A NICE solution to pollution?

Rampant health damage from poor air quality, including 40,000 premature deaths, prompts NICE to propose removing speed humps and introducing citywide 20mph to smooth traffic flow. As usual, the primary source of air pollution from staccato traffic motion – traffic lights – is ignored, so it’s hard to take the NICE proposals seriously. As I told Boris when he toyed with allowing left turn on red, such tweaks to a flawed system amount to fiddling while London and other cities continue to fume, in both senses. Real improvements in road safety and air quality will only come from traffic system reform and driver re-education: above all, replacing priority with equality as the central rule of the road. This would enable us to filter sociably and smoothly at low speeds, and would remove the “need” for most traffic lights, speed limits and speed humps.