ASHLAND — Twenty-six Amish who refused to pay their fines for violating a law that requires flashing lights on their buggies appeared in court on Friday.
Once there, Ashland Municipal Court Judge John Good ruled out the possibility of jail time for them and instead said he would impose liens on their real estate.
Amish buggy crashes combined (including those not even involving motor vehicles) had about a 2.5% fatality rate as opposed to about 1% for deer collisions. But even worse, if you normalize the rate of deaths by US population across 10 years and number of Amish buggy deaths by Ohio Amish population between 2009 and 2019 (best I can do for fair numbers in a rush), you’ll find rates of 0.000013 and 0.000202, respectively.
That’s more than 10x the fatality rate for the buggies. The Amish buggies are absolutely a larger threat to public safety per capita.
And if you drive slow enough for deer, you should be more than slow enough for buggies.
Ambulances driving the speed limit hit children sometimes. Should we outlaw medical transport? Of course not.
There will always be crashes because not all wrecks can be prevented through policy. So we have to balance the social, economic, environmental, and human cost of how we approach road safety.
If you drive 20mph in the driving lane of a highway with a speed limit of 65 just in case somebody wants to act like it’s the 17th century, it’s way, way more likely that either you’ll be rear-ended or someone passing you is gonna hit someone rise head-on versus simply driving the speed limit and asking the Amish to install a fucking blinker on their thousand-pound black box in the right of way.
Find me a road with a 65 mph speed limit where 20 mph is the speed actually required to not hit a stationary hazard or an animal sprinting into the road.
I don’t believe you can until you can show it to me.
In case you haven’t noticed, when a road has a speed limit of 65 mph, the foliage is trimmed far back from the road. That open space, where nothing can hide to leap in front of the car, is part of the design of a 65 mph road.