Risk Assessment and Driving

For John, BLUF:  Regulating for the idiots may make all of us less safe.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Dropping Traffic Rules and Signs Would Make Us Safer

The sub-headline is:

We need more intelligence and less attempted engineering of preferred outcomes.

From the Foundation for Economic Education, by Mr Jeffrey A. Tucker, 26 November 2017.

Here is an excerpt, with the lead-in being a woman who saw a green light and got in trouble for acting on it:

Green gives her the legal right to drive forward.  It doesn’t guarantee that doing so will be safe.

Traffic engineers need to rig the signaling system to let people know that most basic condition of driving:  for your sake and others, be safe.  Increasingly, in Europe, they are addressing the problem in an unusual way:  fewer lights, stops, rules, and signals are better than more.  Some cities are eliminating signs and signals at major intersections completely, based on the realization that individual, on-the-ground rationality works better than top-down rules.

When we lived in the Naples, Italy, area there was a tough intersection, and with no traffic lights or traffic control signs.  It was a free-for-all and known to the Americans stationed in Naples as "Chicken Corner".  The priority road was the Via Antonio Beccadelli, coming up the hill from the South and, past the intersection, going down the hill to the north.  Coming up the hill from the east (and Naples) was the Via Provinciale San Gennaro.  Leaving the intersection and going up hill was the Via San Gennaro Agnano (becoming, eventually, the Via Domitiana, all the way to Rome).  This road was named after Saint Januarius, who was martyred up where he highway bends around the mountain, near the Italian Air Force Academy.  By the way, Antonio Beccadelli was a Fifteenth Century Poet associated with Alfonso V of Aragon, who ruled Naples at the time.

But, back to the story.  After we left, the Italian authorities put in traffic control devices and reports are that traffic was a tangle from that point on.  In the old days, coming up one of the hills the driver would lift his or her foot off the gas, slowing just a tad, look at the traffic and then accelerate forward.  No sweat.

Another example, lost in the 1950s, was that when neighborhood signs made the speed limit 25 MPH and the average speed was 37 MPH, increasing the speed on the signs to 30 MPH resulted in a drop in average speed to 33 MPH.  When the drivers found the speed limit to be reasonable, they tended to follow it.

Drivers are, as a group, a population with a certain risk assessment capability.  We should be aware of that and take advantage of that to create safer streets.

UPDATE:  Provided information on Antonio Beccadelli, after whom one of the roads in Naples was named.

Sometimes less is more.

Regards  —  Cliff