History’s biggest social experiment is starting to yield weird results.
One is that the frequency of car accidents — and deaths and injuries associated with them — has plummeted across the U.S. as the country’s workforce stays home.
I haven’t filled any of the cars in the family since mid-march. I don’t even remember when was the last time I saw gasoline at 1.78 a gallon, but I have refused to fill-up. Many of the countries most serious problems would fix themselves if gasoline cost 10 a gallon.
A decrease in car crashes during a national shutdown is “weird.”
I think you meant to type “likely.”
You get a lot fewer people yammering on their phones while they blast down the road, running late to that sales appointment or to pick up Krissy at the day care, and this is bound to happen.
Cant wait for Trump to take credit for improving roadway safety…
Anybody get the “shelter in place” rebate from their insurers ? Got $25.52 Shocker.
The earth is getting a brief respite from incessant human assault. It shows just how joyful the earth will be once we’re extinct. If the human race can produce a malignancy named Donald Trump it calls into question what it was all worth. We’re just an evolutionary cul-de-sac and will not be missed at all when the last of us goes toes-up.
“The earth is getting a brief respite from incessant human assault.”
Did you catch some of the pictures they were showing from around the world the before and after shots of a world with out cars with everyone being home now?
Well, sure, but I just got laid off from my job as a crash-test dummy!
Reminds me of the Popes lonely prayer in St. Peter’s Square where he directly addressed our failed stewardship of the Earth and seemed to directly relate our current suffering to it.
I dunno that we are an evolutionary cul-de-sac. I see it more like an evolutionary opportunity…horribly horribly squandered.
For you Hippies in the Audience. Guess that tune
You say it’s healing but nobody’s feeling it
Somebody’s dealing, somebody’s stealing it
You say you don’t see and you don’t
You say you won’t know and you won’t let it come
Everything someday will be gone except silence
Earth will be quiet again
Seas from clouds will wash off the ashes of violence
Left as the memory of men
There will be no survivors my friend
500 fatal car crashes in California per DAY? Am I reading that right? That can’t be right. That would mean each year at least 182,000 people die from car crashes just in CA, when in 2014 for example, there were under 1,500.
Not sure what you’re trying to say there, but it seems at a minimum that’s a misleading statement. Did you mean non-fatal?
That’s actually surprising to me. We had to venture out on Sunday, and had heard how that even though the roads are relatively empty, people are speeding like bats out of hell on the interstates. We were on a Chicago area interstate, and we had cars blowing past us easily doing 25 to 30 miles over the posted speed limit, and not a cop in sight.
Crashes include minor fender benders. We have to deal with traffic analyses all the time when trying to prove how land could have been developed before it was taken. Any contact between vehicles that gets reported is counted. I’ve seen intersections…one intersection alone…that can produce like 150 “accidents” in just 3 years.
New kid on the block
– Study Demonstrates Similar Efficacy with 5- and 10-Day Dosing Durations of Remdesivir –
Sunday was the first time I had to purchase gas since February.
I can top that:
SONG FOR THE EARTH words by Joel Sattler & Jim Scott/music by Jim Scott
As the rain sifts through the trees
It threatens nature’s ancient harmonies
Poison rain from an ailing sky
Beneath the ground roots will die
And that is why I sing this song for the earth
The tainted river struggles to the open sea
Defiled is the mountain’s majesty
All of life is a chain
When one is hurt we all feel the pain
What do we gain?
For what it’s worth, I’m offering this song for the earth
The sea is where all life begins
The ocean is our origin
If she dies, nothing survives,
No nothing can, nothing can
And who will look with awe upon the monuments of man?
But the trees still strive to grow
Watching generations come and go
Green and tall, the land is theirs
Feeding the soil, clearing the air
Living their song
A song for the earth
The earth is cleaner too and I hate the thought of going back to incessant traffic and pollution.
I’d miss us. ¯\(ツ)/¯
It specifically says 500 fatal crashes per day. Which is absurd. The country as a whole averaged a little over 100 fatalities/day in 2019. Assuming that even a fraction of those wrecks accounted for more than one death, that’s probably somewhere between 80-90 fatal crashes per day, nationwide.