Written submission from Martin Cassini (DBE0096)

 

Traffic control: the last bastion of institutionalised inequality

 

Evidence submitted on 11 October 2016 by Martin Cassini, road-user, video producer, campaigner for traffic system reform. See Equality Streets and Kinder Streets.

 

 

1. Committee chair, Maria Miller asks, "To what extent do shared space schemes … cause barriers for disabled people and how can these be resolved?” It’s not shared space that promotes barriers and danger; it’s the fatally-flawed system of traffic control itself. The flaw is the unequal, anti-social rule of priority. “Get out of my way!” yells priority, as it grants dominion to the main road driver, licenses neglect, and produces a "need" for traffic lights - to break the priority streams of traffic so others can cross - not that lights ensure safety (para 11). Equality Streets seeks to redress the balance of power, and by harvesting the milk of human kindness, make roads truly inclusive and safe.

 

2. There is a semantic problem with “shared space”, a term coined by Ben Hamilton-Baillie. Too often it is confused with “shared surfaces”. These are flat with no distinction between road and pavement. The blind need to orientate themselves. They don’t want to wander unnecessarily into the road. They need kerbs. Shared space is flexible, and includes kerbs in its designs. Professor of Inclusive Environments, Peter Barker, who appeared in my 2008 Newsnight report: clip [2], happens to be blind and a guide dog-user. He suggests 30 rubberised kerbs. Several advantages: they allow a blind person to distinguish between pavement and road; they allow access for wheelchair users; they provide an escape route for cyclists. (Years ago a friend of mine had her back broken when she was caught between a vehicle and a vertical kerb.) Ben now uses the term, “low-speed environments”.

 

3. The only other issue with shared space in my view is that practitioners believe it can achieve the desired behaviour change – low speeds, drivers respecting the rights of others, giving way to vulnerable users – through re-design alone. To a degree this is true, but bad habits die hard. I believe accompanying reform is required: in culture, the law, the driving test. The key is to replace priority with equality as the central rule of the road.

 

4. We are told there are no silver bullets for our economic problems, nor for our road safety or congestion problems. But there is. Traffic system reform – based on equality instead of priority – is that bullet.

 

5. Some of the reforms – in the name of shared space or my term, Equality Streets – have been gaining ground. But they remain widely neglected or misunderstood, and in the mouths of some shared space detractors, misrepresented. Worth explaining then how the current system gets things wrong, and how reform could put things right.

 

6. Almost exclusively, traffic control treats the symptoms, never the cause of our road safety problems. The spanner in the works that contrives the conflict that regulation seeks in vain to mitigate is priority. Abandoning common law principles of equal rights and responsibilities, priority grants superior rights to the main road, thereby demoting and endangering side road traffic and pedestrians. In defiance of age-old protocols, it licenses main road traffic to plough on regardless who was there first.

 

7. Imposed in 1929 upon an unsuspecting public with no reference to Parliament or the People, priority makes roads dangerous by giving one set of road-users right-of-way over others, not because they had arrived first, which is the civilised way to behave, but because of the contrived distinction between major and minor roads, or main roads and side roads.

 

8. Side roads and pedestrians must run the gauntlet of fast-moving priority traffic coming at them from opposite directions. Children must learn age-inappropriate road safety drill to survive on roads turned into rivers of death by priority. On rural roads, locals must wait for a gap big enough to cross streams of traffic barreling along at 50, 60 or more. At holiday times in the west country, gaps can be hard to come by. So the "inferior" side road-user has to wait indefinitely, or in frustration risks a decreasing gap. If the law is an ass, nowhere is it more asinine, and deadly, than in the traffic arena.

 

9. It's hardly credible that a system which flouts safety and decency so brutally is supported by the law of the land. If engineers must keep traffic moving - often a specious imperative - let them build a bridge or a flyover. Otherwise, let junctions be all-way give-ways, or filter-in-turn as it's known in the Channel Islands.

 

10. After a spate of deaths as people tried to cross the road, what did the “experts” do? Instead of revoking priority, they put up traffic lights. To avoid the inconvenience of slowing down, now we had to stop. Thus is most traffic control a monstrous, and monstrously expensive, exercise in self-defeat.

 

11. That traffic lights ensure safety is a myth. Westminster City Council’s latest audit shows that 44% - nearly half - of personal injury “accidents” occurred at traffic lights. How many of the remaining 56% are due to priority? Compiled in the context of priority, the statistics don’t tell us.

 

12. I put "accidents" in inverted commas because most accidents are not accidents. They are events contrived by the misguided rules and design of the road.

 

13. Few question the system, least of all the traffic managers and policymakers who, despite their vast budgets, fail so signally in their duty to achieve genuine road safety. They like us to think we need their interventions to keep us safe. 25,000 killed or seriously hurt on our roads every year is a grim evidence to the contrary.

