Despite the prevalence of state‐level commissions convened to make policy recommendations, research to date has not systematically investigated the ways in which these bodies impact policy or degree to which state‐level interest groups can use these institutions in that process. We argue that less powerful groups will favor these mechanisms and use them to get issues onto the institutional agenda and to increase the likelihood of legislative success. We also suggest that traditionally powerful groups will oppose the creation of reform‐minded task forces, but will likely use them to hinder policy change once they are formed. We test this assertion in an analysis of the creation and recommendations of task forces convened to study autism insurance mandates, as well as the eventual adoption of such mandates, in the American states between 2001 and 2010. The results suggest that public and industry groups influence the formation and recommendations of task forces, but that the latter appears to have a relatively larger impact. They also suggest that a task force recommendation has a large impact on the likelihood of adopting an autism insurance mandate and that neither the insurance industry nor autism advocacy groups have a direct influence on adoption after controlling for the presence of a recommendation.
Despite the ubiquitous nature of these policies, there is disagreement in the literature regarding the direction and size of the impact that speed limits have on traffic-related fatalities. We argue in this paper that the mixed results in previous work may arise because these studies have missed an important component of the implementation of speed limit laws. More explicitly, they have failed to adequately control for the deterrent effect of enforcement and sanctions. We develop the argument that the observed impacts of speed limits will be overly large when the certainty and severity of punishment are not accounted for. We test this assertion in a cross-sectional time series analysis of state-level traffic fatalities from the years 1990-2006 and find that lower speeds do save a significant number of lives. Interestingly, we find that the impact is significantly overestimated for 65-mph limits and significantly underestimated for 70-mph limits when enforcement, penalties, and the interaction of the two are excluded. The results also suggest that fines have a rather modest impact on fatalities unless states employ a sufficient number of troopers to enforce posted limits. In addition to clarifying previous findings related to speed limit policy, therefore, the findings contribute to the general application of deterrence theory by empirically confirming that the importance of sanction severity is dependent on the perceived certainty of punishment. KEY WORDS: speed limits, criminal deterrence, traffic safety, policy implementationIn 1974, the federal government included a provision in the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act mandating that all states set a 55-mph speed limit on interstate highways. The policy change was eventually touted as a way to not only reduce fuel consumption, but also to decrease traffic fatalities by reducing driver speed. Declining oil prices and mounting public pressure prompted congress to relax the mandate in 1987, and it was repealed altogether in 1995, allowing states to once again set their own limits. Lawmakers in the states responded by raising limits anywhere from 5-20 mph for passenger vehicles. Opponents of higher limits continue to warn that they cause an increase in crashes and fatalities, but recent evidence from Texas and Utah, which are experimenting with an 80-mph limit on some stretches of interstate, suggests that states may adopt even higher limits in the future.Scholars have exploited both the overtime and interstate variation in speed limits in order to assess the efficacy of these policies in reducing traffic fatalities.
Most have experienced the impact of vehicular accidents, whether it was in terms of increased commute time, delays in receiving goods, higher insurance premiums, elevated costs of services, or simply absorbing the daily tragedies on the evening news. While accidents are common, the complexity and dynamics of transportation systems can make it challenging to infer where and when incidents may occur, a critical component in planning for where to position resources for emergency response. The use of response resources is critical given that more efficient emergency responses to accidents can decrease the vulnerability of socio-economic systems to perturbations in the transportation system and contribute to greater resilience. To explore the resilience of transportation systems to disruptions due to vehicular accidents, a location modeling approach is described for identifying the origins of optimal responses (and associated response time) over time based upon the location of known accidents and response protocols. The characteristics of the modeled response can then be compared with those of the observed response to gain insights as to how resilience may change over time for different portions of the transportation system. The change in the location of the optimal sites over time or drift, can also be assessed to better understand how changes in the spatial distribution of accidents can affect the nature of the response and system resiliency. The developed approach is applied to investigate the dynamics of accident response and network resiliency over a three year period using vehicular crash information from a comprehensive statewide database.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.