I don’t know how many regular readers of this blog exist, but if there are some, you know I am not a huge fan of cars. They ruin our urban areas, pollute our air and water, kill and injure us and our children, and make us fat and sick and sociopathic. Beyond that, I knew about traffic stops. The U.S. and U.S. states do not just issue you an ID card at birth. Generally speaking, your driver’s license is your most official government issued ID for most people, and there are enough hurdles to getting one that disadvantaged people (poor, homeless, unemployed, transient, undocumented, disabled, addicted, mentally ill, too old, too young, too busy, the list goes on…) often don’t have them. Those people still use cars to get around in many cases, because that is the only way to get around in many of our communities, and then when they get pulled over in a routine traffic stop they are in trouble. Especially if they already have a warrant or some past legal trouble, which the disadvantaged quite often do.

It’s also always bothered me that you give up your rights against search and seizure the minute you step into a car. Police can stop you and search your car and body on very little pretext in a way they would be unlikely to do if you were on foot (“stop and frisk” aside – another conversation, although it illustrates that police intrusiveness we routinely accept when we are in a motor vehicle can cause an uproar when we are not). Sobriety checkpoints also bother me – don’t get me wrong, drunk driving is very, very bad. But a random sobriety checkpoint subjects you to search and seizure on no pretext whatsoever other than the fact that you chose to get into a car, and if you have some previous legal trouble, or just a paperwork problem, suddenly you are in trouble you had no reason to expect. (The best solution to drunk driving is a walkable community.)

So that’s the disadvantaged portion of the population, who tend to get more disadvantaged over time because the deck is stacked against them. But what about the larger population as a whole? Well, this Freakonomics episode tells the story in a way I hadn’t fully considered:

• Before cars, ordinary people and police just didn’t interact that much. Generally speaking, a search warrant was required for the police to stop and search someone. There weren’t as many police, they weren’t as heavily armed and they just weren’t that busy.
• Once cars came on the scene and started killing and injuring people in large numbers, traffic laws were enacted. Police were told to enforce the traffic laws, and courts ruled repeatedly that the imminent danger posed by cars in real time overruled the need to obtain a warrant.
• Add in guns, or really just the possibility of guns being present in any traffic stop, and you have even more violence on top of the deaths and injuries the cars are already causing – “The traffic stop is the most common encounter between individuals and the police, and it’s also the site of a lot of police violence and police shootings that we see in the news today.“
• At this point, technology would allow us to handle most traffic violations as an administrative matter, with a picture of the violation and a ticket sent in the mail. The article likens this to tax collection and penalties. The police wouldn’t even be involved in most cases.

A couple more thoughts – First, there is a link between mounting fines and mass incarceration, so just imposing more fines on disadvantaged people and trying to collect them may not be the perfect answer. Second, this article doesn’t go into it, but there is also a critical role for safer street and intersection design, which can help a lot to reduce the number of violations, deaths, and injuries in the first place. And I already mentioned it, but the larger urban design and land use policy can reduce the need for driving and increase the number of people able to get around under their own power, which is good for the air, water, land, our bodies and our minds!

I still have some hope for computer-driven cars too. The hype has died down, which means the practical application will probably gradually creep up on us when we least expect it. A computer-driven vehicle should be able to come to a complete stop at every stop sign and red light, stay under the speed limit, stay out of the bike lane, and just generally avoid unpredictable behavior. And if it doesn’t, that is a malfunction rather than a crime, which it should be able to self-report to police and insurance companies and get corrected. Some people are still going to get hurt because there is no risk-free transportation system, but it should be far fewer than what we deal with now.