25 July 2005
Off-target policies could be fatal
Targets undoubtedly have their place, but the places they are forced into often seem to be the wrong ones.
How can it possibly be right for the efficiency of a police force – or, worse, individual officers – to be measured by the number of convictions obtained?
It must be well-nigh irresistible to go for the easy option and leave difficult crimes untackled – the kind of mentality that leads to ineffective, unjust but cash-rich measures like speed cameras.
It’s just as ludicrous that councils should measure the efficiency of traffic wardens by the number of tickets issued. But this happens in many areas, as a report to the Department for Transport made clear last week.
Why should wardens be penalised if everyone parks legally? Surely they should be rewarded if they encourage correct parking. But that would not bring in money. So confrontation and “offending” are promoted.
It’s all part of the fashionable Persecution of Motorists Scenario (PMS), of course, as are measures like long-phase pedestrian lights in places such as Norwich.
It’s fun, if you’re a certain kind of traffic planner, to make drivers wait for thin air – never mind the pollution and congestion that is an inevitable by-product. But it turns out that this apparently pro-pedestrian measure has a downside for walkers. It could kill them.
If traffic is stopped on red in all directions, pedestrians tend to think they can cross – even if the lights are red for them too. And the longer they stay red, the more likely they are to risk it, thinking that the lights must be about to change in their favour.
Unfortunately they are sometimes about to change in the traffic’s favour. Even Norwich can’t make motorists wait for ever.
A more realistic phasing of the lights would, unsurprisingly, be safer for everyone. Now that’s quite a sensible target to aim at.
Exactly what were these lights for?
Motorists unfortunate enough to drive into Norwich from the wrong direction are just starting nine weeks of even more disruption than usual, as workmen remove the traffic lights on the Grapes Hill roundabout.
A bit of road widening and painting will bring the cost up to a cool £¼ million. We are told the result will be to reduce congestion and help improve air quality – both admirable objectives.
It does however make one wonder why the much-criticised lights were put there in the first place: was it to create congestion and worsen air quality?
Part of the current work includes “converting the pedestrian crossing on Chapelfield Road to pedestrian and cycle use”, which must be the ultimate money-wasting project. Standard pedestrian crossings around the city are used constantly by cyclists without any conversion at all.
There must be a tiny amount of sympathy for planners who are faced with the unanswerable question of how to cope with the traffic that will be generated by the Chapelfield Shopping Extravaganza.
But there was a time when the question wasn’t unanswerable. It was just that no one liked the answer, because there was no money in it. The words “short” and “sighted” spring irresistibly to mind.
Going wrong on the distributor road
There are three major wrong decisions that could be made about the Norwich northern distributor road.
• The first is not to build it: only the blind, those who will not see and those who don’t live or move in the north of the city could imagine that an increase in the current congestion there is a viable option.
• The second is to build it too far west, where it completely fails to serve the purpose for which it is designed. • And the third – possibly most bizarre of all – is to make it a single carriageway. Show me someone who wants it built as far west as possible, single carriageway, starting in 2020, and I’ll show you someone who thinks you should “have what you need rather than what you want”, and whose idea of what you need is strangely lacking in human understanding.
Beware of people who think they know what you need. As H L Mencken put it, “the urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule”.
Difficulties of driving while lulled to sleep
A survey this month tried to persuade us that certain music is safer to drive by. The limitations of the survey are demonstrated by the fact that easy listening music got safe-drive approval, despite its propensity for sending people to sleep. Only a few people, most of them from Norfolk, are able to drive in this condition.
But the most obvious danger of music in cars has nothing to do with melody or lyrics. It’s to do with changing the CD (or tape), which is quite hard to achieve while controlling the car efficiently. Strangely this is almost never mentioned in road safety campaigns.