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Do Traffic Tickets Save Lives?

Pity the poor traffic cop. He's the last guy you want to see in your rear-view mirror when you're speeding down the highway. Why isn't he out looking for murderers instead of nailing drivers for minor infractions of the law?

Well, according to a major research project by scientists in Canada and California, that cop just might be saving your life. Or the life of someone else.

The researchers have found that a traffic ticket reduces a driver's chance of being involved in a fatal accident by a whopping 35 percent, at least for a few weeks. The effect doesn't last long, however. Within three to four months, the lead foot is back on the pedal and the risk of killing yourself or someone else is back up to where it was before that cop stared you in the eye and wrote out that expensive citation.

The bottom line, according to the research, published in the June 28 issue of The Lancet, is that traffic tickets save lives. Maybe thousands of lives, every year. Yet traffic laws are enforced sporadically, almost as if by whim, partly because people just don't like traffic cops, and there are lots of other things for the government to spend money on than enforcing highway safety laws.

The Grim Statistics

That attitude needs to be changed, according to Donald A. Redelmeier

of the University of Toronto and Robert J. Tibshirani of Stanford University. Both men are medical researchers, and this isn't the first time they've taken a hard look at highway safety. Their 1998 study caused a stir when they linked cell phone usage to traffic accidents. Now they're back, saying traffic tickets are good for our health.

They were prodded into this project by some very grim statistics. Each year, more than a million persons die in traffic accidents worldwide. If that many people died of SARS in a year, the public response would probably border on hysteria, but we have come to accept traffic fatalities as a way of life.

In addition, another 25 million people around the world are permanently disabled by traffic accidents, and many of them — as well as the fatalities — are children.

Taking It Easy After a Ticket?

When Redelmeier and Tibshirani and fellow researcher Leonard Evans set out to see if traffic tickets really do any good, they found an enormous resource in the Canadian province of Ontario. The full driving record of every licensed driver there was made available to them, warts and all, giving the researchers a huge data base of more than 10 million licensed drivers, 8,975 of whom were involved in a fatal accident during the 11-year period covered by the research, from 1988 through 1998.

"We looked at the month prior to a fatal accident, and the number of