Roadkill

Usually I track government paydays on my calendar so I know to stay off the roads, but I failed to carry the notations forward into 1999. For this minor oversight I sprouted a few hundred more gray hairs, as I cruised along As Lito road one Friday evening, and found myself boresighted by some moron in a four wheel drive pickup truck determined to crash into me like my car was a giant magnet or something.

I returned to home base, swapped my car for my totally massive four wheel drive truck, and ventured out again (I had an appointment to keep), snug in the arms of three tons of Detroit iron.

The next morning, as I updated this year’s calendar to reflect government paydays, this item crossed my desk: mandatory liability insurance.

Requiring liability insurance is pretty typical in the states, so I guess it was just a matter of time before the trend came out here. It seems like a reasonable enough idea to me. Still, it address the symptom of accidents (repair and medical costs), without fixing the cause of the accidents (bad drivers).

Insurance, as useful as it is, can’t erase all the costs of our bad drivers. According to an article in yesterday’s Saipan Tribune, we racked up 109 traffic deaths from the period 1986 through 1998. Insurance can’t bring back those lives. Nor can it totally cure those who were mangled in crashes.

I’ve seen nothing done to get our aggressive drivers off the roads, though. We’ve got some angry people out there with nothing to lose, and they seem determined to share their misery with the world at large when they get behind the wheel. From what I’ve seen, and from observations made by some friends, the situation seems to be getting worse.

Saipan has no ice storms, no blizzards, no fog, not even anywhere where you can (legally) drive fast. And yet the daily accident toll, judging from the evening news tally, seems to hover around 10 or so per day.

We’re up against the economics of “externality” with our road-bozo situation. An externality is a cost imposed on others when someone consumes an economic good. Pollution, for example, is a classic case of an externality. Pollution is a pretty difficult issue to tackle, though, because the economics get pretty complicated pretty quick. Consider this: If you had zero pollution, you’d have zero economy. There is actually an optimal level of pollution (and this calculation is a science unto itself).

The optimal level of bad and aggressive drivers, by contrast, stands at zero. It doesn’t take an economist to figure that one out. The next one killed or crippled could be you or someone you love. Well, come to think of it, it could be someone you hate…I guess even roadkill has a silver lining. Now there’s an idea: Invite
your entire list of enemies to a party at Bonzai cliff on a government payday evening, and rest assured that half of them will get killed on the way.