Are traffic signs as meaningless as star signs?
It’s not something most of our governments want to hear but less regulations actually make us safer:
A German town has scrapped all traffic lights and road signs in a bid to make the streets safer. German town removes road signs to reduce accidents. The radical experiment appears to be working as there has not been a single reported accident in the four weeks since the signs were ripped up. Officials believe the move forces drivers to take extra care and show each other more consideration.
This idea of doing away with the myriad of signs, painted white lines and traffic lights was first promoted by a Dutch traffic expert. Most of his colleagues thought this was a ludicrously bad idea – until some local authorities tried it out and it proved to be an extremely effective way to make the roads and the people using them much safer.
Since then, these same experts have tried to ignore the whole thing, hoping that these successes won’t undermine their own authority and give people the idea that they and their expensive road sign industry are a perfect waste of space and time.
Indeed, stories about these highly successful traffic experiments are few and far between the more regular stories about traffic jams, and traffic accidents and all the expensive and rules-obsessed schemes by the experts who still insist on waving about their outdated signs as if they were that fairytale’s paid flunkies who loudly praised the emperor’s new clothes.
So, for now, those who have vested interests in the status quo are making more noise and getting more print than those who are actually making a difference when it comes to making our roads safer – but I’m sure that the truth will out, slowly but ever more conclusively.
Life is not a fairytale, of course, and it takes more than one small boy shouting that the emperor is naked to change the world but the moment will come when the emperor and his expert cronies will be exposed as naked frauds, who were so in love with their own status that they would rather ignore and even suppress the truth than help prevent more accidents and more deaths by admitting that their own approach was not just outdated but counterproductive and dead wrong.
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