 

14. The venerable aim of shared space is to make roads cradles of civility and safety. By failing to see the beauty of the shared space approach, detractors perpetuate the evils of the current system. They ignore our greatest resource - human nature, and its infinite potential for civilised interaction and cooperation. Presumably, they only think inside the box marked "priority". They believe traffic lights keep us safe. Their sense of security is misplaced.

 

15. In the event of an “accident”, the driver is always at fault, never the system or its anonymous agents. Intrinsically dysfunctional and operationally counterproductive, the traffic system is skilled at escaping scrutiny. Huge vested interests are involved.

 

16. We accept traffic controls without question. But why should we stop at red when no-one is using the green? Who is the better judge of when, or what speed to go – you and me at the time and the place, or lights and limits fixed by absent regulators? We should learn to drive by context, not numbers. Would you want to be hit by a bus doing 20? On a street, especially if children are around, let us proceed at walking pace. On the open road let us, within reason, choose our own speed.

 

17. As social beings, we want to take it in turns. Jump a cashpoint queue and you’ll cause a riot. Why should it be any different on the road? Because of priority. It tells us to ditch our manners. It denies infinite filtering opportunities and expressions of fellow feeling. As a basis for road-user relationships, priority is our prime peacetime disaster.

 

18. Instead of living and dying by priority, we could live and let live by equality. “After you”, says equality, as it lets us rediscover our humanity and make common cause.

 

19. Equality as the basis for road-user relationships would rid us of the array of high-cost traffic control that represents a vain attempt to solve the fallout from the original sin of priority. Given that central reform, all road-users could coexist in peace.

 

20. You see it when traffic lights break down. Peaceful anarchy (self-government) breaks out. We use commonsense and common courtesy to filter more or less in turn. As a cooperative species, we respect the equal rights of others. Survival instinct, too, plays a role. As the law of spontaneous order has it: my interest in avoiding collision with you mirrors your interest in avoiding collision with me. Twice, during power cuts, I have witnessed lights out across central London. Never was cycling more fun. Free of signal control and free to disperse, traffic vanished into thin air. Cab drivers waved me on, smiling. In an early video I made of two central London junctions with lights out, I asked a cabbie what he thought. "When the lights are out," he said, "you just have to be a bit more careful on the junction, that's all." It really is that simple. But traffic managers like to complicate things in a self-perpetuating empire-building exercise. When lights are out of action, councils tell us to "exercise caution", implying that when lights are "working", we can revert to norms of neglect.

 

21. There is peaceful coexistence and poetry in motion in good shared space design too. The prime example is Poynton. In my video about the transformation of Fountain Place from a warzone to a haven, a wheelchair-user says drivers now stop and smile. A blind user loves the wide pavements. In a clip [3] we shot before the scheme was completed, I crisscross the road without looking. Invariably, drivers give way. As a pedestrian, you simply assert your equal right to the road space. Free of regulation and free to watch the road, drivers rediscover their manners and start acting sociably. Re-education - to help drivers unlearn the bad habits of a lifetime instilled by the anti-social rules of the road - would reinforce what shared space design is trying to do.

 

22. What about the maniacs? you may ask. You can’t even legislate for maniacs. Why hobble the vast majority of reasonable people with one-size-fits-all, lowest-common-denominator rules designed to catch the hypothetical deviant?

 

23. The only justification for traffic lights – those weapons of mass distraction, danger and delay – is at multi-lane intersections at peak times, or blind-bend single-track two-ways, e.g. the medieval village of Dunster. Otherwise, junctions should be filters.

 

24. Priority from the right, as at roundabouts, is an advance, because it limits danger to one side. But it too licenses aggression by denying our instinct to give way to others who were there first. And it produces a "need" for lights at roundabouts – to break the priority streams of (peak-time) traffic from the right.

 

25. The aim of roads policy should be to make roads safe for all. Those who demand more restriction and enforcement condemn us to a vicious circle of expensive failure. It’s reform that’s needed, based on a trust in human nature rather than an obsession with controlling it. The biggest indictment of the current system? It puts the onus on the child to beware the driver. It could and should be the other way round.

 

26. The new rulebook need consist of only two rules and one exhortation:

Drive on the left except when overtaking

Take it in turns / give way to others who were there first

Mind how you go / have a nice day

 

28. A new generation of pedestrian is increasingly reliant on signals. Like rooks on a chessboard, they go at right-angles, from signal to signal. Traffic engineers encourage such dependency. That they see us as sheep is enshrined in their jargon. We are corralled into railed-in “pens”. This sort of dependency justifies further expenditure on evermore costly systems of control, the latest being pedestrian countdown (which, like standard signals, would be redundant if all road-users had equal rights). More often than not, pedestrians arriving at a Pelican press the button without looking up. When they look, if nothing is coming, they cross on the red man. So the light turns red for traffic, making it stop for the non-existent pedestrian.

