New lobby wants safer roads but who will they be safe for?

LTT reports a new group “The Campaign for Safe Road Design” which will “save lives” (“Dawson returns to lead lobby for safer roads”, LTT 13th June 2008). It is based on the idea that trees and other “roadside hazards” are killing innocent motorists.
This is actually a campaign based on the idea that motorists are inherently incompetent or unwilling to use any knowledge about driving they may have. On the highway they have crash barriers, the felling of roadside trees, anti-skid “treatments” etc.; in vehicles they have seat belts, crumple zones, side impact protection systems, air bags etc. All these measures collude with the violence of drivers who are either incompetent or unwilling to drive properly. All of this either directly exacerbates bad driving (through short term risk compensation or behavioural adaptation) or else makes it more difficult in the long term for motorists to accept the need to drive properly (long term risk compensation or behavioural adaptation).
It is actually a campaign for what will be more dangerous roads for those of us outside motor vehicles or in the smaller ones. It is the precise opposite of “safe roads”.
It is a campaign based on dubious statistics and the associated voodoo jargon of cost-benefit analysis. (Casualty reduction often occurs either spontaneously or from different – and often opposed – interventions to the ones which are claimed to achieve it). It denies and in effect opposes the notion that motorists are actually quite capable of driving properly if they are required to: either by compelling them through appropriate law enforcement and sentencing, and/or by reducing speeds and confronting them with the increased pedestrians of cyclists and pedestrians, as shown by the burgeoning volumes of evidence on the effects of “naked streets” and the like.
Of course, colluding with illegal homicidal behaviour (you might not know it if you are a highway engineer, but it is against the law to drive your car off the road) is a central part of the “road safety” lobby, and has been since its origin in the 1920s motor industry lobby. It is central to much of transport policy and planning. It is not just the road hauliers and the organisations like the AA and the RAC that have always failed to control the violent behaviour of their members, or even supposedly responsible organisations like the AA owned Institute of Advanced Motorists (apparently not advanced enough to keep their cars on the road). It is entrenched in a “road safety” culture based on ignoring the difference between danger to other road users (basically by the motorized) and danger to others (basically those outside motor vehicles).
Even incompetent and/or law breaking motorists deserve safety. They can get it by controls on bad driving (law enforcement and sentencing). So, if the Institute of Advanced Motorists (or should that be the Institute of Incompetent and Careless Motorists?) wants its members to have the “right” to drive without engineering controls , then it should be campaigning for black-boxes on cars to be used to collect evidence after crashes, with deterrent sentencing to back up safer driving – as has been done for years elsewhere in Europe. Or, if they are unwilling to accept that, engineering which automatically prevents them from endangering others (on-board speed governors etc.).
There are all kinds of things which will “save lives”. We could continue with low numbers of “vulnerable road users” – people outside cars - and continue along the increased motorization route. That would increase the massive loss of life due to the environmental and health disbenefits of mass motorization – life years lost from lack of exercise, noxious and greenhouse gas emissions, resources spent on road building etc. Alternatively we can pursue a policy of reducing danger at source, making those responsible for endangering others – individual motorists, vehicle and highway designers, highway authorities – accountable.
And we could start off in turning things the right way round by using language properly: a road with a tree by the side of it is not “dangerous” – and the people who think it is are. So watch out LTT, and at least put inverted commas in the next time you see the words “safe”, “safer”, or “safety”.

Dr. Robert Davis
is Chair of the Road Danger Reduction Forum