Today's (4/8) Letter of the Day confirmed something I was merely suspecting, that the flashing lights on emergency vehicles are actually causing more problems than they solve. I remember when police cars had just the one bubble gum flasher on top. Then two, then a bar, then more lights on the bar, and now these high output high-tech xenon/halogen multi-colored strobes.
Illinois State Police and California Highway Patrol studies (with input from our own University of Minnesota) have shown the collision rate for emergency vehicles displaying full lights while parked next to the highway is two and a half times higher than for nonemergency vehicles.
Illinois removed the light bars from half of its cars in the study and experienced a 65 percent reduction in accidents. In contrast to red and white flashing lights, amber lights send a very specific message: danger, caution, stay away.
It's exactly as this Minneapolis letter writer and another from Plymouth say. These lights consume your entire attention at night to where you can see nothing else, including people, which includes police and patrol officers who are paying the price.
It's an illustrative example in critical thinking that applies to many situations in life. I was as surprised as anyone to find out those ramp entrance meters were actually clogging the freeways until then Senator Dick Day forced a six week test to prove the rest of us wrong.
Hmmm. Why am I thinking about our public schools just now?
I don't know. What /are/ you thinking about the public schools? Might it be that all the uproar over class sizes is just a make-work project for teachers who shouldn't be teaching in the first place? I mean, if you can't hold the attention of 24 10th-graders, what the heck are you doing in front of a classroom? 35 kindergarten kids, you haven't a chance, but that's where the common sense comes in and we don't even need a study for that. Spend the money where it needs to be spent and for cat's sake QUIT spending money where it doesn't need to be spent.
You also might be thinking about the inefficiency-- heck, absolute wastage-- of integration funding, or special ed, or ECFE, or "Whee, sex!" education, or zero tolerance policies, or at least half of the Minneapolis school district's budget, since they can't seem to graduate more than half of their students.
Are you really suggesting we need a study, unlike these other things, to know that these follies are follies? Haven't we studied and experimented enough with our kids, instead of educating them?
Posted by: J. Ewing | Sunday, April 10, 2011 at 07:51 AM
Illinois paid attention to the evidence and improved results. We have abundant evidence that Head Start doesn't work, some evidence that it's actually harmful but nobody has the courage to act on it. So, we lose another generation.
Posted by: Speed Gibson | Sunday, April 10, 2011 at 07:52 PM