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Martin Cassini is a critic of our traffic control system which he says is inefficient, dangerous and in need of fundamental reform. He is a regular contributor to Traffic Technology International, and has written for The Times, Telegraph, IEA and BBC. He advocates a hands-off approach to junction control, and says that human nature combined with good design is the route to civilised co-existence between road-users. “We should be free to use our greatest resource - our highly-evolved ability to negotiate movement - on roads free of inept traffic controls.” Context is all. “Who is the better judge of when or how fast it’s safe to go - you and me at the time and the place, or remote lights and limits fixed by absent regulators? Anyone can see that lights are often badly phased, except the experts who phase them, but most lights are unnecessary per se – look what happens when they are out of action: courtesy thrives, congestion dissolves. As soon as they are “working” again, the jams and hostility are back." In the footsteps of Kenneth Todd, Cassini identifies main road priority – “imposed without reference to Parliament or the People” – as the fatal flaw at the heart of the system. Priority abandons common law principles of equal rights and responsibilities. It defies basic safety principles and social custom by licensing main road traffic to plough on, regardless who was there first. In all other walks of life, we take our turn in the sequence in which we arrive. Not so on the roads, where we have to fight for survival, gaps and green time. Priority produces a "need" for lights - to interrupt the priority streams of traffic so that other road-users can cross in relative, but not guaranteed safety. It is a scandal, he says, that the current system puts the onus on children to beware cars, when it could and should be the other way round. "Most accidents are not accidents at all. They are events arising from conflicts contrived by the rules and design of the road." The key to our road safety problems is the also the key to our salvation: remove priority and you remove the "need" for lights and the need for speed. Then we can do what is natural and intrinsically safe: approach carefully, watch the road, interact with others, and filter, more or less in turn. When drivers are free of rules dictating their every move - rules which often make them act against their better nature and better judgement - they see pedestrians as fellow road-users rather than obstacles in the way of the next light. A new hierarchy emerges with vulnerable road-users at the top. Thus Cassini advocates an organic, live-and-let-live approach based on context, on our instinct to co-operate, and on a trust in human nature rather than an obsession with controlling it. His ideas overlap with the theory of spontaneous order, which states that the more complex the ballet of human activity (e.g. a skateboard park), the less useful are attempts to control it. They also dovetail with shared space, which has gone some way to proving that efficiency and peaceful coexistence are attainable through freedom to use good sense on sympathetically-designed roads which stimulate rather than enforce correct conduct. A by-product of self-regulation is that road capacity is optimised: instead of stop-start consecutive queueing, we get simultaneous filtering – infinitely more civilised and efficient. Cassini doesn’t claim filter in turn is a panacea, and concedes that in some circumstances external controls might be necessary, e.g. at major junctions at peak times, but we should harness rather than hamper human nature, and coercion should be used only as a last resort. He condemns the stop-start drive cycle produced by traffic lights as the most environmentally damaging form of traffic management, and has accused traffic authorities such as TfL and Camden of "negligence and hypocrisy" http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article1295400.ece. Following his BBC Newsnight report, which featured Dr Ian Walker, Professor Susan Greenfield, Hans Monderman, Ben Hamilton-Baillie, Hank Dittmar and Professor Peter Barker, he founded a campaign, FiT Roads - Roads FiT for People, which advances the right of all road-users to use commonsense and common courtesy on roads free of counterproductive traffic controls. Cassini is a graduate from Wadham College, Oxford, and a member of the International Advisory Council of the Kyoto World Cities New Mobility Program.


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