Traffic Accidents in Las Vegas

Why are there so many?

• If you think you can beat the odds, and love to take a chance without calculating the true consequences, Las Vegas is your city. Many people move here to pursue the very things that prudent thought would advise against. And, they drive with the same assumptions. To some extent, we have concentrated people with poor judgement from all over the country into one place.
  
  
• A lot of people who move here for the reasons above, happen to drink too much. I watched a cool young man get into his car at valet parking at a major casino. He asked the car jockey to hold his bottle of beer while he got settled in the driver's seat. Then he reached out the window, took his beer from the valet, and roared off. He was resting his elbow on the window and taking a sip as he rounded the corner.
  
  
• This is a 24 hour town. Every casino, topless bar, and drug store is open around the clock. There isn't a single grocery store in Las Vegas that closes at night. There are a lot of people working the graveyard shift, and that is very hard on their biological clocks. When they drive around during the day, they are not in top mental form.
  
  
• If you lived in the S.F. Bay Area in the 1960s, you remember "Blood Alley". This is a section of US 101 south of San Jose. It was two lanes in each direction, with no center divider, and a stoplight every mile. The heavy traffic went fast, and there were lots of serious accidents. Part of the problem was people turning left at each intersection. They had to cross several lanes of oncoming traffic that was going 55-65 MPH.
       In Las Vegas, every major street has the same properties as "Blood Alley". The city is organized in square mile blocks, with a six lane street every mile. The minor streets don't go through, so if you want to get somewhere, you take a major six-lane street. The speed limit is 45, and people go faster. Most of the accidents I see are attempted left turns across three lanes of oncoming traffic.
  
  
• Clean Air. Yes, traffic accidents are caused by clean air. When the sun is low in the sky, and very bright because of low humidity and clear air, people can't see. They don't adjust their driving habits at all, and there are lots of accidents at this time of day.
  
  
• The Las Vegas valley is a bowl. Almost all of it is on a gentle slope, which is so uniform that people don't notice it. They think they are driving on flat ground, and don't factor in the extra distance needed to stop when going downhill.
  
  
• God is not doing his job. Las Vegas is 25% Mormon. There are many good things about the large presence of LDS members here, and perhaps sin city could not exist at all if there weren't a big block of people who you can trust. If everyone here were a swindler, it just wouldn't work. But with LDS members and other traditional religions, a fair number of drivers believe that God is protecting them. God's protection is a big relief, and allows that driver to relax a little, look around the car for those cookies, and see how the passengers are doing in the backseat. A religious driver can free up some brain cells to think about God, the universe, and everything. It seems, however, that God Himself is not paying full attention to the driving either...