'Fast and Furious' Films Causing Speeding Surge?
"Fast and Furious" films have apparently encouraged fast driving.
A team led by economist and Harvard Medical School physician Anupam Jena suggests that this might be the case after conducting a research with the results published in the New York Times.
They decided to look into the idea that the Vin Diesel-led films caused a surge in the number of speeding cases after various police departments in the United States stepped up their traffic patrol efforts near theaters where "Fast and Furious" movies are released.
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To get to the bottom of this, Jena's team examined a total of 192,892 speeding tickets recorded by the Montgomery County in Maryland from 2012 to 2017, during which three films in the popular franchise came out.
Using this bulk of traffic violation data, they analyzed the average miles per hour over the speed limit that drivers were charged with going on a given day. They discovered that during the weekends after "Fast and Furious" releases, the average driving speed increased by almost 20 percent, as compared to speeds from before the release.
The study reported, "Comparing the three weekends before each movie's release with the three weekends after, we found that the speeds people were given tickets for increased almost 20 percent, to an average of 19 miles per hour over the speed limit, from 16 miles per hour."
Jena's team also discovered increase in extreme speeding rates. Double the percentage of the drivers are charged with driving more than 40 miles over the speed limit, though this makes up just two percent of all the speeding violations.
"Additionally, using data on latitude and longitude reported in the tickets, we found that increases in this extreme speeding were concentrated in areas close to movie theaters (often within two miles), consistent with speeding behavior induced by moviegoing," the research added.
The extreme speeding violations that happened within three weekends after a "Fast and Furious" movie came out were on Route 270, a major highway that spreads adjacent to large movie theaters.
The speeding cases recorded before the films were released were "less common" and often took place farther from movie theaters and on the said highway.
Comparing their findings with speeding cases recorded after the release of the four "The Hunger Games" films, which did not feature any fast driving, the cases did not go up. It is the same when they put side by side a year when a "Fast and Furious" was released to another where nothing did.
Jena's team says that while their analysis was "limited" and does not tell the whole story, they did uncover something important about behavior portrayed in movies or other media could influence the audience.
"Fast and Furious" will have two more films to go with the penultimate one releasing in 2020. Jena advised caution at least to the folks in Montgomery during the film's release.
