lower urban speed limit will increase accidents

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7358863.stm reports on new research that shows that our brains go into rest mode when we face an unchallenging task, such as a boring job.

In amusingly characteristic synchronicity, government has just announced that it will introduce a 20mph speed limit in towns to save lives.

I've argued before that lower speed limits cost lives based only on the increased proportion of lives spent in the car to get from A to B when you have to drive slower, and that they also increase accidents. See

http://www.btinternet.com/~ian.pearson/web/future/roaddeaths.htm and http://www.btinternet.com/~ian.pearson/web/future/driving.doc

This 'latest research' suggests that the effect will be even larger, with people's brains going into autopilot and reacting much slower to visual clues than normally, and consequently making far more mistakes. I for one almost fall asleep if I have to drive as slow as 30mph on an uncluttered road with few obstacles or dangers or pedestrians to track. Being forced by speed cameras to drive at only 20 will mean that my brain will almost switch off completely, or at least wander onto thinking about totally different things. Certainly, I will find it impossible to concentrate on driving at that speed unless the road is very challenging indeed, and very few urban roads are that difficult.

If people respond much more slowly to visual clues and make more mistakes, this will directly translate into more accidents. Although a smaller proportion of those accidents will result in deaths if they occur at slower speed, it is hard to see that implementing a policy that will increase the number of traffic accidents will be sensible. We will have more injuries, even if the number of deaths is lower.

As I said in my articles above, it would be far more sensible to concentrate efforts on reducing the far greater number of avoidable deaths in hospitals, because the benefit:cost ratio would be a great deal better.

Lollipop ladies and backlash watch

The papers this morning feature lollipop ladies with head-cams so that they can record video in case they fall victim of road rage. Part of me says that this is a good use of such technology, protecting good people from abuse. Another part sees annoyance at another step towards the surveillance society. Or more appropriately, the Stepford Society, because it is another piece of technology to force rule-compliance on ordinary people.

At face value, there is nothing wrong with a nice lady (it is decades since I saw a lollipop man) using a camera to video someone who has made her an innocent victim of their road rage. Where she is a genuinely innocent victim, I would support her to the end with any technology possible. But looking deeper, and replaying some personal experiences, the face value glance is just too simplistic and the video will present a very one sided story. It won't record, for example, whether the lady has interrupted the traffic flow for every individual child, even long before they get to her, so that they won't have to wait a second to cross, even though there is a long jam of cars trying to get past, just trying to get to work on time. Those innocent victims who arrive late at work because of an overenthusiastic lollipop lady will have no video evidence and no ear in the authority even if they had. And the video won't record her personality, whether she takes great pleasure from wielding power over car drivers, or makes insulting faces or gestures at them as she stops them.

And it is the latter that I really think is the problem here. While most people doing this job are sensible and will wait until there are several kids before forcing a line of cars to stop, there are others for whom power goes to their heads. And we see the same stories everywhere when a degree of one-sided authority is given to people. Traffic wardens whose love of giving out tickets extends well beyond professionalism, bin-men who love to fine householders if the bin is slightly open, or road planners who seem to take great delight in creating traffic jams by redesigning a junction where previously there was no real problem, or of course the lollipop lady who really just hates cars and does her best to inconvenience them as much as she can under the banner of helping kids cross the road safely. The ability to wield power over other people is a primary career driver that takes people to director level in big companies, but at lower levels, it can just as easily attract the wrong types of people to a job. Lack of proper accountability and even misguided performance incentives give power-hungry people who can't make it to senior management posts another route to indulge in power-wielding.

Technology in such hands just amplifies the problem, because it can provide the evidence they need to show that their decision could be considered right. But without the other half of the evidence, their victim's side, this technology creates asymmetry.

Each time we hear new uses of technology to amplify the asymmetry that exists between the authorities and the people they are meant to serve, we are one step closer to a backlash. Ultimately, government exists to serve the people, and if the people are abused too much and too long, they will eventually take back the power from an abusive government and install one that promises to serve their interests again.