I feel like a lot of transportation safety people work themselves into a corner with "only this matters, and nothing else." For example: “It’s not the level of punishment that matters, it’s the guarantee of the consequence" as quoted in your roundup. Surely, both things matter, because if you were given a one cent ticket with certainty, or only one person in the nation was given a trillion dollar speeding ticket and nobody else was ticketed, both systems would be extremely ineffective. A lot of people really oversell road redesign like this. Yeah, it would help, and we should do it, but it's not the only thing, and it wouldn't work if we did absolutely nothing else. Commonly, you read/hear things like "people won't do something if there's a chance that it will damage their car," but there's no shortage of videos of cars just plowing straight into the middle of a roundabout at 90 mph or driving down a narrow street in a city with cars parked on both sides and nearly hitting a kid that steps out.
In short, everybody needs to chill with the absolutism and seek a little balance.
I feel like a lot of transportation safety people work themselves into a corner with "only this matters, and nothing else." For example: “It’s not the level of punishment that matters, it’s the guarantee of the consequence" as quoted in your roundup. Surely, both things matter, because if you were given a one cent ticket with certainty, or only one person in the nation was given a trillion dollar speeding ticket and nobody else was ticketed, both systems would be extremely ineffective. A lot of people really oversell road redesign like this. Yeah, it would help, and we should do it, but it's not the only thing, and it wouldn't work if we did absolutely nothing else. Commonly, you read/hear things like "people won't do something if there's a chance that it will damage their car," but there's no shortage of videos of cars just plowing straight into the middle of a roundabout at 90 mph or driving down a narrow street in a city with cars parked on both sides and nearly hitting a kid that steps out.
In short, everybody needs to chill with the absolutism and seek a little balance.