Priority is the fatal flaw at the heart of the system. It makes roads dangerous by subverting our natural desire to take it in turns. It makes us obey a system of unequal rights-of-way which is anti-social and anathema to good road-user relationships.
Drivers trying to enter or cross a main road face interminable waits and intolerable danger as streams of fast-moving traffic come at them from opposite directions. If the law is an ass, nowhere is it more asinine, and lethal, than in the traffic arena.
The system tilts the power balance in favour of main roads or traffic from the right at the expense of everyone else – people on foot, side roads, minor roads, all non-priority traffic. Priority makes us compete for gaps and green time. It engineers an unequal killing-field. It should be providing a level playing-field. A system based on the social protocol of equality, or even pedestrian priority, would eliminate the danger.
In other walks of life, we take it in turns. Jumping a cashpoint queue is unthinkable, but on the road, we accept such delinquent behaviour without question. Priority licenses main road drivers to ignore side road traffic and people on foot, regardless who was there first or how long they might have been waiting.
Priority produces a “need” for traffic lights – to break the priority streams of traffic so others can cross. Thus is most traffic control is an expensive exercise in self-defeat, a vain attempt to solve the lethal conflicts produced by priority.
The solution? Remove priority, the underlying cause of our problems on the road. This will remove the “need” for lights, and the need for speed, enabling everyone to approach gingerly and merge more or less in turn.
When traffic lights break down, peaceful coexistence breaks out. Now road-users are not in competition. They are in the same boat.
Not only is equality-based self-control safer, it’s over twice as efficient. Our traffic lights-off trial in Portishead went permanent after journey times fell by over half with no loss of safety. The transformation took place even without the benefit of re-education to help people unlearn the bad habits of a lifetime instilled by the anti-social rules of the road. What could be achieved in terms of improved safety, efficiency and quality of life through culture change, roadway redesign and legal reform is unlimited.
Priority generates hostility, segregation, disunity. Equality stimulates empathy, affinity, unity.
26.9.2016
Q (on my YouTube channel): Who has the right of way?
A: No-one, which is the whole point. On foot or on wheels, you take it more or less in turns, as in all other walks of life. Instead of a regulated, artificially-engineered hierarchy – which imposes unequal rights-of-way, makes roads intrinsically dangerous, and produces a “need” for traffic lights – we can follow our inner lights, make common cause, and act sociably, as we were born to do.
At the risk of some repetition:
It’s the priority rule that makes roads dangerous in the first place. It promotes conflict by imposing unequal rights-of-way. Priority for main roads, or to the right as at roundabouts, produces a “need” for traffic lights, to break the priority streams of traffic so side roads and pedestrians can enter or cross.
Priority subverts our cooperative instincts and the common law custom of taking it in turns. Largely because of the priority system, we have an unspeakable, unacceptable annual peacetime road casualty toll of 30,000. We also have needless delay and added air pollution on a colossal scale.
The untold injustice and harm caused by standard traffic control could be stopped now if we replaced priority with equality as the central rule of the road. We also need to change the driving test and redesign roads to express equality.
Equality + Liberty (to think and act as social beings) = Fraternity. The central rule would be expressed thus: all road-users are equal, but some – the vulnerable, especially children and blind people – are more equal than others.
