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

[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.