Since I've been driving all over the state this week, I though I'd share a few excerpts from a book I recently read, Traffic.

• We do draw a lot of information from bumper stickers.  The point was demonstrated in 1969 at California State College, a place marked by violent clashes between the Black Panther Party and the police. In the trial, fifteen subjects of varying appearance and type of car affixed a bright BLACK PANTHER sticker to their auto’s rear bumper. No one in the group had received traffic violations in the past year. After two weeks with the bumper sticker, the group has been given thirty-three citations.

• What is meant to be the “forgiving road,” argues [professor of urban planning Eric] Dumbaugh, becomes “the permissive road.” Safety features meant to reduce the consequences of driver error encourage drivers to drive in a way requiring those generous safety provisions.

• This raises the interesting, if seemingly outlandish, question of why car drivers, virtually alone among users of wheeled transportation, do not wear helmets.  Yes, cars do provide a nice metal cocoon with inflatable cushions.  But in Australia, for example, head injuries among car occupants, according to research by the Federal Office of Road Safety, make up half the country’s traffic-injury costs.  Helmets, cheaper and more reliable than side-impact air bags, would reduce injuries and cut fatalities by some 25 percent.

 And since it's 9-11

• Grimly tally the number of people who have been killed by terrorism in the United States since the State Department began keeping records in the 1960s, and you’ll get a total of less than 5,000 – roughly the same number, it has been pointed out, as those who have been struck by lightning.  But each year, with some fluctuation, the number of people killed in car crashes in the United States tops 40,000.

In Missouri it's illegal to turn left on red onto a one way street from another one way street.

That could all change.

State Representative Mike Daus recently introduced HB 2335 which would shave crucial seconds, even minutes, off the commute to and from the maze of one way streets that is downtown St. Louis (as well as other one way streets across this great state of ours). 

According to Wikipedia, Missouri is one of only a handful of states that bans this practice.  As Wikipedia unequivocally states, "In 37 other states and Puerto Rico, it is legal to make a  left turn on red only from a one-way street. Left turns on red are prohibited in the states of South Dakota (unless permitted by local ordinance), Connecticut, Maine, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Rhode Island and in the District of Columbia and Guam, as well as in New York City."

We are not Guam!  We are Missouri!  And we should be free to turn left on red onto one way streets from another one way street whenever we please!

Let us join our brothers and sisters in all of our neighboring states and bring this tyranny to an end!

Rep. Daus is term-limited so it is now or never.

My friend Mike Cozart has started a site for folks who want to blog (and read blogs) about the Highway 40 shutdown.  40blogger.com