The following appeared in a letter to the editor of the Balmer Island Gazette."On Balmer Island, where mopeds serve as a popular form of transportation, the population increases to 100,000 during the summer months. To reduce the number of accidents involv

The writer of the letter recommends the Blamer Island Gazette to limit the number of moped rentals in order to reduce the number of accidents involving mopeds and pedestrians. To support this recommendation the author cites anecdotal evidence regarding Seaville’s town that applied similar limits on moped rentals. Close scrutiny of this evidence reveals that it lends little credible support for the author’s recommendation.

The author’s recommendation is based on a false analogy between the two councils that enforced similar limits on moped rentals in order to reduce the number of accidents involving mopeds and the island’s pedestrians. In order to act as a model for Blamer Island Gazette to emulate, the author must assume that all circumstances involving the two islands’ council were the same. However, the author fails to offer any convincing evidence that this is the case. For that matter, the author cannot defend that the recommended course of action would bring the same result in Blamer Island Gazette. Hence, I cannot accept the recommendation.

The recommendation relies on another crucial assumption that the increase in the number of mopeds was responsible for the increase in the number of accidents by itself. Nevertheless, the author overlooks the possibility that other plausible factor involving the accidents and the increase in the population caused the increase in the number of accidents. Perhaps the pedestrians, in the summer where the island was very crowded, were less careful while they were walking. Or perhaps the moped drivers were careless during the summer, in which event more accidents were happened. I would also need to know whether they flouted the transportation’s laws or not. In short, unless the author accounts for these and other possible scenarios, the author’s recommendation amount to especially poor advice for the Blamer Island Gazette.

Another threshold assumption upon which the author’s recommendation is based is that he or she expects the same 50 percent reduction in the number of accidents if similar limits are imposed to the mopeds rental companies. Yet, there is no evidence in the argument to substantiate this crucial assumption. Maybe the number of accidents would decrease by 30 percent, or maybe more. In short, until the author substantiate this assumption, I remain unconvinced that the recommended course of action would bring the same results in Blamer Island Gazette to the desired extent.

In sum, the argument is logically flawed and therefore unconvincing in its current form. To bolster the argument, a number of questions are to be answered. First, whether all the factors regarding the pedestrians accident were essentially the same. Second, whether the number of accidents are proportional to the number of mopeds. Finally, whether the utilization of equal limits would bring the exact same 50 percent decrease in the number of pedestrians accidents in Blamer Island Gazette.