The Observer has an article about indoor pursuits and health+safety fears causing a decline in the physical strength of children. Similarly, by prohibiting autonomous acts, traffic controls weaken our ability to make decisions. Increasingly, pedestrians and drivers are incapable of crossing roads or junctions without the “help” of signals. Through their automated controls, are traffic authorities disabling us, and rearing a race of automatons?
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What does any of this have to do with Ivan Illich – this Observer article, or your blog in general? Am I missing something? Illich, I imagine, would see your push to modify traffic signage as merely a way to fine-tune a mode of transport (ie. the car, aka “traffic”) that is quite destructive of community, social relations, and people’s general health. Even if cars used water as fuel, and even if there were no red lights to impede their flow, they’d still push people off the streets and stretch apart the landscape in a way that makes travel by foot or bike (true auto-mobility, that is) difficult if not impossible. Removing traffic signs may (or may not) take some of the sand out of the gears, as it were, but it leaves the main problem – the car itself – unfixed. Check out Illich’s “Energy & Equity” essay, available gratis all over the Web.
Thanks for your meaty comment. In haste: I see traffic engineering/policymaking as one of the disabling professions, hence the Illich tag. In one way, the car does elongate the landscape, but in another, it narrows it. Edinburgh and London (for example) were settled long before the motor car. It would have taken an 18th century traveller days to make the journey. Today you or I can do the drive in 6 hours. If we wish, we can take family, friends or luggage with us, and decide when to leave, when to return, and whether to stop on the way. Why would you want to disinvent the car? In my view, all modes could coexist in peace, if only they were free to do so.