Dash cam, Part 3: Butterfly effect meets Broken Windows

Yesterday I was contacted regarding my first dash cam video which shows flagrant disregard for traffic control signs, and from that anonymous feedback, I realized the extent to which I've sorta put the car before the horse, here.
(Get it?? the car before the horse??  Arf!!). 

I launched into the dash cam video series without fully explaining the motivations and intentions behind it.  Therefore, I'd now like to back-track and cover that ground, because what I'm driving at here has significant ramifications not just for our neighborhood, but for our entire nation. 

Seriously, to say the same thing a different way, I (we) are not just old gray-haired eccentrics with nothing better to do with our time than to get all dramatic because some of our local residents are pathologically reckless drivers.  The wider impacts of this behavior are utterly profound.

Let me begin that explanation with one of my favorite proverbs, a bit of high wisdom that dates back to at least the 14th century (legendarily, Benjamin Franklin re-stated it formally in the year 1758):

FOR WANT OF A NAIL

For want of a nail, a shoe was lost

For want of a shoe, a horse was lost

For want of a horse, a rider was lost

For want of a rider, a battle was lost

For want of a battle, a kingdom was lost

All for the want of a horse shoe nail.

This proverb is a metaphorical restatement of the butterfly effect, the observation that final outcomes can be exquisitely sensitive to starting conditions. 

If we take the ancient horse shoe proverb and re-cast it in terms of contemporary motor vehicles, this is the type of butterfly effect that falls out of that:

FOR WANT OF TRAFFIC CONTROL

For want of traffic control, a kid's freedom to run and play safely outside was lost

For want of safe outdoor play, a kid's most natural fitness outlet was lost

For want of fitness outlet, a kid became obese and his long-term health was lost

For want of good health, the obese kid grew to become a less-productive adult whose net-positive contributions to private health care and Medicare systems were lost

For want of widespread net-positive contributions, America's financial strength was lost

For want of financial strength, America's position as a world power was lost

And all for the want of traffic control.

Is traffic control the ONLY factor in that causality?  Of course not - but nevertheless, it is one very REAL contributor.  Contrary to popular media hype, most parents today severely restrict their kids' abilities to run and play outside NOT because they are afraid of child-killer abductions, which are almost nonexistent, but because driving habits simply make it unsafe.   And now we have absolutely astonishing accelerations in national obesity rates despite the proliferation of organized sports for children (there seems to be something about free play that provides benefits to physiological regulation that structured sports do not, and I'll also post more on that topic later).

In his book "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference", writer Malcolm Gladwell touches upon Broken Windows: a criminological theory which asserts that signalling has a dramatic effect on behavior.  Because of this, minor social disorder manifesting as broken windows, graffiti, and (I would argue) unchecked traffic violations provide a signal to people that the system has already broken down.  Internalizing this message, people then proceed to behave accordingly - with even greater degrees of disorder.  And pretty soon under such conditions, kids can no longer play outside, and their view of the world shrinks even as their waistlines balloon. 

If you want a real eye-opener, read pages 141 to 147 of the paperback version of "The Tipping Point", where it describes how New York City did an about-face on its crime wave, not by going after serious felons, but by refusing to accept minor infractions of the law and thereby stopping the progression of crime in its tracks. 

The lesson:  seemingly insignificant quality-of-life crimes are "tipping points" for more severe social degradation.  More than once, our local Chief of Police Mike Jez has gone on record as stating, "The police department would prefer not to write speeding tickets".   I realize that budgets are limited and yes, we have many crimes in our city that, on their face, are more urgent and serious than moving violations, but I find Mr. Jez's assertion to be short-sighted and an inappropriate social signal because, from those little things the big things flow, both in terms of crime and lifestyle and everything else that springs from them:

For want of traffic control, ...

***

So there's the first part of my larger dash cam rationale, and I will close this post with another 30-second video clip.  This one shows the impossible conditions that exist IH-45 northbound at the El Dorado Boulevard exit.  Because IH-45 is woefully underbuilt through north Clear Lake, people tend to treat the feeders as mainlanes, driving on them en masse at speeds up to 70 mph despite the 35 to 45 mph posted limits.  To compound this misery, the El Dorado interchange is an antiquated cloverleaf that cannot be safely approached at prevailing illegal feeder speeds.  Here you see me initially hit the exit ramp while INCREASING my speed off the freeway, because that's often the only way to achieve a merge.  But then I realized that I couldn't possibly merge in time for the exit, so I had to slow down abruptly to about 15 mph.   That's a very dangerous situation to be forced into when people are approaching from behind at up to 70 mph, but there's often no other way to access the exit.  Note that the four cars that blasted by on my right side were both lane-jumping AND driving faster than the cars in the freeway mainlanes to camera left!