Paved with good intentions

[unixronin]

Via cracked.com, Bitmines, and paulesyllabic¹, the five most popular safety laws that don’t actually work.

Highlights:

• “Traffic calming” costs more lives than it saves.  “One report from Boulder, Colorado suggests that for every life saved by traffic calming, as many as 85 people may die because emergency vehicles are delayed.  It found response times are typically extended by 14% by speed-reduction measures.  Another study conducted by the fire department in Austin, Texas showed an increase in the travel time of ambulances when transporting victims of up to 100%.”
• [1997 article]  A 1997 study found that in 1994-1995, crime (both violent and overall) decreased by three times as much in states without Three Strikes laws as in states with them.  In eight of the thirteen states that had three-strikes laws, crime actually increased during that period.
• Fully half of the 233 Amber Alerts issued in 2004 were for children who were in no danger.  48 of the 233 alerts — more than 20% — were for children who hadn’t even been abducted.
• Sex offender registries don’t distinguish between serial rapists and somebody who took a leak in public while drunk.  Besides, 95% of sexual assault victims, child or adult, already know their attacker anyway.

And I’m sure I don’t have to point out the utter stupidity behind zero-tolerance policies to anyone here... not to mention the rampant abuses.

[1]  Not necessarily in that order.  Or any order.

Comments

[hrrunka]

That first link's in my home territory. I can see that some of the bumps round here would cause an ambulance problems. Some of them are sump-busters. I wouldn't mind betting that (badly) parked cars cause more trouble than bumps, though...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

It doesn't help that, in the US at least, few municipalities seem to have the faintest idea how to actually construct a properly scaled speed bump. If the speed bumps are intended to enforce a speed limit of 20mph, you probably can't do more than 5mph over them without bottoming out your suspension.

Still, one of the funnier things I've ever seen was when we lived in Tracy, California, driving down to the grocery store and being passed at about 75mph (in a 40 limit) by some totally riced-out Honda covered in Type-R stickers and all the usual rice-racer crap, getting to the Safeway a couple of minutes later, pulling into the parking lot, and finding said ricer directly in front of the store ... immovably high-centered on a speed bump, with the front wheels easily two inches off the ground, and the occupants standing around it looking bewildered and embarrassed as they tried to figure out how to unstick the stupid-looking POS without tearing the underside out of the car.


(By the way ... if you haven't come across it before, go read the Honda wigger clown car story (http://www.tamparacing.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-244931.html). It's hilarious.)

[fruitylips.livejournal.com]

Wasn't me, dude...that was pef's link.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Huh. Coulda sworn it was you. Trying to do too many things at once, I guess.

Corrected.

[ehintz.livejournal.com]

Oooh, nice. I'll be using that stuff on "calming" measures. They put in a bunch of 'em here in Plimmerton and pissed us right off. Has slowed our response time to callouts by anywhere from 2-5 minutes.

[beckyzoole.livejournal.com]

I can see the problem with speed bumps on major streets, but I really really wish we had a couple on my block. The speeding by teens (and people who are old enough to know better!) drives me nuts. There are a lot of little kids at play on this street.

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

The last three (or four, if you count zero-tolerance policies) are all species of removing discretion, making action automatic so as to avoid negligence or bad decisions -- the assumption is that most of the time the automatic action will be better than action taking after real thought, or better than nothing. Sometimes that's harmless, as in the Amber Alerts -- if there are a lot of false alerts, what's the harm? (unless, of course, there are so many that people stop attending). Other times -- three strikes laws, "protect the children" sex-offender laws, etc. -- there's real injustice.

Removing discretion isn't such a bad thing, in moderation. California voters have discretion to amend their Constitution by a simple majority vote, and the result is horrible, one of the United States' worst state constitutions. If the requirement were raised to a two-thirds supermajority, we'd retain the ability to amend our constitution while being protected against the passions of nutjobs. Similarly, three strikes and Megan's Laws might not be so bad if they let judges retain power to short-circuit them when they were clearly abusive. Unfortunately, drafting them to do so takes actual thought, and risks incurring the wrath of the tough-on-crime and protect-our-children crowds.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Sometimes that's harmless, as in the Amber Alerts -- if there are a lot of false alerts, what's the harm?

As was pointed out in the articles that section linked to, all the false alarms waste resources that are already in short supply; meanwhile, the kids that HAVE been abducted by psychopaths are usually already dead by the time the alert goes out anyway.
What we need is hard numbers on how many kids who really are in danger are actually saved by "Amber Alerts". Those are probably hard numbers to get.

