Private benefits, public pain, come from GPS beacons

Are new technologies allowing people to venture into the wilderness unprepared? A former ranger for the National Park Service says yes.

Shawn Regan writes in Regulation magazine (PDF) about the rise of personal locator beacons that use GPS technology. While beacons can be life-saving devices when things go bad (someone falls and breaks a leg, an unforeseen storm descends, etc.), some people abuse them by venturing into the wilderness ill-prepared.

Here’s the nut paragraph:

some are beginning to ask if these devices are encouraging people to be more careless in the wilderness and causing them to take on more risk than they would otherwise. While data are sparse, anecdotal evidence and standard economic theory suggest that these devices do create moral hazard. Because individuals engage in more risky behavior when rescue is either explicitly or implicitly guaranteed, the head of California’s search and rescue operations, Matt Scharper, has nicknamed the beacons“Yuppie 911.”

Yuppie 911 creates several problems. It puts the lives of rescue teams at risk unnecessarily, since rescue operations are often risky. Taxpayers suffer too, since someone has to pay the costs and salaries of the rescue crews. (Helicopters are handy, but expensive.) Finally, and ironically, Yuppie 911 puts at risk the lives of the very people who over-rely on technology. The phenomenon of taking on extra risk after being equipped with safety gear is so common that it has a name–the Peltzman effect.

Some states or counties have laws that allow (but don’t require) public officials to charge adventure-seekers for rescues, especially if negligence is involved. These laws have two positive effects. Most obviously, they help recoup money. A more subtle but perhaps more significant effect is that they discourage people from going into the wilderness ill-prepared.