Do fewer regulations always add up to more freedom?
About 12 miles east of the Bay Bridge, Route 50 crosses Route 213, near the Chesapeake Community College.
It’s a busy intersection and one of a few places along this stretch of Route 50 where motorists often have to stop for a light.
At 1 a.m. on Jan. 10, 2015, a 29-year-old trucker named Yvenet Mayette was driving south on Route 213, trying to make the light before it changed.
According to police, he didn’t make it. Before he entered the intersection, the light was already red.
Also entering the intersection was a 2006 Suzuki Forenza, which contained five members of the Ayres family of Greenbush, Va., including 30-year-old Zerissa Ayres, who was pregnant.
In the resulting crash, all five were killed. Among the dead were Jordan Ayres, age 7, and Jonathan Ayres, age 2 months.
Police said no drugs or alcohol were involved in the accident.
But another deadly factor was: fatigue.
According to charges recently filed by the Queen Anne’s County state’s attorney, Mayette had driven a total of 70 hours over eight days. Further, he had come on duty without being off for 10 hours, following a 14-hour stint.
He was tired. He was impaired. And on a cold January night, the lives of two children and three adults, one pregnant, were snuffed out.
What’s this got to do with politics?
Quite a lot.
We hear a lot of talk about freedom in this country, especially during election years.
The reason is obvious. Talking about policy is dull. Talking about freedom is fun and requires only a minimal attention span.
(You may recall the story last year about how, because of smartphones, the attention span of people has dropped in recent years from 12 seconds to eight seconds. This is especially disturbing when you consider that goldfish, which do not use smartphones, boast an attention span of nine seconds.)
Most politicians talking about freedom see the equation this way: If the federal government has less power that means “the people” - you and I - have more power.
Or to put it another way, less regulation equals more freedom.
There’s some truth to that, of course, but we need to ask: Freedom for whom?
Take the trucking industry. Like most industries, it lobbies hard for fewer regulations.
Recently, it won a victory. According to The Hill, a publication that covers Congress, the year-end federal funding bill rolled back regulations aimed at limiting driver fatigue.
The rules mandated breaks for drivers and limited hours they could drive in a week.
Why were highway safety regulations part of a funding bill? Because that’s how a lot of things get done. Controversial issues are often buried in enormous spending bills that have to get passed to keep the government functioning.
One reason for the regulations, according to a 2015 New York Times article, was that in 2013, “the latest year for which data is available, 3,964 people died in accidents involved large trucks, most of whom were riding in another vehicle or were pedestrians.”
As the article noted, that’s up 17 percent since 2009, a period during which overall traffic fatalities dropped 3 percent.
This is where the rubber meets the road, you might say.
Fewer regulations might mean more freedom for the trucking industry, but it can also mean less freedom for the motoring public at large. In the case of the Ayres family, they experienced the ultimate loss of freedom. They lost their lives.
And yes, driving drowsy can be as dangerous as driving drunk. A 2012 study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that both drunk and sleep-deprived drivers were twice as likely to get into an accident as a fully alert driver. The trucking industry lobbyists have every right to push for less restrictive regulations. That’s what democracy is about.
But when lobbyists and politicians talk about loosening regulations, we need to demand they do more than simply invoke the word “freedom.”
(One website that supports the rollback in regulations of all kinds, including the above-mentioned trucking regulations, is named, not surprisingly, FreedomPartners.)
We need to understand the issue to see if the trade-off is worth the risk. In other words, we need to put down our smartphones for a minute and develop an attention span longer than that of a goldfish.
Update on offshore drilling issue
Milton has joined the list of Delmarva towns that have passed resolutions against both seismic testing and oil drilling off the Atlantic Coast.
Also of note: Last week Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, predicted an energy breakthrough that will “save our planet” is only about 15 years away. That’s not a guarantee, of course, but Gates is a smart guy who keeps up with advances in technology.
If we were to extract oil off our coast, we’re looking at 30 to 40 years of drilling. Does it make sense to risk our ocean and beaches - and our local economy - for an energy source that could become obsolete?
Don Flood is a former newspaper editor living near Lewes. He can be reached at floodpolitics@gmail.com.
