Opinion: Is it safe?
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How does safety make people dumber? Courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily comes this Shankar Vedantam column describing how consequence mitigation encourages risky behavior.
And even if you don’t increase your own risk-taking because, for example, you bike in a helmet rather than bareheaded, it turns out hell really is other people. One researcher studies how drivers react differently to bicyclists based on some perceived safety variables. And it turns out (what are the chances?) that if you really want to be rigorous in these experiments you have to pretend to be a woman:
Traffic psychologist Ian Walker at the University of Bath in England once conducted a similar experiment that vividly illustrates the problem with well-intentioned interventions that backfire. Walker rode a bicycle equipped with a distance sensor, video camera and a computer. Over 15-to-20-minute periods, he rode with his helmet on, then with his helmet off. He rode some segments three feet from the curb and others closer to the edge of the road. With each iteration, he changed a single variable. In the interest of being rigorous, he even obtained a shoulder-length wig of curly black hair, so that some passing motorists would think he was a woman.
Results: Drivers are less likely to run over women cyclists. There’s no way to protect yourself from safety. And as long as people are still having promiscuous sex with many anonymous partners without protection while at the same time experimenting with mind-expanding drugs in a consequence-free environment, I’ll be sound as a pound.
Is safety burnout another problem we can pin on Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara? This American Heritage article suggests so:
McNamara had a much different view of automobiles from Reith, an enthusiast who loved racing. His chief concerns were fuel economy and safety. He may have been the first senior executive at an American auto company to care at all about either. Soon after taking over at the Ford Division in 1955, McNamara had gone way out on a limb by adding several safety devices to the 1956 model and then making them the focal point of the marketing campaign. By today’s standards it was a modest effort. The 1956 Ford’s five-part Lifeguard System included two standard features, a deep-dish steering wheel that gave way in a crash and safety latches that kept doors from springing open on impact. Three options also were offered: front seat belts anchored to a steel plate; a padded instrument panel and padded sun visors; and rearview mirrors with backing that reduced glass fallout when shattered. Also, the front and back seat supports were redesigned to reduce the possibility of their coming loose in a crash.
Saab claims to have pioneered the use of seat belts as standard. There’s a scene in ‘Tucker: The Man and his Dream’ (which to my astonishment seems to be considered a bad movie) wherein a bunch of Detroit apparatchiks reject Preston Tucker’s then-innovative plan to include seat belts in the 1948 Torpedo because they’re afraid seat belts will create the impression that the automobile is unsafe. Some say that’s accurate; some say it ain’t. In any event, it’s another one of those scenes (like the Modernist/Post-Modernist architecture skirmish in ‘The Fountainhead’) where the soulless, weaselly yes men turn out to be right, though their reasons may be wrong. Automobiles are unsafe, people need more reminders of that bald truth, and if there’s one thing wrong with this here modern America, it’s that too many people get behind the wheel without a proper sense of the tragic business they’re engaged in.