Another attempt to sum up what I’m on about.
The spanner in the works of the traffic system is priority. It imposes unequal rights-of-way and creates conflict between priority and non-priority traffic (including foot traffic).
Priority – for main roads, or to the right at roundabouts – flouts the common law practice of taking it in turns based on time of arrival.
Priority puts “inferior” side roads and vulnerable road-users at a dangerous disadvantage. It subverts our cooperative instincts.
It produces a “need” for traffic lights, to break the priority streams of traffic so side roads and pedestrians can enter or cross.
But traffic lights do not ensure safety. Nearly half of all personal injury “accidents” occur at traffic lights. How many of the remainder are due to priority? The stats don’t tell us. As far as I know, accidents investigators don’t take priority into account.
Priority has a hidden role in our annual road casualty toll of 30,000. In large part, it’s also responsible for the needless delay and added air pollution suffered by a put-upon public.
The harm caused by standard traffic control could be stopped overnight if we replaced priority with equality as the central rule.
Also needed: a new driving test based on equality, and road design that expresses equality.
Equality + Liberty (to think and act as social beings) = Fraternity.
The new one-page rulebook: All road-users are equal. The vulnerable, above all children and blind people, are more equal than others. Give way to other road-users who are there first. Enjoy your day.
Will the traffic control dictatorship, which presides over 30,000 avoidable casualties every year, ever face the consequences of their grotesque system?
Will the racketeers responsible for parking control and speed enforcement ever be called to account?
When pigs fly.