Similarly, three strikes and Megan's Laws might not be so bad if they let judges retain power to short-circuit them when they were clearly abusive. Unfortunately, drafting them to do so takes actual thought, and risks incurring the wrath of the tough-on-crime and protect-our-children crowds.

Exactly. And these days we're all about quick, headline-friendly fixes. Actually thinking about the problem? Not so much...

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

they had 3 amber alert phone bank calls in the last couple years in my town.

in all cases, the people they were looking for "wandered off" and were found at a friend's house. absolute over-reaction. plus bad parenting.

iirc, they did not call the amber alert OFF after the fact for at least 1 of them.

they also had some kind of private alert thing going on where some lady lost her prize show dog, and somehow managed to get an entire community on patrol looking for it. we had a lot of crazy people driving around here, at speed, in a private community, for hours, despite being told to slow down (EFF EWE!), and that nobody saw their stupid dog, and SLOW DOWN THIS IS PRIVATE PROPERTY YOU ALMOST HIT A KID (EFF EWE!) - fine, we're calling the cops - SCREECH! see ya!

the highway amber alerts i've seen, involved a "legal abduction" of a father asserting his rights, a girl on a joy ride with her boyfriend and freaked parents (and the girl was a legal adult...).

apparently the old 24-48 hour rule is thrown out the window to test these new systems.

#

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

Trying to nail down the cost of resource utilization is a futile exercise. If the emergency workers and law enforcement personnel are already on the job, what is the incremental cost of having them look for something specific? Do we count it against all their time, figuring that if they were not looking, they would not be getting paid and consuming resources? Do we only consider extra costs, like the amount of gasoline that was consumed over what would have been used on the shift? Not and easy answer, and one that is ripe for gaming.

As a business example: When we lost power to our datacenter, the CFO was trying to get into the server room to tell us that we were losing $5000 per 15 minutes we were down. (An average outage lasted about five hours.) When we introduced the cost of the UPS's or generator to protect the datacenter, the income was only deferred, and we only actually lost about $4000 per outage. We finally got the UPS's. But the numbers were never the same from the same guy. It all depended on whether we needed it, or he wanted it.

[masgramondou.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough no mention of the ncoming CPSIA trainwreck - see http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/blog/g/c325e853-6a7d-48d8-ab80-0cc55369c6c8 amongst a number of other places. In fact "CPSIA=Fail" may be the only thing that Hugh Hewitt and lefties like the Nielson Haydens agree on ...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

When has Congress ever NOT thrown the baby out with the bath-water?

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

Since when are facts important in the creation of new laws? Laws are created to show that our elected officials are responsive to their constituents. We all know that constituents have the memory capacity of the fictional goldfish, and will only remember their emotional response to their elected representative doing something about the problem.

Three strikes laws are stupid. What they mean is that the first two times you get caught for a crime, you get a slap on the wrist and a chance to figure out what to do so you won't get caught next time.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That's one problem with them. Another is the wildly varying interpretations of what's considered a "strike", and worse still the fact that depending on the interpretation of "strike" as compared to the specific charges filed against you, you can accumulate multiple legal "strikes" from a single offense. And perhaps the worst is that if you're in a three-strikes state, you know that you already have two "strikes" against you, and you're committing what you know is a violent felony, it's a strong incentive to leave no living witnesses who can identify you.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the incentives are all wrong.

As a challenge, try to create incentives for a desired behavior that have no unintended and undesirable consequences. I spent a few years in business implementing the IT side of an arms escalation in the sales commission structure. Some really bright and motivated guys trying to keep the commission system as a way to generate profit for the business. The sales reps were constantly working to game the system by offering the lowest price to the customer, and gain the highest commission. When we started, that meant a loss on the entire sale. I was instrumental in helping to craft the policy, and the computer system to prevent gaming, but there were several hundred sales reps, each one entering and reentering customer orders in different configurations to yield the highest commission (which I had no problem with) and provide the lowest cost to the customer (which hurt the business bottom line, a problem.)

Doing it right is a huge problem, and not one with easy answers. There are only a few thousand people in congress. Trying to imagine what 300 million+ people can do with the law is a daunting task. (Even limiting the number of practicing lawyers and judges to the intent of the law is infeasible.)