The nub of it

Posted on 8th July 2014 by Martin Cassini

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!”

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Sharia law on our roads

Posted on 10th June 2014 by Martin Cassini

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?

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Inadequate traffic authorities

Posted on 27th May 2014 by Martin Cassini

The current driving test is predicated on anti-social priority. Advice and practice stem from that odious premise, so the driving test unleashes cohorts of barbaric drivers onto our barbaric roads. The Highway Code says pedestrians have priority at junctions. This morning I was walking along a pavement and had started to cross a side road, following the broken double white lines, when l heard a car approaching from behind. I was aware of it slowing down, presumably to turn into the road that I was crossing. As an assertive ped, l wasn’t about to bow and scrape, so I kept going. Only when I heard him screech to a mini emergency stop did I turn and look into his startled face. He was one of the great unleashed: he was assuming priority, and assuming I would be intimidated. Although I was peeved at him and his ignorance, my real contempt is for a system which encourages him to think he owns the road, and that people on foot should defer to him and scatter. There is a grand canyon between the Highway Code and the assumed rules of the road that no authority – not the DfT, nor the DVSA (Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency), nor the DVLA or whoever is in charge of the inadequate driving test – thinks of bridging.

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Losing lollipops need be no loss

Posted on 19th May 2014 by Martin Cassini

The Daily Mirror slams government cuts for axing school crossing patrols. A teacher warns that councils will “have blood on their hands”.  As I pointed out in 2010 and 2011, if roads were designed for safety instead of danger, we wouldn’t “need” lollipop people, any more than we would “need” traffic lights or speed limits.

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20mph – for simpletons

Posted on 15th May 2014 by Martin Cassini

20mph campaigners’ hearts are in the right place, but the spirit is trumped by the letter. The Institute of Advanced Motorists states: “Good design and widespread consultation are the keys to the successful use of 20mph zones as a road safety tool, because limits that match the road environment enforce themselves.” This contorted logic reflects the tortuous traffic control system. Unpicked, the statement expresses the case against 20mph limits, or indeed any tools of regulation. It could be rewritten along these lines: Good design, re-education/culture change, and freedom from vexatious regulation make speed limits redundant, because speeds that match the context are self-regulating and as such, (infinitely) more appropriate.

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Seeing more red

Posted on 9th May 2014 by Martin Cassini

Road safety minister, Robert Goodwill, is thinking of extending red time at traffic lights to allow pension-age pedestrians more time to cross the road. About 6 years ago I briefed him about my take on traffic lights. Disappointingly, he is intent on throwing good money after bad by restricting free will and freedom of movement with yet more regulation! How absurd is the current system which requires one set of road-users (people on foot), to ask permission of another set of road-users (drivers), by means of a signal, to cross the road? If we lived by equality (“After you”), instead of lived and died by priority (“Get out of my way!”), we could dispense with most traffic lights, those weapons of mass distraction, danger and delay. Moreover, Goodwill is shovelling millions into the Think! “campaign”, which basically pays for road signs saying Think! He fails to realise that instructional road signs are a sign of failure to design roads in a way that stimulates equality and empathy. Was our only astute transport minister Leslie Hore-Belisha? His beacon, introduced in 1934, acknowledged the human instinct for cooperation and stimulated interaction between road-users. The current crop of ministers, including Patrick McLoughlin (who laughably blames most traffic “accidents” on mobile phone use), continues to squander public money on systems of counterproductive control. They persist in treating the symptoms of our road safety problems, never the cause.

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Lethal drivers v lethal policy

Posted on 6th May 2014 by Martin Cassini

In prospect: longer sentences for disqualified drivers who kill. What about drivers of lethal, unequal policy? Nothing in the news about them.

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Inequality

Posted on 15th April 2014 by Martin Cassini

Economist Thomas Piketty, “is in no doubt,” writes Will Hutton, “that rising wealth inequality imperils the very future of capitalism. He has proved it.” As I keep saying, inequality on the road endangers life, and has been doing so for nearly a century. Commissioning editors in the Press and BBC, however, as well as most traffic officials and Westminster politicians, think it’s of no interest that the annual peacetime casualty toll of 25,000, many of them children, is due to a fatal flaw in policy and practice. Of no interest to them either is the evidence from Portishead and Poynton (see Media) that equality is the solution to our problems on the road. Do you have to write a book for people to take note?

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The Country of the Blame

Posted on 24th March 2014 by Martin Cassini

Brake! wants “tougher sentences for killer drivers”. As usual, the blame is misdirected. The priority system is the cause of our problems on the road. By fashioning an unequal killing-field, it makes victims of us all. We live in the Country of the Blame, where the likes of Brake! see only symptoms of a dysfunctional system.

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Stuck

Posted on 9th March 2014 by Martin Cassini

Our roads are stuck in the age of deference. By making side roads and pedestrians defer to main road drivers, regardless who arrived first, the traffic system is chronically out-of-date, as are most of the people who run it.

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