Why did the United States take exception? The U.S. delegation found it “necessary to dissociate ourselves from certain paragraphs” in the Declaration that “muddle our focus.” Issues like “climate change, gender equality, reduced inequalities, responsible consumption and production,” the delegation pronounced, do “not directly” relate to road safety.
Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf pronounced just the opposite when he opened the Stockholm gathering. The conference, he noted, represented “an “opportunity to link the road safety challenge to other sustainability challenges, such as climate change, health, equality, poverty and human rights.”
The delegates who gathered in Stockholm had plenty of reason to explore all those links, especially on equality. The nations with the lowest auto death rates just happen to be among the world’s nations with the smallest gaps between the wealthy and everyone else. Among major developed nations, the United States has both the highest traffic death rates and the most economic inequality.
Just coincidence? Or could maldistributions of income and wealth be contributing somehow to traffic tragedy?
Epidemiologists — the scientists who study the health of populations — have already linked societal death rates overall to inequality. People in more unequal nations, their research shows, live longer, healthier lives than people in more unequal nations.
Could the same dynamics be at play with traffic deaths? Could inequality impact what happens when people get behind steering wheels? Inequality most definitely could — and does.
Let’s start with the roads that stretch underneath our tires. These roads, if poorly maintained, can become hazards to our health. And roads across the United States have been poorly maintained — in no small part because America’s wealthy have been bankrolling tax-cut campaigns to keep their own taxes as low as they can get them. The richer America’s rich have become, the greater their interest in keeping taxes low and their greater their bankrolling capacity.
The tax-cuts the campaign contributions of the wealthy proliferate have starved state and local governments of the funding they need to adequately maintain our highways. The inevitable result? Highways get slick when rains come. Potholes have cars suddenly swerving. Faded traffic lane lines create driver confusion. The roads become more dangerous and driving more stressful.
Add to that stress the added daily tension of life in economically stratified social settings. Inequality, for instance, lengthens commuting times as average Americans have to locate themselves ever farther away from their jobs to find affordable housing. All this stress and tension ends up exploding into road rage, into the sorts of driving behaviors that make deadly traffic accidents much more likely.
But inequality doesn’t just nurture road rage. Research psychologists have also begun focusing attention on what we might call the “road arrogance” of the rich.
One new study, funded by the federal National Institutes of Health, has found drivers of expensive cars “less likely to stop for people on foot trying to cross the street.”
Drivers prone to “speeding, tailgating, passing without signaling, and generally driving aggressively tend to be men and tend to drive high-status cars,” adds the lead author of another recent study that appears in the Journal of International Psychiatry.
Both these studies build on research from psychologist Paul Piff that positively associates “higher social-class standing” with “increased feelings of entitlement and narcissism.”
Road rage. Road arrogance. Road disrepair. One other impact of inequality seems relevant here, what economist Robert Reich has dubbed the “secession of the successful.” Simply put, this thesis holds that the affluent, as levels of inequality increase, disengage from the rest of society. They live in their own separate world and don’t particularly fret about what’s happening outside their own social universe.
The most disengaged of all — our super rich — also have the most political power. They determine, to an exceptionally high degree, which problems get seriously addressed and which problems languish and fester. For our super rich, traffic safety simply doesn’t rate as a major concern.
These rich, after all, never hassle rush-hour traffic. They ride to work in the back seats of chauffeured limousines. They flip through spreadsheets and sip coffee while others stew and steam.
A deeply unequal society will always be unsafe.
