This is actually something I have given considerable thought, probably because I hang out around a fair number of transportation economists (and if I end up going to UC Irvine as seems likely, I'll be positively surrounded by them).
Since teen drivers are the worse drivers, one thought might be that we should raise the driving age from 16 to say 18 or 21. This, however, is almost guaranteed to fail, for two reasons: (1) Nobody is going to support it and (2) Even if it went through, it wouldn't actually accomplish anything, because the reason teen drivers are bad is that they are inexperienced, and now you've just made it so that older drivers will be inexperienced instead. You might reduce traffic fatalities a little bit, but the main effect would be by reducing the number of drivers on the road---and there are better ways to do that, as I'll get to in a moment.
Increased enforcement of laws against speeding and texting while driving could work, but the problem is: How exactly do we do that? It's virtually impossible to know whether someone is texting before you pull them over, and while speeding is more detectable, the police resources required to seriously enforce all speed limits would be massively cost-prohibitive.
So I'm going to recommend two policies you don't seem to have thought of, which may seem a bit "outside-the-box".
(1) Establish a carbon tax.
(2) Require high schools to start class after 9:00 AM.
By establishing a carbon tax, you make gasoline more expensive; that means people will want to drive cars less. If people drive cars less, there are fewer cars on the road, and roads will be safer. The environmental benefits of such a policy would also be enormous (and could literally save millions of lives by preventing the damage of climate change), so this one should be an absolute no-brainer. I can't think of a single environmental economist or public economist who doesn't think some version of a carbon tax would be a good idea. An increase in gasoline prices by 10% due to a carbon tax would reduce traffic fatalities by about 2-3%.
By starting high schools after 9:00 AM, you allow teenagers to get more sleep, which they desperately need; chronic sleep deprivation is universal among US teenagers, and has all sorts of damaging health effects---one of which is increased auto accidents.
Both of these could be implemented as federal laws, since carbon emissions would fall under the Interstate Commerce Clause (a good deal more so than interstate highways do, in fact) and therefore federal taxation authority, and public education is already regulated at the national level (e.g. No Child Left Behind). So there's no serious Constitutional challenge.
There's also no particular need for public-private partnership; the tax can be collected by the IRS like everything else, and if jurisdiction is an issue the early-morning ban can be applied only to public high schools (though it would be good to also apply it to charter schools or even private schools as well).
Nothing is ever going to completely solve traffic accidents, short of a fundamentally new transit system (perhaps based on self-driving robotic cars, but even those are not completely error-free). But the effects of carbon taxes and later high school times could be surprisingly large, amounting to hundreds if not thousands of lives saved per year. It's also very much a long-term solution, as it could and should be continued indefinitely.
Both policies require very minimal infrastructure, and while there will be transition costs, the net economic impact is almost certainly positive.
The biggest obstacle is garnering political support. Despite overwhelming scientific evidence in their favor, both of these policies have failed to gain traction in more than a handful of jurisdictions, and it's worth looking at why.
Carbon taxes anger the fossil fuel industries for obvious reasons, so lobbyists funded by large coal and oil companies always fight them and usually defeat them. Anything that reduces the number of cars on the road---even though we are doing so quite intentionally---is also going to annoy the auto industry as well. But ultimately the environmental argument is so unassailable that I believe we will eventually get there; we'll just have to fight through the fossil-fuel lobby in much the same way we had to fight through the tobacco lobby with regard to the science of lung cancer.
It's less clear why we haven't been able to shift high school to later times. One reason might be institutional inertia; it would require a lot of changes to educational scheduling and transportation, which would involve fairly substantial switching costs. Another is that athletic programs have a very strong lobby, and they like to practice after school, which wouldn't work as well if school continues later. (And if they start practicing before school, the benefits of the policy would be greatly reduced.) But I think it's quite feasible to get this policy through, if we fight hard enough and make people seriously confront the fact that teenagers die because we make school so early. I coined a slogan, "Early classes cause car crashes!" that I'd like to see brought into some protests.
No comments:
Post a Comment