 

29. Drivers too, intent on external control, learn to abdicate responsibility. Sometimes, if I cross the road on foot with a car approaching, the driver honks or makes a rude gesture. I blame him less than I blame the system which promotes ownership of the road and intolerance. It goes back to the delinquent rule of priority, which instils greater respect for artificial priority and traffic lights than for human life.

 

30. Reform based on equality (a social model) as distinct from priority (an engineering construct), will lead us out of congestion and road safety problems that kill thousands, delay millions, cost billions, stump governments and plague us all. This is a charter for transformational gains across the board. The only losers will be the traffic experts who for decades have been driving us down the road to nowhere, symbolised by this traffic sign in central London:

 

Dead end regs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

31. Given streets designed for equality, we could dispense with the vastly expensive system of traffic lights and instructional signs which, by taking our eyes off the road, flouts the fundamental principle of road safety. Liberated from the burden of vexatious regulation, road-users would be free to follow their inner lights and live in harmony. Under self-control, a new hierarchy emerges, with vulnerable road-users at the top. Pedestrians are seen as fellow road-users rather than obstacles in the way of the next light. This happens spontaneously but needs reinforcing with re-education, etc.

 

32. A lights-off trial I instigated in Portishead in 2009 went permanent after journey times fell by over half with improvements in road safety, quality of life and space. Too few councils agree to trials to expand the evidence that self-control makes an infinitely better fist of access and safety than signal control ever could. Reform offers painless cuts of £50bn+ a year, but most councils still pursue counterproductive "solutions" [4] that cost the earth and fail to keep us safe.

 

33. Do our personalities change when we get behind a wheel? Or is because we suddenly become subject to a barrage of regulation that demands our attention, usurps our judgement, and puts us at odds with each other and our surroundings?

 

34. Priority and traffic lights teach neglect, e.g. of mothers at the roadside or marooned on traffic islands, their toddlers at the ideal level to inhale toxic fumes which stunt brain and lung function. The system is a travesty of all that’s decent.

 

35. In a report I co-authored for the IEA (Feb 2016), we wrote that liberation from the straitjacket of traffic control, and freedom to to filter, would save the economy £16bn a year. In my accompanying piece [5](summary on its last page), I estimate the savings in traffic system reform to be £100bn a year. As the public realm underwent transformation from hostile segregation to civilised integration, the long-term savings would be immense.

 

36. We need a five-pronged agenda for reform: a combination of street redesign, culture change, a new rulebook, a new driving test, and legal reform.

 

37. In Holland, if a driver hits a road-user aged 14 or under, s/he is automatically liable. If the victim is over 14, the driver is liable unless s/he can prove a reckless act. In the UK, we force-feed toddlers age-inappropriate road safety drill when the onus for safety should be on the driver. Overnight, that single legal change would transform safety. Make roads safe for children, and you make them safe for everyone. Instead of feeling threatened, blind people would be able to use roads safe in the knowledge that sighted people were looking out for them, in both senses. Priority and traffic lights promote dangerously conflicting speeds. Shared space means slow speeds. The key to peaceful coexistence on our roads and the elimination of "accidents" is to replace the dysfunctional rule of priority with the sociable protocol of equality.

 

39. Over the years I have briefed three Shadow Ministers: Chris Grayling, Transport; Owen Paterson, Roads (sufficiently intrigued to go to Holland to see shared space in action); and Robert Goodwill, Roads. Now that Grayling is Transport Minister, I've tried contacting him. No reply. In failing to take action along the lines advocated here, are ministers failing in their duty to our time, health, quality of life and the planet? Are they complicit in the unspeakable annual casualty toll on our roads? Outlined here are some of ideas for making roads safe and civilised. I have plenty more, e.g. a failsafe, cost-effective way of making motorists "think" bike. I offered my services as consultant and communicator to Grayling and Goodwill. The offer remains open.

 

40. The current system of priority aka inequality might not exclude the vulnerable but it demotes and endangers them. The ethos of shared space is inclusivity. In practice, given a programme of comprehensive reform, it would signal an end to road accidents and road rage, ushering in an era of peace on our roads.

 

October 2016

 

 

In case the embedded links don't show on the website, here are the links in full:

[1] http://www.traffictechnologytoday.com/features.php?BlogID=718

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeryaK22ntw

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mL6qd5rqCxg

[4] http://www.getreading.co.uk/news/local-news/experts-join-shinfield-road-lights-4219150

[5] http://www.equalitystreets.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/IEA-companion-piece-23.4.16.pdf