Article here.
Funny how Highways Agency spokespersons are never named. The roundabout is at Canford Bottom, near Bournemouth. Article and photograph here.
PM had an item claiming traffic wardens are welcome back after a break from duty (no April Fool apparently). No-one minds reasonable regulation, but parking enforcement is overwhelmingly unreasonable, vexatious, even extortionate. How many times have we been ticketed, clamped or towed for inoffensive, non-obstructive parking?
Our traffic control system makes roads dangerous, causes congestion, generates ill-will, encourages delinquency, damages air quality, damages our health, and costs a fortune. Despite my efforts to enlighten government and media (over the years I’ve emailed the Today programme a dozen times without reply), they remain blithely ignorant of its defects and potential for both constructive spending cuts and economic growth.
In her Four Thought, Kate Smurthwaite told us that donkeys receive more in charity than homeless humans. The acres of newsprint and hours of airtime devoted to phone hacking also reveal eccentric priorities, considering the dearth of coverage devoted to the humans, many of them children, who are killed on our roads every day – not through any fault of their own but because of a traffic control system which imposes inferior rights on the vulnerable road-user – in defiance of common law principles of equal rights and responsibilities – and then inconveniences and makes us pay through the nose for additional controls that fail to address the cancer at the heart of the system. I often pitch articles to the press and pitch programmes on the subject to TV, but they aren’t interested.
Until recently, domestic news was all about the inevitability of painful cuts. As often stated here, traffic system reform offers vast scope for kind cuts. These days, domestic news is all about the need for growth. Leaving aside the Transition movement, which questions consumer-led growth, Equality Streets (also as often stated here) provides vast scope for growth, e.g. in reworking streetscapes and roads to express a social rather than a traffic engineering context. Of course Equality Streets ticks environmental and Transition boxes too, because as it cuts accidents and journey times, it cuts fuel use and emissions.
“Most of us have a hard-wired fear of all things unusual,” says gym instructor-turned-author Venice A Fulton in a piece in today’s Observer about his diet book, Six Weeks to OMG. This is the only way I can understand the opposition that remains to life without (most) traffic lights … although when you get a chance to explain it properly, most people do see the light. Fulton adds, “It takes a few brave humans to stand up and try something new. Eventually, the truth spreads from these explorers, and makes all our lives better.”
My Radio 4 piece is over and done, but I should have denounced the purveyors of traffic control in stronger terms. By making roads dangerous in the first place (with the unequal priority system), and for presiding over tens of thousands of avoidable deaths and serious injuries on the roads every year, should they be facing corporate manslaughter charges? In London alone, poor air quality kills 4000 people every year prematurely. The added pollution from idling needlessly in queues caused by traffic lights, and accelerating away from a standing start, multiplies fuel use and emissions by a factor of four (No Idle Matter). Whichever way you look at it, policymakers and traffic engineers have blood on their hands. For wasting our time and fuel, and for squandering tens of billions of public money on counterproductive systems of control, should they also be facing corporate lawsuits for damages?
Jonathan Sacks is always worth listening to. Today it was about justice, achieved through collective responsibility and collective action. The parallel with Equality Streets is clear. On the road, individual and collective responsibility are illegal. We have to submit to a system of control that overrides our own judgement. Where is the justice in that?
