Recently I’ve come across Equality Streets, a website devoted to the assumption that motorists and pedestrians don’t need to be told when they should proceed at junctions.
According to Martin Cassini, over 20,000 humans are killed or hurt on our roads every year – many of them children – from that he asserts that the current system could hardly claim to be a success.
We complain about the traffic and blame other drivers, but could the real problem be the system itself?
Traffic lights take our eyes off the road, a recipe for danger. They make us stop when we could go, a recipe for rage. They cost the earth to install and run.
What happens when lights are out of action and we are free to use our own judgement? We approach carefully and filter sociably. As courtesy thrives, congestion dissolves.
A system based on equality removes the “need” for most traffic control, and the need for speed, allowing all road-users to use commonsense and common courtesy to filter more or less in turn, and merge in harmony.
Seems like a sensible proposition to me.
On 18 September 1709 Samuel Johnson was born, his dictionary: Oats a grain in England is given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people
Newgate Prison was renovated with funding provided by London’s famous mayor, Dick Whittington, with a bequest in his will of 1422, the gate and gaol were pulled down and rebuilt
Under Cleopatra’s Needle a time capsule contains cigars, a razor, Queen Victoria’s portrait, newspapers and pictures of 12 English beauties
During the plague a sage said breathing on a chicken for self-diagnosis: if you’re infected the chicken becomes ‘roupy’ and lay rotten eggs
At a Twickenham public park 8 naked ladies disport on fountain rockery so startlingly white during World War II their bums were sprayed grey for the blackout
When Animal Farm was published in 1945 George Orwell was living at 27b Canonbury Square he moved there in the autumn of 1944 after their flat in Kilburn was hit by a V-1 flying bomb
Tea made its first appearance in London in September 1658, when the new beverage was advertised in a pamphlet by Thomas Garraway, a coffeehouse owner
Griffin Park Brentford FC’s home since 1904 is renowned for being the only English league ground to have a pub on each corner, and the ground is named after one of these
Blackfriars is London’s only station to have entrances on both sides of the Thames, it is world’s largest solar-powered bridge having been covered with 4,400 photovoltaic panels
19th Century ‘pure finders’ wandered London collecting dog faeces required by the many South Bank tanners to purify the leather
Street names that sadly no longer exist include Shiteburn Lane, Pissing Alley, and more than one Gropecunt Lane
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