Dear Mahatma: A major reason for the decline in traffic fatalities is our recently enacted primary seat-belt law. Please remind your faithful readers (I am one) to please always wear their safety belt. -- Doc Charles
Dear Doc: You are correct in that Arkansas now requires front-seat passengers, and kids in the back seats, to wear a seat belt. What's meant by primary is that police can now stop, and ticket, drivers and passengers for not wearing a seat belt. Previously, that was a secondary offense, tacked on to another traffic offense.
(Doc's remarks are in reference to last week's column, in which the number of traffic fatalities was tracked for several years and wild speculation ensued on why they have declined. The seat-belt law was not included.)
Now for some more data, although some readers were no doubt put off by last week's snootload of numbers. Sometimes, numbers are useful.
A federal agency with an extremely long name -- the U.S. Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration -- tells us the seat-belt use rate nationally in 2014 was 87 percent. Low state was South Dakota with 68.9 percent; high was Oregon with a usage rate of 97.8 percent.
Arkansas, bless its heart, was at 74.4 percent in 2014. That's down from 76.7 percent in 2013. In 2007, the rate was 69.9 percent. In 2009, the first year of the state's primary seat-belt law, the rate was 74.4 percent. Progress, but not prodigious. But there's now a goal, to be like Oregon.
An old friend and bookend, Lyndon Finney, has passed along even more numbers. Plus, thankfully, a lot of supporting words. They all come in the form of a report on the interstate highway system compiled by TRIP, an organization in Washington, D.C., that says it researches, evaluates and distributes information on surface transportation issues. The report is fresh meat, issued in June.
Mr. Finney points us to the section about the big rigs that carry so much stuff. See more about stuff at the end.
Says the report:
• Travel by big rigs accounted for 11 percent of vehicle miles traveled on the interstate system in 2014.
• Wyoming and New Mexico had the highest percentage of interstate traffic by big rigs, with 33 percent and 28 percent, respectively.
• Arkansas, bless its heart, was third at 23 percent.
This got us to thinking about population density. Wyoming's is 6.0 people per square mile; New Mexico's is 17.2; Arkansas' is 56.9.
So while those states technically have more truck traffic, ours feels like a whole lot more. We know this personally, having driven recently from Little Rock to Memphis, and from Little Rock to Texarkana. Interstates 40 and 30 were a river of big rigs.
Let's get back to stuff. This was written on the back of a big rig: "Don't like big trucks? Don't buy stuff. Problem solved."
Touché, trucker guy.
Mahatma@arkansasonline.com
Metro on 08/06/2016