In a rare victory for liberty in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom refused to sign into law Senate Bill (S.B.) 961, which would have required every passenger vehicle after the 2030 model year to beep each time its driver goes more than 10 miles per hour above the speed limit. Unfortunately, Newsom did not cite regulatory overreach but interference with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) as his reason for passing on the bill.
In a Saturday press release, Newsom expressed concern that California-specific vehicle rules "would create a patchwork of regulations that undermines [NHTSA's] longstanding federal framework." Appealing to federal rulemaking is an odd tack for Newsom to take considering the governor touted California's "17 bills covering the deployment and regulation of GenAI technology" yesterday.
Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco), the author of S.B. 961, was none too pleased by Newsom's refusal. In his own Saturday press release, Wiener described Newsom's veto as "a setback for street safety at a time Californians are feeling extremely unsafe." While Californians may feel unsafe, their sentiments are unsupported by the data on traffic deaths.
There is no crisis of pedestrian vehicle deaths, despite the NHTSA's claim to the contrary. The agency's proposed rule aims to establish new "performance requirements to minimize the risk of head injury" in head-to-hood collisions, set to take effect two years after the final rule's publication in the Federal Register. Yet per-capita pedestrian deaths have steadily decreased from 35 per million in 1975 to 23 per million in 2022.
The trend for all motor vehicle crash deaths reflects the trend in pedestrian deaths, as Insurance Institute for Highway Safety data show. In 1975, there were 20.6 deaths per 100,000 people; in 2022, the most recent year for which there are data, there were only 12.8 per 100,000.
Wiener described Newsom's rejection of the bill as resigning Californians to "a completely unnecessary risk of fatality." It's worth noting that this risk is lower than the one posed by falls, which claimed 46,653 American lives in 2022. There were 42,514 motor vehicle crash deaths in 2022.
Wiener appeals to similar requirements imposed by the European Union to justify his proposed regulation, but he shouldn't. The E.U.'s nanny state is not worth emulating. But not all of Wiener's arguments are so bad: He hails Wisconsin "passing the first seatbelt mandate in 1961" as an instance of a state taking the legislative lead to address an issue of public concern—i.e., federalism.
Newsom and Wiener are fun house mirror reflections of one another: Newsom was right to veto the helicopter-parent bill, but wrong to resist the federalism he embraces in other instances. Wiener was wrong to support the bill's passage, but right to embrace a state-based regulatory framework.
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