I submit that on or about Fri, 19 Aug 2005 19:29:07 GMT, the person
known to the court as Steven Bornfeld
<
[email protected]> made a statement
(<
[email protected]> in Your Honour's bundle) to the
following effect:
>> Risk compensation is real, and denying it is vacuous.
> No one is denying it. I am denying that safety measures are fruitless.
> I think it was Guy who suggested that road signs be removed in order
>to make vehicular traffic safer.
There are two separate ideas there.
The first is that safety improvements are fruitless. That is not
quite what I'm saying; what I pointed out was that in 1938, Smeed
noticed an inverse-square relationship between road casualties and
motor vehicle ownership. He found it applied across 20 countries for
which he had good data. It was always an empirical formula. What
Adams notes is that despite all the time, effort, ingenuity and money
spent on road safety interventions over the years, it's actually quite
hard to prove any improvement over and above what the Smeed law
predicts - which indicates that some at least of the safety benefit is
being consumed in other ways. We all know this: modern cars
accelerate faster, corner faster, brake better in the wet - and we use
these features to get away quicker, go round corners faster and brake
later than we used to, so we get to the end point quicker - or at
least we would if we hadn't compensated for /that/ advance by choosing
to live further from work!
http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/~jadams/PDFs/smeed's law.pdf discusses
this (and there's more from Adams at
http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/~jadams/publish.htm)
The second point is that removing road signs, in line with Hans
Monderman's "naked streets" ideas, might make the roads safer.
Actually I suspect that some or all of the improvements in safety
which have been yielded by these experiments would regress to the mean
after a few years, or rather, that the overall levels of casualties
would return to previous levels, but I'd be surprised if the
severities would be as great, and I'd also be surprised if the balance
didn't shift (right now we have a lot of highway engineers making
changes which improve safety for those who are already safest at the
expense of their victims; I don't know whether the so-called "naked
streets" initiatives will reverse this at all). But even if that
happens, even if the roads end up after a few years no safer than they
were before, the end result is vastly more pleasant aesthetically, and
vastly more humanised.
Here's a comparatively limited scheme, in Kensington High Street in
the City of London:
http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/EnvironmentalServices/general/hsk_beforeafter.asp
Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
85% of helmet statistics are made up, 69% of them at CHS, Puget Sound