To cut the deficit, the Govt is thinking of selling its stake in Eurostar, which could raise £20bn. Among other national assets it might flog is the Royal Mint. Meanwhile, traffic regulation, which acts to our detriment and costs tens of billions in public money every year, is overlooked.
To cut the deficit, the Govt is thinking of selling its stake in Eurostar, which could raise £20bn. Among other national assets it might flog is the Royal Mint. Meanwhile, traffic regulation, which acts to our detriment and costs tens of billions of public money every year, is overlooked.
I go on about priority being the fatal flaw at the heart of the traffic system – how it’s a diabolical basis for road-user relationships, how it sets the stage for neglect and danger, how it produces a doomed, retrospective “need” for expensive, inefficient regulation, how it treats symptoms instead of the cause, and how, by replacing priority with equality, we would see most of problems on the road disappear. For years I’ve pitched the ideas to TV, because a TV series would be the optimum way to communicate the perception shift that needs to underpin the reforms that are so scandalously overdue. But TV has always found reasons for not greenlighting the project, perhaps because they genuinely think that fairy cakes are more important than children’s lives, and therefore more deserving of airtime. For years I’ve lobbied governments. Nothing doing there either. So to their shame and our continued detriment, the broadcast and political establishments resist and fail to support change. The avoidable deaths and life-changing injuries of thousands of innocents in peacetime Britain are of no interest to them. With gruesome irony, they give the subject no priority. The Press, too, have proved useless and apathetic.
On the road, as in other travels in life, freedom+responsibility+education=empowerment. Most traffic regulation disempowers us, upsets our relationships with other road-users. If policymakers used instead of abused our social instinct for cooperation, things could be so simple. But the lords of misrule who populate traffic authorities make things needlessly difficult. They should face abuse or corporate manslaughter charges. With an apostrophe and a space, the term corporate manslaughter becomes corporate man’s laughter. They fuck us up, the engineers; they may not mean to, but they do. (It’s not exclusively engineers, of course, but that’s the only term that scans in the rhythm of Larkin’s poem.)
Are they all merchants!? Instead of making roads intrinsically safe – by replacing priority with equality – traffic authorities spend fortunes on retrospective “solutions” which are not solutions at all. Instead of integrating all modes in a mutually-tolerant mix, they segregate, corral, and put us at odds with each other! This links to an article outlining Boris’s plans for segregated cycle lanes in Westminster. I can see them rubbing their hands together as they contemplate more revenue from the ENFORCEMENT of yet more counterproductive REGULATION!
Local press confirms Council rethink over pedestrianisation after hearing my Equality Streets presentation.
“We have to get away from the patronising view that the state knows better than the individual,” stated Chancellor, George Osborne, on 21 July 2014, “about how to spend its money.” He was referring to pensions reform, and is still a million miles away from applying that commonsense to traffic and road-user relationships.
It’s a mark of the low esteem in which transport is held that Patrick McLoughlin, transport secretary, retained his role in the recent reshuffle. He thinks most if not all accidents are caused by mobile phone use. I heard him last year at a UN conference on road safety. What a buffoon, I thought, but bit my lip. The reason roads are dangerous is because they are subject to the rule of priority, which promotes neglect and licenses aggression. If we lived by equality (“After you”) instead of lived and died by priority (“Get out of my way!”), most of our road safety problems would disappear. McLoughlin is no different from his predecessors. In my lifetime, so far, transport ministers of both political stripes have proved as bad as each other. The Conservatives are wedded to HS2, the spawn of Labour transport minister, Lord Adonis. The poet, Simon Armitage, says northern transport connectivity should be prioritised. Instead of another conduit to London, the £50-odd billion should be spent on lateral links between northeast and northwest, creating a hub of social and economic activity. In addition to that sensible re-allocation of funds, of course, is the potential in traffic system reform for efficiency savings that would pay for roadway redesign and a programme of re-education to change the culture of the road from priority to equality and hostility to empathy.
The current traffic system, founded on the anti-social idea of priority, embodies a culture of violence and intimidation. It encourages intolerance and inappropriate speeds, denying infinite filtering opportunities and expressions of fellow feeling. Priority produces a “need” for expensive, vexatious regulation which, by treating symptoms instead of causes, amounts to an exercise in self-defeat. The solution is a simple, sociable one: equality, not priority, as a basis for road-user relationships. “After you,” instead of “Get out of my way!”
Simple-minded roads ministers are planning to quadruple fines for the fabricated crime of “speeding”. Presuming guilt, removing responsibility, outlawing discretion, and infantilising us by making us drive by numbers instead of harnessing our humanity and encouraging us to drive by context. Chop off a man’s hand for stealing a loaf. £10,000 fine or jail for doing 100 on a clear motorway, as Stephen Fry, Harriet Harman and countless other responsible adults have done with no risk to anyone. Speed doesn’t kill. It’s inappropriate speed that kills. Who is the better judge of appropriate speed? You and me at the time and the place, or limits fixed by absent regulators?
