ASHLAND — Twenty-six Amish who refused to pay their fines for violating a law that requires flashing lights on their buggies appeared in court on Friday. Once there, Ashland Municipal […]
Deer will no wear reflectors (except their eyes of you count that) nor active lighting. If you can’t see a buggy with reflectors, you’re going too fast.
While collision with deer can be dangerous, the reality is it can’t be controlled for, and the result is usually a broken windshield and a dead or injured deer.
A buggy having lights is a minimal requirement that’s easy to implement and helps prevent a much more dangerous type of collision with zero downsides. It doesn’t even conflict with Amish beliefs about technology - not that that should even matter when it comes to policy on public safety.
It’s cheap, effective, and will save lives. It’s a no-brainer.
Each year in the United States, deer–vehicle collisions resulted in at least 59,000 human injuries and 440 human fatalities.[1]
In 2000, of the 6.1 million lightweight motor vehicle collisions in the US, 1 million involved animal-vehicle collisions. Deer–vehicle collisions lead to about $1.1 billion in property damage every year.[2] State and federal governments, insurance companies, and drivers spend an additional $3 billion in an effort to reduce and manage the increasing number of deer-vehicle collisions.[3]
Majority of animal-involved human deaths in the US are deer-vehicle collisions. Going slower can greatly diminish the frequency and severity of those collisions.
Amish buggy crashes combined (including those not even involving motor vehicles) had about a 2.5% fatality rate as opposed to about 1% for deer collisions. But even worse, if you normalize the rate of deaths by US population across 10 years and number of Amish buggy deaths by Ohio Amish population between 2009 and 2019 (best I can do for fair numbers in a rush), you’ll find rates of 0.000013 and 0.000202, respectively.
That’s more than 10x the fatality rate for the buggies. The Amish buggies are absolutely a larger threat to public safety per capita.
Ambulances driving the speed limit hit children sometimes. Should we outlaw medical transport? Of course not.
There will always be crashes because not all wrecks can be prevented through policy. So we have to balance the social, economic, environmental, and human cost of how we approach road safety.
If you drive 20mph in the driving lane of a highway with a speed limit of 65 just in case somebody wants to act like it’s the 17th century, it’s way, way more likely that either you’ll be rear-ended or someone passing you is gonna hit someone rise head-on versus simply driving the speed limit and asking the Amish to install a fucking blinker on their thousand-pound black box in the right of way.
Deer will no wear reflectors (except their eyes of you count that) nor active lighting. If you can’t see a buggy with reflectors, you’re going too fast.
While collision with deer can be dangerous, the reality is it can’t be controlled for, and the result is usually a broken windshield and a dead or injured deer.
A buggy having lights is a minimal requirement that’s easy to implement and helps prevent a much more dangerous type of collision with zero downsides. It doesn’t even conflict with Amish beliefs about technology - not that that should even matter when it comes to policy on public safety.
It’s cheap, effective, and will save lives. It’s a no-brainer.
Majority of animal-involved human deaths in the US are deer-vehicle collisions. Going slower can greatly diminish the frequency and severity of those collisions.
Amish buggy crashes combined (including those not even involving motor vehicles) had about a 2.5% fatality rate as opposed to about 1% for deer collisions. But even worse, if you normalize the rate of deaths by US population across 10 years and number of Amish buggy deaths by Ohio Amish population between 2009 and 2019 (best I can do for fair numbers in a rush), you’ll find rates of 0.000013 and 0.000202, respectively.
That’s more than 10x the fatality rate for the buggies. The Amish buggies are absolutely a larger threat to public safety per capita.
And if you drive slow enough for deer, you should be more than slow enough for buggies.
Ambulances driving the speed limit hit children sometimes. Should we outlaw medical transport? Of course not.
There will always be crashes because not all wrecks can be prevented through policy. So we have to balance the social, economic, environmental, and human cost of how we approach road safety.
If you drive 20mph in the driving lane of a highway with a speed limit of 65 just in case somebody wants to act like it’s the 17th century, it’s way, way more likely that either you’ll be rear-ended or someone passing you is gonna hit someone rise head-on versus simply driving the speed limit and asking the Amish to install a fucking blinker on their thousand-pound black box in the right of way.