When we talk about “road safety” we already think of roads as existing primarily for transportation and cars in particular. Marco te Brömmelstroet argues that we need to break free of this framework in which safety is something to be accommodated amongst other priorities like efficiency, and start thinking in terms of “reducing road danger”, flipping the locus of responsibility from potential road accident victims to the conditions that create them in the first place. 

Marco te Brömmelstroet will be talking at  LSE’s event A safer future for cycling in London on October 31. 

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Literally nobody is against road safety.  But the way we talk and think about road safety, the way we define problems and solutions, and the approaches we use to do research on it severely limit its potential. We are not getting closer to making our streets safe. On the contrary. To make progress we need to go back to the roots of traffic engineering and recognize the limits of thinking in terms of “road safety” and all the problematic assumptions it brings with it. Instead of thinking of “increasing road safety”, we need flip the script and think in terms of “reducing road danger”, moving the burden of responsibility from the victims of car crashes to the conditions creating them.

A new street language centred around values such as control, efficiency and the freedom of the individual car driver.

The roots of our road safety language

Our streets used to be complex and diverse places that hosted a whole range of different functions. These “remaining spaces between buildings”  functioned as largely ungoverned public spaces, as commons used for many different purposes: work, trade, play, socialising and transportation. But this changed around the 1930s, when our urban streets were facing the disruptive large-scale introduction of the motorized automobile, resulting in largescale disturbances and the violent death of many, most notably young children. At first, there was a societal consensus that there was no place for the car on our streets. In the mainstream language of justice, the intrinsic innocence of children was undisputed. And this new violence was seen as completely unacceptable. But this rapidly changed in the decades after. As the influential thinker Ivan Illich stated already in 1983:  “Like any true commons, the street itself was the result of people living there and making that space livable … streets are no more for people. They are now roadways for automobiles, for buses, for taxis, cars, and trucks.”

A new street language centred around values such as control, efficiency and the freedom of the individual car driver. “Traffic engineering” translated these values into a number of key assumptions of how streets should function. First, streets should never be clogged, making optimal vehicular throughput and free flow undisputed goals and congestion the single most important problem. Second, humans are rational and isolated egoists who aim to minimize travel time at the expense of anything else making travel time savings the ultimate goal of policy makers.

These choices solidified into new road guidelines, designs and norms. Then, they solidified into traffic models, institutions and traffic laws. They solidified into rules, regulations and behaviour. And finally they solidified into asphalt, concrete and steel. All other goals of the streets have disappeared. So what do we see, and arguably more importantly what do we miss, when we think and talk about road safety within this context?

We take it for granted that we express fatalities and severe injuries in monetary terms to include them into cold statistical model that help us with the trade off between human lives and travel time savings.

The (un)intended normalization of road violence

The transport system is seen as a machine that needs to be optimized. Instead of a human tragedy any traffic crash is now a glitch in the functioning of that machine. An interference to the ideal free flow condition. Causes of crashes are either found in the behaviour and lack of protection of victims or in the human error of drivers. We take it for granted that we express fatalities and severe injuries in monetary terms to include them into cold statistical models that help us with the trade off between human lives and travel time savings. It became normal to first teach our children to hold our hand when they cross the street, and to then tell them that the street is a dangerous place where they are —at least partially—  responsible for their own safety.

In his often cited Death and the Car, Culver eloquently wrote that “The naturalization and denial of vehicular violence have allowed car deaths to become largely invisible relative to their horrific ubiquity, shielding it from any substantial critique to this day”. By looking at road safety as a responsibility of individual behaviour, we have hidden the larger car-centric mobility system —and the systemic nature of traffic violence— from critical analysis. But if humans err to such a degree, we should conclude that it is not human errors, but a species error that should have been accounted for when designing the road and mobility system. Although in many car-dependent countries fatalities and severe injuries have declined over a period of time, this is not the result of taking away the source of road violence. Instead, we have —to a certain degree successfully— disciplined the spatial and societal system around it. We produced landscapes of fear and anxiety while implicitly normalizing the danger itself. And the motorized vehicles within these landscapes have grown —and are still growing— in number, size, weight and power. While its drivers have become more and more distracted.

The reduction of maximum speeds is not about taking away privileges from car drivers, but about giving back privileges to so many others.

Let’s reduce road danger instead

The current framework of “increasing road safety” isn’t working. What is required instead is  a shift  to thinking about “reducing road danger” and bringing back elements of justice. At the least, that should make us more aware of the potentially negative unintended consequences of current safety interventions such as the relentless pushing of bicycle helmets, Hi-Viz clothing and disciplining of small children. But at best, this can help us to position all our energy, time and resources to reduce the danger itself. Re-politicizing the underlying values of road danger can help us find more popular support for interventions than we currently find. The reduction of maximum speeds is not about taking away privileges from car drivers, but about giving back privileges to so many others.

Change our educational programs. Elementary schools that pay attention to road safety, teach their children all the rules that they have to adhere to and why that is important. This has lead to the normalization that kids, even at the age of four, have at least a shared responsibility for their own safety. But what if instead we would also teach them that they have rights as young citizens? And how they can exercise them to improve their own streets?

Crash matrixes as the way to represent the problem. Talking about road violence only in terms of victims is misguided at best, and disingenuous at worst. It would be unacceptable in school shootings or other forms of street violence. It should be the norm to always talk about it in terms of all the parties involved. This gives us a much better view on the systemic violence of the car based mobility system.

Talk about human tragedies instead of glitches in the machine. Crashes are not an inconvenience for the functioning of a system, or something that can be discounted in our formulas. We need to talk about the deep human suffering for all those involved to understand the urgency to make real transformative changes.

A relentless focus on the systemic nature. It is not about the victims. But it isn’t about blaming other humans either. If a coffee machine would lead to similar carnage, we would not focus on never-ending behavioural campaigns or redesigning our kitchens. We would take out the dangerous product. Ban the coffee machine until its design takes human fallibility into account.

This Blog post is based on the academic article “Increase road safety or reduce road danger: challenging the mainstream road safety discourse”

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit: Toa55 Shutterstock

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