It’s bizarre that some see my call for equality-based reform of the traffic system as mad, dangerous or counterintuitive. If you were devising the system from scratch, would you make children responsible for their own safety, or would you put the onus for the child’s safety on the driver?
Would you devise artificial rights-of-way that produce conflicting speeds at crossroads and defy common law principles of equal rights and responsibilities? Yet so ingrained are the current rules of the road that those intrinsically dangerous system components are seen as normal and acceptable.
Presumably my ideas are sometimes seen as odd because I’ve called for the removal of most traffic lights. The call should be seen in connection with my deeper critique of the priority system which produces a “need” for traffic lights.
We “need” traffic lights to break the priority streams of traffic so others can cross or enter. So the root problem is the rule of priority (aka unequal rights-of-way). Given equality and freedom to merge more or less in turn, we’d be able to coexist in harmony without the burden of authoritarian regulation and state-sanctioned coercive control.
The current system is anathema to civilised values. It’s a recipe for conflict and grief.
