Revolution on the road?

[Martin Cassini]

Some councils are wising up to ideas of traffic deregulation, which until recently they resisted tooth and nail. Yes, a road revolution is in the air. But most councils still miss the wider context, so, for the time being, we are still required to conform to the technocrat’s idea of how we should act. Under the current system of PRIORITY, we must continue to live (and die) by rules that derive from railway engineering. Obviously railways have to be segregated from roads. But is segregation, or priority, conducive to quality of life on the road? Not to my mind. (I risk repeating myself, but this stuff is vital.) Based on the artificial distinction between main and minor roads, priority grants rights-of-way to one set of road-users over others who might have been there first. It creates an imbalance of rights and responsibilities. It puts side roads and pedestrians at a dangerous disadvantage. They must wait for gaps in fast-moving traffic coming from opposite directions, licensed by priority to ignore them. At best, priority makes roads inconvenient; at worst, lethal. Could any of our 30,000 annual casualties be down to priority control? It produces a "need" for lights – to break the priority streams of traffic so others can enter or cross. Priority is the bad idea at the heart of a defective system. Instead of being able to take it more or less in turns in line with social custom, we have to operate under a set of rules alien to our nature. The current system presumes to know better than you and me at the time and the place, when, or how fast we should go. Enforced by a multi-billion control industry, the system is deeply subversive. As it rules, it divides us: into one sub-species that accepts regulation without question, and another that resents regulation which removes choice. Is that a recipe for harmony? By contrast, a live-and-let-live approach based on EQUALITY, with a level playing-field where all road-users can interact sociably – where the first to arrive at a junction is the first to leave, more or less – stimulates peaceful coexistence. Instead of a system that demands conformity to contrived doctrine, let’s keep pushing for a system that conforms to human nature, which will at last make Roads FiT for People.