Even the mayor has started to come around. “I have observed a slight increase, anecdotally, in very reckless driving with extraordinarily high rates of speed on local roads, and I’m comfortable if somebody in that scenario gets pulled over for a significant traffic violation,” Mayor Freddie O’Connell told the Banner.
Getting pulled over in Nashville used to be a fairly regular occurrence. Before graduating high school, I got at least a handful of speeding tickets and warnings, and attended driving school on two separate occasions; in general, I felt very monitored on the road. Because of that, I'd try to follow the speed limit, use turn signals more consciously, and come to a full stop at every stop sign. The thought of a law man out there who might pull me over changed the way I drove.
Then, in 2018, I learned that the Metro Nashville Police Department would no longer pull over drivers for minor infractions. After a series of studies were released purporting to find no correlation between the number of traffic stops and the reduction of criminal activity, traffic stops fell off precipitously.
It had long been a goal of the department to reduce the number of stops. In 2012, MNPD initiated 445,152 stops. By 2018, they got that number down to 204,484. In 2022, the most recent year for which there’s full data, MNPD conducted just 18,663 traffic stops.
With this in mind, at the start of Covid, I bought a cheap 1990 Mazda Miata and didn’t bother to register it. I treated it as a “fugitive” car of sorts. I stopped considering speed limit signs, referred to it as my go-kart, and on lazy Sunday afternoons, I’d blitz down Briley Parkway and split off onto the rural roads in North Davidson County. Looking back on that period, I am certain that I achieved nirvana.
My point in telling this story is that I could feel the lack of police presence on the roads, and as a result, my behavior changed. Even with the risk entailed while driving an unregistered vehicle, I wasn’t concerned in the slightest about being stopped.
Similarly, less conscious and more reckless drivers than myself across the country have changed their behavior. As traffic stops plummeted, drivers have acted more erratically and, as a result, roads have gotten more dangerous for both drivers and pedestrians. Pedestrian deaths are currently the highest they’ve been in forty years.
A number of reports analyzing what’s contributed to this rise focus on the size of SUVs, the use of smartphones, or inadequate infrastructure. Twelve years ago, an entire global initiative designed to address it called Vision Zero emerged. And cities like Nashville have adopted its tenets, building out pedestrian infrastructure and modifying roads to make them safer (e.g. illuminating crosswalks and banning right on red). Vision Zero initiatives are tied deeply into Freddie O’Connell’s transit referendum. It’s a program you hear about repeatedly from local leaders as a kind of secular mandate from heaven that requires urgent attention.
And yet, the solution is sitting right at their feet. The roads are more dangerous now because people drive more dangerously. The most immediate thing the city could do to make them safer is empower police officers to pull over people for driving like idiots again.
Rod's Comment: It seems hard to deny that traffic enforcement leads to better driving. I have received a few tickets in my life and after everyone, for a while, I am more cautious about driving the speed limit and coming to complete stops at stop signs and following other traffic laws. I would assume that not only does getting a ticket cause the person getting the ticket to drive more safely but when some people drive more safely, it effects the way other people drive. Why we ever thought that we could cut back on traffic enforcement and it not affect people's behavior, I don't know.
I walk almost every day for exercise. One is taking their life in their hand when crossing an intersection. After I get the "walk" light, cars just keep turning. I hope that Metro resuming traffic enforcement includes a focus on people making illegal turns and failing to yield the right-of-way to pedestrians.
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