Road v rail

Posted on 28th October 2013 by Martin Cassini

For convenience, the car is unparalleled. It enables you to go door to door whenever you want. It lets you carry stuff and ferry passengers. Yet the traffic dictators make roads a dangerous obstacle course beset with contrived conflicts, bottlenecks and traps. £50bn would enable most of our road system to be transformed into Equality Streets, enabling civilised, efficient coexistence, where children could go in safety. But the supporters of HS2 want to spend £50bn on a single branch line of an overcrowded, overpriced 19th century mode of travel: rail.

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Do traffic violations kill?

Posted on 12th October 2013 by Martin Cassini

I came across this piece by Sarah Goodyear, inviting us to be shocked at low-level policing, and implying that traffic violations were responsible for road deaths in Atlantic City. I commented: People assume the rule-breakers are the killers. But what is the correlation between traffic violations and “accidents”? The underlying problem, which makes roads dangerous but goes untreated, is the anti-social rule of priority. If we replaced priority with equality, i.e. designed roads to express a social context, it would be “After you” instead of “Get out of my way!” All road-users would take it more or less in turns, and most of our road safety problems would vanish in a puff of exhaust smoke.

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All-way stop v roundabout

Posted on 11th October 2013 by Martin Cassini

Thanks to Sam Goater for sending this entertaining clip from the U.S. show Mythbusters. I’ve always thought the all-way stop should be an all-way yield, because what’s the point of stopping if you can continue filtering? In the experiment, it wasn’t clear if drivers were all stopping (as the dumb law requires), or if, when they could, they kept going. Would it have made any difference to the count? Of course the all-way stop is more efficient in terms of road space required, as a roundabout needs a bigger footprint. They also do a comparison with an “officer” directing traffic, akin to traffic signal control.

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Supporting the majority?

Posted on 1st October 2013 by Martin Cassini

The Tories claim to support the hardworking, honest majority. Why then, do they support a system of counterproductive traffic control for which the hardworking, honest majority pays through the nose?

 

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Pulling off a fast one

Posted on 1st October 2013 by Martin Cassini

“We will find the money to pay for the fuel tax freeze,” says Cameron. It never enters the heads of policymakers to consider traffic system reform as a rich source of kind cuts and efficiency savings. In persuading us that we need their expensive regulation to make roads safe and keep traffic moving, traffic managers have pulled off a fast one and ringfenced their colossal budgets. That they preside over an annual death and injury toll of 25,000 goes unnoticed.

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Dear George

Posted on 30th September 2013 by Martin Cassini

We heard on the News that the Chancellor will freeze fuel tax if savings can be found. Read my stuff, George, and you’ll find that savings of £50 billion, yes £50,000,000,000 a year, can be made from traffic system reform. At the same time it would cut emissions, make roads safe, and transform quality of public life and space.

 

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Is Woking joking?

Posted on 12th September 2013 by Martin Cassini

I’ve spent the last few days in Woking, where I used to go to school. 24-hour traffic lights produce congestion at every turn, even on one-way systems where there is no conflict. Are traffic managers, whose armoury of railings and signals blight streetscapes, in league with planning heads who allow malformed plastic windows to blight our historic housing stock? To their shame, politicians have stood by and let unelected officials destroy quality of life and space in the public realm.

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Trains and automobiles

Posted on 12th September 2013 by Martin Cassini

In his latest bid to keep HS2 on track, the transport minister is now claiming capacity is the crucial factor. Capacity could be increased by adding carriages to existing trains and if necessary extending platforms to accommodate them. Above all, instead of spending tens of billions churning up the countryside to shave journey times between London and the northwest – while neglecting regions starved of transport links – a transport minister worth his salt would attend to the roads. Under the current system, road capacity is rationed by regulation which denies infinite filtering opportunities. The hours lost in the mists of dead red time can only be imagined. Liberate and make roads safe by giving all road-users equal rights, let us filter on opportunity instead of making us fume at red or speed at green, and suddenly there will be a vast increase in capacity – on the roads. At the same time we would save £50bn a year in traffic (mis)management and associated public costs.

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HS twaddle

Posted on 11th September 2013 by Martin Cassini

In a desperate bid to keep the HS2 vanity project alive, the transport minister will quote a report commissioned by HS2 Ltd which says HS2 will boost the economy by £15bn a year. That dubious figure is dwarfed by the potential in traffic system reform for savings and regeneration, as I pointed out 3 years ago here, and as we argue in more detail in a forthcoming report for the IEA.

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Sex and traffic

Posted on 8th September 2013 by Martin Cassini

A study reported in The Observer measures the erotic quotient of different parts of the body. The bit that relates to relationships on the road is this from Prof Oliver Turnbull of Bangor Uni, who led the study: “… we all share the same erogenous zones, whether we are a white, middle-class woman or a gay man in a village in Africa. It suggests it is hardwired, built in, not based on cultural or life experience”. In the same way, our instinct to take it in turns based on time of arrival transcends nationhood and culture. Our problems on the road are almost exclusively down to the anti-social rule of priority, which subverts our cooperative instinct, and makes us act against our better nature. The result? Avoidable death, damage and injustice on our mismanaged roads.

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