On 31 October, the BBC aired the first of a two-parter about road safety. It skated over the subject of shared space, implying it was lunatic fringe stuff. The presenters were much more excited by technological “solutions”.
They prefaced the myth about seat-belts (exposed by John Adams here), by saying, “It is estimated that 60,000 lives have been saved …”, but they did nothing to challenge it. Co-presenter, Anita Rani: “A third of people killed last year weren’t wearing belts”. So what? What about the other two-thirds? There was no attempt at closer analysis.
It was not surprising to see Frank McKenna dodging Anita’s question, “Do speed cameras really work?” His reply was in terms of compliance alone. The Cheshire East Council official (Rod Menlove? named but not captioned) blamed lack of money for his dangerous roads, and co-presenter, Justin Rowlatt, failed to challenge him. What has Menlove been doing with the public dosh sloshing around in the five decades prior to this recession? Cllr Michael Jones also blamed lack of money for road improvements. (How many traffic lights would they buy if they did get the £40m that Stephen Hammond, government minister for road safety, isn’t about to dish out?)
They told us the DfT values a road death at £1.7m and a serious injury at £190,000 (arguably, a serious injury involves greater expense, e.g. a lifetime on life support). They said the cost of accidents in 2011 was £15.6bn. If they had read further down the DfT report, they would have seen the £15.6bn figure didn’t allow for accidents not reported to the police. Including those, the total value of prevention of road accidents is £34.8 billion.
The trail for next week’s programme said “90% of accidents involve human error”. No mention of the priority rule which makes roads dangerous in the first place. I noticed the producer/director was Lisa Dunn. Is it a case of dumbing dunn? I also noticed the exec producer was Lucy Hetherington, who turned down my programme pitch eight or nine years ago. If I sound twitter and bisted, I probably am. My next pitch – for a series that will accuse the authorities of negligence, and show how roads can be made organically safe rather than inherently dangerous – will be at least the 12th in recent years.
New York Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, says cyclists and pedestrians are “more important” than motorists. Not quite. Equality – among ALL road-users – is the solution to most of our problems on the road. It’s absurd that people on foot should defer to drivers, especially in urban settings. If anything it should be the other way round. If we took it in turns, instead of living (and dying) by priority, most of our road safety and congestion problems would vanish in a puff of exhaust smoke.” Thanks to Alex Smith for sending the link.
You’ll be pleased to hear the Department for Transport has published a new Research report, Operation of Traffic Signals during Low Demand (4 Oct 2012). I’ll quote and comment as we go along.
“Traffic signal design is a science that has been developed through decades to a point where the maximum efficiency can be squeezed out of the most congested of junctions. Conflicting needs of all road users are measured, evaluated and optimised such that the ever-increasing and varying demands continue to be managed with ingenuity and perfection.” Note the self-congratulation over a questionable claim.
“But roads aren’t always busy.” Get outa here! “In many cases the very justification for signal control is based on a problem that may only exist for a couple of hours each weekday. Even the most congested networks have their quiet moment, yet, in a deserted city at 3 in the morning, signals still cycle for non-existent traffic. Any driver who ventures into this scenario may sit in frustration at a red light while the ‘intelligent’ control system optimises the signals for phantom conflicting demands.” How come the DfT, which gets £12bn a year of public money, has only just become aware of this?
“In other countries various techniques are applied to ‘demote’ signalised junctions to priority mode of operation, for example the flashing amber on main road/flashing red on minor road employed in some States of the USA, or signals that simply turn off overnight as in parts of Europe.” I noticed this when I was in Europe in my teens. It’s taken the experts half a century to wise up! Meanwhile, how many man-hours of needless delay and how many tons of avoidable greenhouse and health-damaging gases have we suffered at the hands of the experts?
On the subject of policy, this wordy passage is ultimately revealing: “… there are opportunities for embracing developing technologies and making minor changes to installation parameters that could reduce installation and maintenance costs and improve the efficiency of LD methods of operation that retain signal control and its intrinsic safety compared with priority operation.”
No mention of no-priority or equal priority! DfT thinking is stuck inside the leprous box marked “priority”. These people really think the choice is only between priority and signal control! You don’t believe me, do you? Well, here is the publication.
George Osborne (Today Programme) wants to “tackle unfairness” by making welfare cuts of £10bn. Meanwhile, traffic system reform can still* provide annual cuts of £50bn that will hurt no-one except traffic managers and signal salesmen (*as I’ve been saying for years).
Last week I finished a draft edit of a film about Poynton, a community thriving again after liberation from decades of oppressive traffic engineering. More material needs to be shot, so it’s still a couple of months away from publication, but it shows how public money can be spent for the good, rather than the misery of all.
The Sixties brought a refreshing attack on class deference. We need a similar shift on the roads. People on foot – stop deferring to people on wheels! Motorists, while traffic lights dictate your every move, I appreciate this is a big ask, but – stop assuming priority, and start deferring to people on foot! Hand in hand with equality for all road-users should go liberation from the system of traffic control by which they make us live and die.
In arch-conservative Texas, a revolution in criminal justice is in progress. Condemnation is giving way to understanding, incarceration to rehabilitation. As a result, prison numbers are dropping dramatically, as are crime and recidivism. “I am getting the biggest bang possible for taxpayers’ bucks while doing something positive for society,” says Judge Robert Francis (Observer piece). Presumably arch-conservative Britain will wise up eventually, not only on the real crime front, but on the fabricated crime front represented by counterproductive traffic policy.
In the past I’ve written that if the law is an ass, nowhere is it more asinine than in the traffic arena. But is it the law, or traffic managers’ interpretation of the law? There is no legal requirement, i.e. no law, that says we must have priority or signal control. Yet both are imposed at almost every junction in the land. “Inequality kills”, writes Tanya Gold in another context (social immobility) in today’s Guardian. Inequality kills on the road too, every day of every year. Not by chance, but by design – devised and imposed by Public Enemy No.1 – the traffic manager who fails to think outside the box marked “priority”.
20mph is in the news, so at the risk of repetition: Who is the better judge of how fast or slow to go – you and me at the time and the place, or limits fixed by absent regulators? Painting by numbers has nothing to do with grown-up art. Driving by numbers has nothing to do with grown-up driving. Context is the key to appropriate speed and approriate action.
