Light On Dark Water

Speed Bumps and the End of Civilization

There’s a lot one could say about the publication by
National Review of
a list of what they consider to be the
top fifty conservative pop songs. I find this in general to be an
odd thing to do, but one thing that struck me as significant was
the inclusion of the Sammy Hagar song “I Can’t Drive
55” (lyrics here).
I’ve only heard it once or twice but it struck
me as not much more than an anthem for louts in cars. I
can’t see anything conservative about it at all. If any
ideological significance can be extracted from it, surely
it’s a fairly pure libertarianism: I see no hint whatsoever
in the lyrics that the driver of a car recognizes any obligation
to other people, although maybe it’s a concession to civil
order on Hagar’s part that he’s willing to surrender
his license rather than head for the hills to prepare an armed
resistance.

I consider a more conservative view on driving practices to
have been captured in a cartoon I saw some time ago—two men
are sitting in hell, and one says to the other something like
(I’m paraphrasing from memory): “Pulling up behind
people and flashing my headlights at them. What about
you?”

My local paper regularly publishes letters and phone calls
from people who are outraged that speed bumps (or breakers, or
lumps, or tables, or traffic circles, as the various obstructions
are called) have appeared on a street where they had not
previously been. My sympathy is all with the residents of the
street, not the drivers. I assume that anyone outraged enough by
a speed breaker to complain about it at length to the paper is
one of those who caused the obstacle to be needed in the first
place. Usually the street involved is a residential one that has
gotten adopted as a short cut which avoids bigger and more
congested ones. This would be only annoying if the short-cutters
were well behaved, but inevitably a number of them believe
themselves entitled to drive forty or fifty miles an hour where
the posted limit is twenty-five or thirty, and are not shy about
showing their impatience and disregard for anything that might
slow them down.

So the people who live on the street find their lives and
those of their children and pets at risk from the reckless
drivers, and they ask the city to put in speed breakers. I figure
they have to be pretty concerned and unhappy to ask for something
which is, after all, going to be a big inconvenience for them,
too.

I suppose it’s possible that the behavior of the drivers
hasn’t really changed much in recent years, and it’s
just that the residents are pushing back more vigorously. I
wonder the same thing about the phenomenon of people running red
lights. Every day upon leaving work I have to pull out into a
major street from a small side street. There’s a light
there, but I know better than to assume that green means,
unqualifiedly, “go.” At least once a week someone
runs the light, and I don’t mean that the car just slips by as the
yellow turns to red, but that it accelerates from a block away at the
first sight of yellow and flies through the intersection well
after the light has turned green for me. Have people always done
this so regularly and with such abandon? I have no statistics
upon which to decide the question, but I certainly seem to see it
more often.

If they really are increasing, these bad habits are small
signs of a bigger decay, of increasing indifference to the rights
of others, the common good, and for that matter simple courtesy.
So goes the devolution of liberty, as intolerable behavior
requires the imposition of more and pettier rules upon matters
which used to be managed acceptably by a general presumption of
self-restraint.