Vanderbilt on Tickets

Submitted by Mike on Tue, 09/01/2009 - 11:15

I've become a big fan of Tom Vanderbilt's work on the world of traffic, and all the sciences behind it, from physics to psychology. His recent book on this subject – Traffic – is marvelous, and I hope to devote a series of blog posts to it. Last week, Vanderbilt had an article online at Slate discussing the merits of traffic enforcement.

He made a number of interesting points:

  • There is a strong correlation between traffic violations and non-traffic criminal activity. Something on the order of a 15x greater likelihood. Vanderbilt focuses on the direction of finding criminals via traffic tickets, but one could also consider the opposite direction of finding higher insurance risks (higher driver points from tickets) by searching for criminal records. I have personally done this research, and it's quite compelling.
  • The data clearly suggests that greater traffic enforcement – primarily in the form of speeding and red-light tickets – leads to a reduction in traffic fatalities.
  • He echoes the "broken windows" theory from James Q. Wilson and applies it to traffic, even if Wilson himself cannot.

For more from Vanderbilt, check out his blog which is linked on our Links page.