Draft email to transport minister

[Martin Cassini]

A recent RoSPA press release states: “... the ultimate aim is the continued reduction of road deaths and injuries.” Amberlight says that 35,000 KSIs a year (killed and seriously injured) is unacceptable. Any hint of self-congratulation at the annual death count dropping below 3000 (seen in some press pronouncements at the time) is unspeakable, especially when you consider the point made by John Adams: "accident figures are distorted because old people hardly dare cross the road and children are not allowed out on the roads anymore". At Amberlight and FiT Roads, the aim is the complete elimination of road deaths and injuries. We have a way of achieving it. Unlike RoSPA, BRAKE and the Government, we don’t accept the current traffic control system, indeed we think it is fatally flawed. We accuse it of turning our public roads into danger zones where the onus is on children to beware motorists - rather than the other way round - and where we have to fight for survival, gaps and green time. Most accidents are not accidents at all. They are events contrived by the rules of the road. We propose a demonstration project that could provide a blueprint for genuinely safe and efficient roads, by changing the culture from licensed aggression to mutual tolerance. The spanner in the current works – which we would reform – is the system of main road priority. Priority produces a “need” for lights – to break the priority streams of traffic so that others can cross in relative, but not guaranteed safety. Remove priority, and you remove the need for lights and the need for speed, enabling everyone to do what is natural and intrinsically safe: watch the road, approach carefully, and filter, more or less in turn. At a stroke, roads would be transformed from their current unfit state into Roads FiT for People.