Correlation is not causation… ? In what manner does BLM protests affect traffic on a mass scale

The protests are a red herring. It's the cops not wanting to be charged with murder so they just make less traffic stops.

I don’t think they were afraid of being charged with murder in the first place. Qualified immunity for police is quite strongly backed.

Yea I don't know about BLM protests but cops have vanished from enforcing traffic laws where I am.

I would say someone blows a red light at least 50% of the time at a red light.

There might just not be enough cops now though demographically. That would be my guess. The same way there aren't enough nurses.

I think this can be addressed by using speed cameras instead of chase cars to enforce speed limits. Tint and lights can be covered by periodic vehicle inspection. These are fairly common elsewhere, but the US chooses cops that give chase.

There’s no real evidence that that enforcement leads to lower accident rates. Most people simply drive at whatever speed they think is safe and the ones who think that’s a faster speed find the tickets worth it.

This happened at the same time screen's got distracting, so any correlation is likely coincidence.

Similarly the United States once introduced a maximum highway speed that lowered highway speeds everywhere. Fatality rates went down, but it turned out to be unrelated, Similarly the United States once introduced a maximum highway speed that lowered highway speeds everywhere. Accident rates went down, they just happened to do it at the same time legislators were responding to the unsafe at any speed era. They lifted the maximum speed, speeds went up, and rates of accidents and fatalities kept going down.

There is a strong positive effect that more enforcement of traffic laws reduces traffic accidents: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/effect-high-visibility-e...

While interesting, that is not correlating traffic laws with reduction of accidents generally, it is saying that using short term bursts of “ highly visible enforcement” does. that’s well and good and I suppose perhaps that has been curtailed also due to police staffing shortages, I don’t know that there is any evidence that the pre-pandemic background level of enforcement really had much effect.

And from what I understand the level of accidents we are seeing now is basically on trend with what you would have expected if you just followed the trendline forward from 2019, even if the pandemic never happened.

yeah, because all this enforcement is somehow happening stealthily. All these cops pulling people over but flipping on their ninja switch so no one sees them.

No, but generally they do it so infrequently that you bake it into the cost of driving if you’re a frequent speeder. For many years I just considered it a cost of driving, but if I knew a lot of cops were enforcing in one area (like when I got 3 speeding tickets in under 24 hours in the same stretch of road) I’d slow down there.

There are known places where cops pull people over a lot and you’ll see people go from 15 over to driving the speed limit there, then accelerate right after.