ROADBLOCKS TO CHANGE
Taking drivers to task for not following signs isn’t going to solve traffic chaos.
I once had a job watching paint dry.
I worked for a company that screen-printed the hanging ads you see in department stores. I sat at the end of a massive conveyor belt watching the signs come off the printer and dry, checking for flaws in the finish. It was exactly as boring as it sounds. But sometimes when someone else called in sick, I would be assigned to work on the “guillotine” that trimmed the edges off big stacks of finished signs. Its blade could slice cleanly and instantly through hundreds of sheets of heavy cardstock.
To operate that machine, you needed to push two buttons a little more than a metre apart at the same time, while also depressing a pedal. Because the machine could easily amputate an arm if someone got careless, it wouldn’t work if both your arms weren’t on the buttons, safely away from the cutting area.
Now some people might say this was unnecessary. The danger is obvious! Anyone operating that machine should know to pay attention and keep their hand out of the way!
But what people should do and what they actually do are two different things. People make mistakes. They fail to restrain impulses. Their minds wander off the task at hand. They shouldn’t, but they do.
Recognizing these basic human failings as inevitable, the machine was designed to make it very difficult to hurt yourself. Conditioned as I was to distraction after weeks of watching paint dry, it may be thanks to the machine’s safety features that I have two hands at the end of my arms to type these words today.
I was thinking about that big blade this week. I wrote a column about how drivers seemed dangerously confused by the redesigned Queens Quay, and suggested some changes to signs and markings were needed to avoid disaster. Most of the notes and calls I got agreed — including the one from Waterfront Toronto, the agency that built the road, which is making changes to improve navigation.
But a very vocal minority had a different response. Drivers should be able to figure it out, they told me. Drivers should pay closer attention, they said. Toronto drivers are terrible, and they should not be driving if they can’t understand this new road, they wrote.
This sort of argument comes up in public policy debates all the time. People should pay more attention crossing the road. People should stop smoking. People should not get addicted to drugs. People should abstain from sex when they’re too young to deal with the consequences. People should work harder, get up earlier, study harder in school. People should . . .
In many cases, those making these arguments are right about what people should do. And if people don’t do those things, perhaps they are to blame, or partly to blame, for the consequences. But they think they have made an argument about the solution to a problem by assigning blame. They have not. In public policy debates, the most important question is almost never “Who is to blame?” Instead, the key thing to ask is “How do we prevent this bad thing from happening?”
When we can see clearly that many people are not doing what they should be doing, perhaps we need to design a system that helps prevent them from doing what they shouldn’t.
We routinely do this to protect our property: People shouldn’t steal, but many do. So we have laws against it and police enforce those laws. But because not all people obey the law, we put locks on our doors, on the ignitions of our cars, on the home screens of our phones. We have bank cards activated by secret codes. We install security cameras and hire security guards. And so on. We do all this to make stealing difficult, which deters many people from impulsively giving in to temptation (“Locks keep honest people honest,” a locksmith I know says) and slows down determined thieves so we can catch them.
It’s not perfect, but we account for human failings in designing our systems, and we’re somewhat successful in alleviating the problem.
In Sweden, they are now applying this logic more aggressively to traffic, trying to eliminate deaths on the road.
“Most of the people in the safety community had invested in the idea that safety work is about changing human behaviour,” Matts-Ake Belin, a traffic safety analyst for the Swedish government, told CityLab last year. “Vision Zero (a strategy whose goal is to eliminate traffic fatalities) says instead that people make mistakes . . . let’s create a system for the humans instead of trying to adjust the humans to the system.”
For them, this has meant not just reducing urban speed limits to 30 kilometres per hour, but also installing speed bumps and traffic cameras to encourage compliance with those limits, and doing things like having a walk signal at intersections that’s separate from the signal for turning car traffic.
Belin says it’s about moving beyond “increasing sanctions,” beyond forcing someone to take responsibility after a catastrophe. “These mistakes will happen all the time,” Belin summarized. “We need to design a system that supports these people so you don’t have this catastrophe.”
That sounds like a good rule of thumb. I think of it as the “TwoButton Rule,” named for the machine that saved my own thumbs: Don’t focus on what you think people should do. Instead, design a system to avoid catastrophes when, inevitably, they don’t. ekeenan@thestar.ca, @thekeenanwire