ASHLAND — Twenty-six Amish who refused to pay their fines for violating a law that requires flashing lights on their buggies appeared in court on Friday.
Once there, Ashland Municipal Court Judge John Good ruled out the possibility of jail time for them and instead said he would impose liens on their real estate.
Look at it from another perspective:
If you’re driving a buggy on a public Right-of-Way, you should ensure it’s visible enough to be seen by someone obeying the speed limit driving on the road.
Reflectors are a partial answer, but they require direct line of sight. If there’s a buggy just over a hill, headlights won’t hit the reflectors until the driver crests the top of the hill, while lights on the buggy will illuminate dust, fog, and nearby foliage that can be seen earlier.
I have lights on my bicycle. There’s no reason a 6-8’-wide black buggy shouldn’t also have them.
A road’s speed limit is the lower one of these two values though:
If you can’t stop within the same distance as you can look ahead, YOU ARE TOO FAST.
If you crash into a stopped car hidden behind a curve or hill, you went too fast. Traffic jams can occur for any reason at any road.
If you run over a child that ran across the road from behind a parked car in a dense urban environment, you went too fast. It is to be expected that children live in urban areas and that children are irrational.
Deer will no wear reflectors (except their eyes of you count that) nor active lighting. If you can’t see a buggy with reflectors, you’re going too fast.
While collision with deer can be dangerous, the reality is it can’t be controlled for, and the result is usually a broken windshield and a dead or injured deer.
A buggy having lights is a minimal requirement that’s easy to implement and helps prevent a much more dangerous type of collision with zero downsides. It doesn’t even conflict with Amish beliefs about technology - not that that should even matter when it comes to policy on public safety.
It’s cheap, effective, and will save lives. It’s a no-brainer.
Majority of animal-involved human deaths in the US are deer-vehicle collisions. Going slower can greatly diminish the frequency and severity of those collisions.
Amish buggy crashes combined (including those not even involving motor vehicles) had about a 2.5% fatality rate as opposed to about 1% for deer collisions. But even worse, if you normalize the rate of deaths by US population across 10 years and number of Amish buggy deaths by Ohio Amish population between 2009 and 2019 (best I can do for fair numbers in a rush), you’ll find rates of 0.000013 and 0.000202, respectively.
That’s more than 10x the fatality rate for the buggies. The Amish buggies are absolutely a larger threat to public safety per capita.
And if you drive slow enough for deer, you should be more than slow enough for buggies.
Ambulances driving the speed limit hit children sometimes. Should we outlaw medical transport? Of course not.
There will always be crashes because not all wrecks can be prevented through policy. So we have to balance the social, economic, environmental, and human cost of how we approach road safety.
If you drive 20mph in the driving lane of a highway with a speed limit of 65 just in case somebody wants to act like it’s the 17th century, it’s way, way more likely that either you’ll be rear-ended or someone passing you is gonna hit someone rise head-on versus simply driving the speed limit and asking the Amish to install a fucking blinker on their thousand-pound black box in the right of way.
Find me a road with a 65 mph speed limit where 20 mph is the speed actually required to not hit a stationary hazard or an animal sprinting into the road.
I don’t believe you can until you can show it to me.
In case you haven’t noticed, when a road has a speed limit of 65 mph, the foliage is trimmed far back from the road. That open space, where nothing can hide to leap in front of the car, is part of the design of a 65 mph road.
Simply not true. Deer have a top speed when they run. The distance from the tree line to the road, divided by a deer’s sprinting speed, determines how much time you have to stop if a deer heads into your lane at top speed. If your stopping time is longer than that you’re going too fast.
You can control for it by going below that speed. Lower speed, less stopping time.
I grew up in deer country. Tons of deer, every year, and I stopped for unexpected deer dozens of times without hitting any deer.
You are choosing not to take responsibility, based on this lie you’re telling yourself about how it can’t be helped.
A 65mph rural highway may have a 60 ft ROW, making it 23’9" from the trees to the middle of the near lane (30 feet to the center minus 6’3" for a standard 12’6"lane).
A white-tail deer can sprint 35mph, which comes out to just over 50 feet per second. So you have half a second between the trees.
A professional driver on a closed course with new tires and a dry road can control a car braking car at about 32 fpsps (1g). Clearly you’re a perfect driver from what you say. Let’s also assume you have an absolutely perfect reaction time of zero.
So assuming you have superhuman reaction times, the skills of a professional, and all other perfect conditions… you can certainly avoid hitting the deer - so long as you’re driving under 9 mph.