[jonney38]

Birdman--Great post. You and all the other posters point out that the problem is very, very complex. A vast variety of vehicles, conditions & driving skills. The story gets even more complex when one looks at the maze of government which determines highway policy. In states, you have "transportation departments". They have a vested interest in keeping numbers up on the highways. Thus, they tend to have "studies" which are designed to steer things toward that end. Instead of hiring social scientists study things, whose background is human behavior, they tend to stick with their own, civil engineers. Next come state legistlators, who pass the actual laws. Every state capital is packed with lobbyests from every corner of highway intersts. Then, there is the Fed. Gov't and US Congress. Saftey hardly comes up, except to justify some special interests goals. It could enter the picture in a more honest way if a state's public health/safety departments were asked to start from scratch to design the laws for highway use. If such departments said, "We are going to set a goal of reducing to a minimum deaths on the highways," we might see many of the ideas posted here come to pass--better spacing, more training, more DUI enforce, etc. We currently have little peer reviewed academic research about how to improve highway safety and no political will on the horizon to collect it. That is why I'm stuck on what little information we actually have, crash dummy tests. Drive my Focus faster, I die younger.