul, who lives in Mounds View. I found it to be an interesting read, and if you have a few hours to check it out yourself, I’d be interested in your thoughts.

There is an ad that’s been running on local television for the past week or so meant to call the public’s attention to a law that was passed about a year (maybe more) ago that mandates that traffic must move over one lane when encountering a patrol car or other emergency vehicle stopped on the shoulder of the road. The ad shows a State Patrol car crumpled up like an accordion bellows that has, obviously, been struck from behind. Every time I see this ad I wonder why they are running it, not to mention wondering why they passed the law in the first place.

What neither the lawmakers or the advertising copywriters seem to have paid any attention to is the line in the ad that says, “When you see….” Do they honestly think that there are people on our highways who, seeing a patrol car on the side of the road, decide, “Oh, well, there’s no law against it, let’s hit it.” There may be a few people out there who are so mean-spirited and antisocial that they like to “buzz” a patrol officer outside their car just to take out their aggression on the officer, but I doubt that simply passing another law or advertising its existence will change their behavior….

It’s not that I’m in favor of patrol cars and officers being hit while they perform their duties on our roadsides. Having been “rear-ended” twice in my life, I’m not in favor of anyone — patrol officer, EMT, firefighter or civilian — being hit on the side of the road. But I’m pretty sure that it’s not happening due to the lack of a law forbidding it or because drivers just don’t care who or what they hit.

The problem, it seems to me, is demonstrated in that phrase, “when you see,” because far too many drivers, for far too many reasons, simply aren’t seeing, whether because they are drunk, dozing, changing CDs, scolding the children safely belted into the backseat, wiping ketchup off their pants, lighting a cigarette, looking at their GPS display, or talking, or even worse, texting on their cell phones. There is already a law on the books prohibiting careless driving, and colliding with anything while doing one of the things listed above would, it seems to me, consitute careless driving.

But not only is the advertised law stupid and redundant, it could well be dangerous as well. Consider that, from what I’ve observed, traffic officers, when making a stop, will delay that stop until they get to a (relatively) safe stretch of highway. It’s not common to see an officer on the side of the road in the middle of a tight turn or in the vicinity of a blind intersection. They try to stop along stretches of highway where they will be visible. Their hazard lights are flashing. All that oncoming traffic needs to do is stay completely in their own lane as they pass the stopped vehicles and nobody gets hit. But officers are getting hit. So, obviously, there are people who can’t keep their car going in a straight line (for the reasons listed in the previous paragraph.)

Now, by law, you ask these incompetents to change lanes and merge into traffic while going past the patrol car. If you’ve lived your whole life in Wyoming or Montana and these are your first few hours in Minnesota, you can be forgiven for not seeing the problem with this but, having spent 45 years driving among Minnesotans, it’s my guess that 20% of Minnesota drivers simply can’t merge — the concept is completely outside their understanding — and another 20% can, but won’t. So the law has now taken the relatively safe and easy maneuver of simply driving in a straight line past the cars on the roadside and instructed drivers to squish two lanes of traffic into one, a maneuver much more complex for the average Minnesotan, in the expectation that all of this jostling of traffic will make the office on the side of the road safer.

I take rather a different view of how to cut down on the number of collisions due to inattention. My solution: if the Legislature is going to “outlaw” things, (and that seems to be their approach to most everything, it’s what they know how to do best) outlaw air bags and automatic transmissions, power brakes and power steering. The spectre of a crash ought to bring to mind thoughts of death or dismemberment. Crashing one’s car ought to have more severe consequences than simply being a financial inconvenience. Let’s bring back unpadded steel dashboards. And get rid of all the power accessories so that driving has more of the feel of operating a large, dangerous machine and less the feel of sitting in a lounge chair, talking with friends on the phone while watching the scenery pass by. If a person can text message their friend while changing gears and wrestling with the steering wheel of a non-power assisted Chevy Suburban, more power to them. I think that people have adopted all of their “side behaviors” because “automated” driving is simply boring for them. We need to get them more actively involved in actually operating the car again. It’s the reason they’ve incorporated “rumble strips” on sections of interstate highway, to simply wake up drivers who have starting dozing due to the monotony of driving down long stretches of straight, smooth highway with little to do but simply hang on to the wheel and go along for the ride.

Were this done, I can practically hear the whining in my mind. “This car’s no fun to drive. It’s soooo hard to steer. I don’t like it.” And maybe, if driving weren’t quite as much “fun” as it’s become, people would make fewer frivolous trips and gasoline prices would stabilize, and carbon emissions would start going down and fewer patrol officers would be hit on the roadsides. Hmmmmm. Just a thought.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 6:05 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.