Provo sees car wrecks drop
Nobody can be certain, but Provo city and police leaders say they do, and a researcher who recently studied the issue showed that drivers cited for traffic violations are less likely to be involved in fatal accidents.
The Provo Police Department upset some officers in its patrol division and some residents when it began in 2001 to require each patrol officer to write three tickets a day.
Some called it a quota. Police Chief Craig Geslison and the patrol division captain who implemented the program called it a performance standard officers should meet easily. Whatever it was, patrol officers wrote 2.5 times more tickets in 2003 — more than 40,000 in all — than they did in 2000.
And the number of accidents dropped 22 percent, from 3,503 to 2,737.
"The number of serious injuries, we believe, has gone down as well," Mayor Lewis Billings said.
Officers wrote fewer tickets the past two years, according to information Provo provided to the Deseret Morning News through the Government Records Access and Management Act.
"We have more people die from traffic accidents in Provo than we ever do from murders," Upchurch said. "We see more damage, in terms of cost, from traffic accidents than from any crime. We can save more lives and more property by enforcing traffic than anything else we do."
A study published by the British medical journal Lancet in 2003 showed that a traffic ticket reduced a driver's chance of being involved in a fatal accident by 35 percent. The effect lasted only a few weeks, disappearing completely within three or four months.
"We were interested in the question because motor vehicle trauma is such a widespread cause of death," University of Toronto researcher Don Redelmeier said. "Car accidents cause about 1 million deaths a year worldwide and about 40,000 deaths a year in the United States. That means deaths in motor vehicle accidents are outnumbering deaths by malaria for the first time in history."
Another 25 million people worldwide are permanently disabled by traffic accidents.
"Enforcement does not have to yield perfect obedience to yield major societal benefits," Redelmeier said.
He believes the study extinguishes the popular complaint that cities, counties and states set ticket quotas to make money for government coffers.
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