safety | Lonely Joe Parker

Too many laws and customs of driving make speed more important than safety, from the driving instructors’ “make good progress down the road” (e.g. “hurry the fuck up”, which most drivers internalise as “drive at least as fast as the speed limit unless there’s literally another car right in front of you”), to every transport investment ever being marketed to (presumably furious) taxpayers as “reducing journey times”.

This is in contrast to other European countries, where safety is #1, and speed just a nice-to-have. Surely it’s time for the national Government to admit – as London’s TfL have – that the UK is blessed with only a fixed amount of road space, so with growing numbers of people using it, we all have to accept that journeys will get slower in future, not quicker.

We have a real blind spot (pun intended) in the UK about traffic jams. On the one hand, we are only too aware of all the time we **WASTE** sat in stationary traffic each day – most car journeys are fewer than five miles, made by commuters, and involve up to half that time in queues – so traffic jams are a fact of driving life here in the UK.

On the other hand, peoples’ frustration / anger / surprise about being stuck in a traffic jam on any given morning (when they are, every morning) is total. But this is bizarre… We know the traffic will be there, but still get in our car expecting a free road, at 08:30 on a weekday! Where’s all that traffic come from!

Surely it’s time to admit traffic jams exist, will get worse, not better, and constantly lurching from 0 to 30mph and back again is pointless as well as dangerous?

Imagine a world where the DoT’s published targets and main priority were to reduce accidents per mile travelled, and included walking and cycling targets, not journey times? Where 20mph became the standard urban default speed limit, not exception? Where satnavs routinely pointed out to users when (given traffic conditions) particular journeys, short and long, were quicker by public transport / foot / bike?

A safer UK. A calmer UK. And – just possibly – a healthier, richer, and happier UK.

Imagine.

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A lot of people are concerned about whether driverless cars will be safe in cities, and you can see why. But tonight I wondered whether perhaps they can’t come soon enough…

Over a century ago, driving a car was hard. There were a whole set of levers (levers!) you had to operate, and if you ran out of petrol or oil you were screwed – there were more velodromes or stables than petrol stations in those days. But everyone took it pretty seriously, and you couldn’t go all that fast. So accidents, although everyone worried about them, were rare(ish).

Fifty years later, it all changed. Ford et al had made driving a car far, far, easier, and they were much, much more powerful. People got a lot sloppier, and (until safety features came in) the accident rate soared.

Tonight I had a fairly close shave at a lights with some bloke in a Lexus. He had three – three – LCD screens in the car, and was tapping away on his phone while gently wobbling sideways to squash me on the nearside (he was overtaking, I wasn’t filtering inside, before anyone complains). It wasn’t that fast and I’m experienced enough that dealt with it, but we see this played out every day on the roads in cities.

Here’s the thing: would a driverless car have done worse? I doubt it.

I’ve realised that we’re already living with driverless cars – in the sense that most people are safe enough, and distracted enough, in their cars that they’re not really paying attention. On the motorway or a small town you can get away with it most of the time. But in London, with pedestrians, bikes, and generally more stuff, these can become lethal lapses of concentration.

So if we’re already living in a functionally driverless city, why not do the real thing? Allow only driverless cars in the centre, or those driven by humans with extra qualifications and no distracting electronic devices. It might be more unsafe. But I doubt it.

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