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To be fair...
...the guidelines *do* say you have to wait in your car.
Disparities
We'll close most businesses, make people stay at home, and incredibly inconvenience almost everyone in the US to stop the spread of COVID. This is understandable! COVID kills many and injuries even more.
But will we do anything to address injuries related to driving? Nope! I'm not suggesting banning cars. Just make driving tests more strenuous and frequent and impose significant penalties for moving violations.
This is an old, brain-dead argument about risk trade-offs.
We still do not know the likely total deaths from the pandemic, so you don't have a reasonable scale of comparison yet. I recall when our President said there would be zero deaths, and it would go away in the spring like magic, and we're now over 100,000 deaths with no apparent end in sight, likely undercounting them (when governors like that Florida dolt aren't deliberately hiding them), and likely set up for a resurgence in a few months' time.
Further, car accidents aren't capable of multiplying geometrically as this virus still can. A sudden spike in accidents that can lead to a healthcare system crash isn't likely to happen. We recognized the risks in auto travel years ago, and through Federal regulation have taken steady steps to improve its safety, which would be a nice thing for our Federal government to do with the virus, but which the current one is utterly incompetent to do.
But nice try.
Well
I'm suggesting the efforts to contain the fatality and injury rate due to cars aren't working.
There was nearly 40,000 deaths related to motor vehicles last year plus 100k+ who are permanently injured in some way. There's got to be something short of massive economic shutdown which can lower that number.
???
So - you believe that if there were no traffic laws at all, and no safety equipment or traffic controls, that the traffic death & injury rate would not increase at all? Because that's what "aren't working" means. In reality, thousands of people were not injured or killed, because of efforts to prevent those injuries and deaths.
Yeah
They aren't working well enough if 40,000 people are dead each year. Take what's currently being done and go further.
How about this: Get caught driving and using your phone? No fine, but the car is impounded for a month. Make a speeding ticket proportional to someone's income.
Society shouldn't be willing to "accept" 40,000 people dead due to do traffic any more than they should "accept" 100,000 dead due to COVID.
Traffic fatalities are rising
Traffic fatalities are rising in America. What are we doing about it? Not much. To be happy with the status quo is to be happy with 40,000 preventable deaths caused by drivers every year.
Hmm
https://www.nsc.org/road-safety/safety-topics/fatality-estimates
That's with 300k more people in 2019 vs 2018. Change is hard and change is slow but it's happening.
Things are being done
Although cell phone usage and other distracted driving problems have made it worse in the last few years.
The death rate per 100,000 has been on a pretty steady decline since the 60s (with a bit of a jump after the oil shock of the early 70s).
But there is still room for more improvement.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatality-trends/dea...
Also the higher traffic crash rates of the last 3 months have been called out, not aware of any tabulation of stepped up enforcement rates though.
I'm in favor
of much harder driving tests and periodic re-tests. It boggles my mind how basic the tests are here vs some other countries in Europe. I'm also in favor of enforcing harsh penalties for distracted driving. I agree the answer isn't to ban cars, it's to keep idiots from operating them.
I patronized Rogers for years when I had an
office nearby. It was a great old-timey barbershop experience. He always had the latest Playboys to read, would record the pay-per-view fights and turn the chair around so I could watch them while he narrated the blow-by-blow. And he had a lot of customers who were Sox season ticket holders (town cops and firefighters, mostly) who would tape the tickets for the games they couldn't use to his mirror; I picked up a lot of games that way, back in the pre-Title Town days.
Ah, barbershop porn.
I always wanted to sneak an issue of Playgirl into a barbershop but never did.... sigh
"Harumph, I said, 'read', as in the articles. The
magazine has a long history of award-winning short fiction, in-depth interviews, and reviews of the latest cars, consumer electronics, and men's fashion. It had porn in it, you say?! Egads! All I ever noticed was some very tasteful, beautifully-lit art photography. Surely you don't mean that?!"
I was most definitely reading...
The articles ;)
Sorry...
Must've been shear terror for a moment in there.
Close shave?
Thankfully no one killed, otherwise, Barbacide?
Right
Looks like it was pretty hair raising, but in the end, the car didn't take anything off the top, like the ceiling.
Is anyone else incapable
Of hearing “Sharon”, and not hearing a confused Ozzy Osbourne yelling at his wife?
If you're a barbershop...
you've gotta understand, cars are going to hit you.
Hahahahaha. This joke never
Hahahahaha. This joke never gets old. Why did it take so long for someone to post it? You’re slipping!