AP Reports Traffic Deaths At Lowest Levels Since 1949

It was announced by the AP and National Transportation and Safety Administration that traffic deaths last year were at the lowest levels since 1949.

Many factors were attributed to this statistic heralded by the NTSA Director, such as seat belt use and raising drinking ages, safer cars and so forth.

But to this writer none of those statistics I feel are primarily responsible in the decreasing levels since '49.

The largest factor would appear to be that there are fewer drivers really on the highways progressively also traveling since air travel has become the preferred method since that time for most business travel and families, due to less time to get from here to there as also a consequence of our increasingly higher stress lifestyles, and also the fact that the boomers, the largest segment of the population, are aging and thus don't appear to be drag racing anymore on the streets and highways.

They are the ones most often getting the finger from the more aggressive drivers still left on the roadways.

Primarily, of course, our youth or even the police who seem to exceed the speed limit in most metro cities far more than those boomers driving their grandkids or themselves to the nearest work force center, many of whom after vast years of experience are still seeking work for which they are more than qualified even given the excessively tech focused job scene and market and all those jobs they formerly held lost due to the advent of the computer age.

While, of course, they are being interviewed by their children or those even younger than their children for many of those few jobs.

It was announced once again that there was a gain in the available jobs, and the unemployment rate had decreased.

Not surprising given that most of those benefits have run out for many, and the jobs which have been created most likely are those now tied into expanding our even increasing military due to the recent headlines in our involvement now in Libya and its civil war.

Those statistics also fail to recognize all the monies poured into expanding our highway and freeway systems since '49, so it would not appear that this statistic would be surprising in the slightest since there are better roadways also for those truckers and cars to traverse from state to state.

But ignoring the obvious does appear also to fit the agendas once again of those whose hold those questionably Constitutional jobs and functions, which also does not explain then the higher and higher insurance rates which are now off the charts in most parts of the country.

Maybe the biggest factor is also the progressively higher and higher gasoline rates and those ever increasing taxes, such as the recent 35% plus increase in the cost of gasoline, which has left quite a few Americans with the only remaining transportation left to them.

Walking to their next job interview.