Taking Responsibility
by Marcus Bachler
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
Herbert Spencer
Today we are encouraged to live in an increasingly protected life-style that is inundated with Government health and safety regulations and warnings. Children are banned from playing risky games at schools, motorists are persecuted for eating apples and in the work place even tap water needs to have its own State risk assessment. The bottom line from all this is that Government wants to wrap us in cotton wool and remove any need for us to take risks and make our own decisions. Nanny knows best and we, her aberrant children, cannot function without her.
That is why a current news item from Carlisle, a city in the North West of England, is a breath of fresh air against this pervasive modern-day “nanny knows best” mentality. It turns out that in January of this year a flood caused the traffic lights in Cumbria’s busiest and most congested road junction to stop working for two weeks. When the lights were restored, many motorists complained that traffic had flowed much better and more safely without them. After much discussion and debate county councillors finally bowed to public pressure and sanctioned from today (March 7th) a six-month experiment, effectively switching the traffic lights back off again. Not surprisingly safety officers are opposed to the experiment, claiming that there will now be more accidents.
However, experience in Holland has already proved otherwise.
Two years ago, a province in The Netherlands removed all traffic lights and stop signs from its roads in order to encourage people drive more carefully. And it worked; the changes improved traffic flow and reduced the number of accidents at intersections drastically.
The reason it works is that by relying too heavily on traffic lights and road signs, motorists assume that there is no danger and stop making their own judgements of the potential risks they are taking. When cyclists and pedestrians are in places they shouldn’t be, or motorists jump traffic lights or ignore speed signs, the result can be fatal. However, without traffic lights and signs, motorists, cyclists and pedestrians make common sense decisions to slow down to a safe speed and give-way to other traffic.
In other words, when motorists are expected to make their own choices they start to be more aware of risks involved and act accordingly. This proof of principle illustrates that when individuals are actually expected to think for themselves, they do so much more effectively than when lectured by Nanny.
The Dutch experiment was so successful the idea is starting to get consideration in other places in England than just Cumbria.
Elizabeth Moon, a principal urban designer at Essex County Council, says a pilot scheme is “something that we would be interested in pushing, but we are in the very early stages.” She says political backing would be needed before a scheme was devised, but suggests that we live in “a nanny state with all these signs and signals everywhere. When traffic lights break down you see that everybody can negotiate the junctions.”
Taking responsibility for our own lives is not only rational, but is also in our best interests. Maybe this “new” idea of fostering individual responsibility will become popular with the public as they begin to realize that responsibility in the hands of individuals, rather than politicians, is in their best interests. I hope a new ideology of taking responsibility will eventually trump the current lazy and corrupt practice of embracing Nanny. That way, not only will the economy save billions on paying for and implementing the current health and safety bureaucracy, but individuals will start to use common sense and reason, rather than relying upon mindless dictates of the State.
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