Call the Health Department, Not the Cops
Marblehead's 75 Years Behind Schedule
Everyone is using your street to bypass the traffic jams on Pleasant or the drop off traffic at Village is a nightmare. You’re scared to let your kids play street hockey or even bike around the neighborhood. Who ya gonna call?
If you’re in Marblehead, you’re going to call the cops. That’s because it’s not the cars causing the problem, it’s the drivers. They’re either on their phones, in too much of a hurry, or just plain stupid. If the cops would only enforce the law… problem solved.
That’s old fashioned thinking. Through the first half century of the automobile age, automakers convinced the public that their products were perfectly safe if operated correctly. If they were unsafe, it was because the “nut behind the wheel” was disobeying the law or mentally unfit for the task.
Then, about 75 years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote Epidemic on the Highways. Traffic casualties should be treated as a public health, not a policing problem, he wrote:
“Admonishing individuals to drive carefully seems a little bit like trying to stop a typhoid epidemic by urging each family to boil its own drinking water and not eat oysters; that may help, of course, but why not try vaccinations, setting standards of cleanliness for food handlers, and purifying everybody’s drinking water in the reservoirs?”
Moynihan was not alone but part of a growing movement to reimagine traffic safety. His fellow travelers included William Haddon, the first head of what became the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and Ralph Nader, a crusading lawyer whose book Unsafe at Any Speed and congressional testimony gave us seat belts, air bags, and, over time, a new paradigm in traffic safety. It was one of the great “silent victories” in public health.
Why then don’t Marbleheaders call Andrew Perry, Director of Public Health, when they want action? Because continuing to treat traffic safety as a problem of policing human behavior validates policing. As legal historian Sarah Seo explains in Policing the Open Road, we have come to accept — and even expect — pervasive police power thanks to the automobile. Never mind that traffic policing has only a limited and transient impact on road deaths. Never mind that technology can eliminate the hazards of mobile phone use, driving under the influence, and excessive speed — without the need for constant surveillance.
The rate of traffic deaths has plummeted over the last half century because vehicles have become immeasurably safer for those inside the car. But pedestrian deaths reached a 40-year high in 2022 and continue to rise. Protecting these vulnerable road users is the next frontier in traffic safety.
A public health approach directs us to reduce exposure by enabling alternatives to driving. A public health approach directs us to build an infrastructure that reduces the threat posed by motor vehicles to vulnerable road users. A public health approach values active mobility and its attendant contribution to health and well being. Actually solving the problem of traffic deaths, however, would leave peace officers gazing forlornly at their phones and waiting for them to ring.
