Texas police used a monster truck to promote seat belts. It shows all that’s wrong with U.S. road safety
To learn why the US is so abysmal at road safety, you could read through a pile of academic studies and investigations. Or you could examine a single social media post from one Texas police department.
August 14, 2024 @ 5:07 pm
Yup… been waiting for this one. Let me say the very best of propaganda is crafted from the absolute truth, and this article is a fine example of that.
I’m almost seventy and I’ve been operating motor vehicles since I was fourteen with an outstanding safety record, I learned from my father who was a mill ion mile long haul trucker. Where road safety is a high priority issue I’ll speak to here in a moment I really don’t believe the intent of this article has anything to do with road safety. Why would I say that? The final sentence in the article the author obviously wants to be his reader’s conclusion as well as his own.
The author ends by saying Contrary to the Cedar Park police’s message, that’s a responsibility that falls largely on government officials themselves—not on individual travelers. Quite a logical disconnect when the individual traveler is in moment by moment command of a motor vehicle and therefore, as part and parcel of command rank, responsible to safely navigate any environment that might be encountered as a consequence of their own command decision.
That logical disconnect on a rational fear is exactly the sort of thing the fauxLiberal love to exploit to promote transferring responsibility from the individual (the traveller) to the collective (the government), with the maturity of personal freedom the inevitable casualty of the exchange.
Now, as for road safety? Can the government help or hinder that noble cause? Of course they can. To work with what the article gives? The government can help by refusing to issue a tag to any vehicle so modified as to make it uncontrollable above say one half gravity of lateral acceleration… which pretty well eliminates “monster trucks” from public roadways. And anyone who has ever done any serious off-roading in a pickup knows there is no reason to lift the coachwork much above the frame line, that just weakens your truck, doesn’t get you any more ground clearance and makes it prone to tipping over on a side slope… or the highway.
Road safety is like all other safety… there are individuals who make it a point to be safe, but no such thing as a safe environment. And just for the record? I HATE driving in Texas. Them folks are fine folks anywhere except on the road where they are plumb f-ing crazy!