Common Sense

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” (Gertrude Stein)

If you dig around on Transport for London’s website you can find some interesting documents. As I am a bit of a techie I find much of the detail interesting, but on the whole many of these documents seem to offer a common sense approach to traffic management. We must assume that their primary audience consists of the traffic management and enforcement departments of the Local Councils who after all are the people tasked with ‘greasing the flow’ of vehicles through their patch.

We are supposed to believe that the purpose of traffic enforcement is to reduce congestion and hence increase traffic flow; OK at lot of it is biased towards getting the buses to run faster and on time – no bad thing. So, let us put aside for one moment the belief that the purpose of enforcement is to gain more revenue, and concentrate solely on the effectiveness of the various methods of enforcement.

TfL have subjected their policy of using CCTV enforcement to external review by a team from the Technical University of Berlin “…who have particular expertise in cameras from a variety of EU funded projects. They have assessed and quantified the impact of camera enforcement on compliance using established social modelling techniques.”

Now here’s the interesting bit:

“Their modelling study found that the visibility of the enforcement system plays a major part in its effectiveness. It is drivers’ awareness of their potential visibility to the enforcement system that is crucial for maintaining compliance, and this in turn is reinforced by the visibility of the system to drivers who may consider contravening the regulations.”

In other words if you really want to make drivers comply with the regulations you put up large clear signs and you make the cameras highly visible. But hang on, isn’t that what happens with speed cameras already? You put clear (as in unambiguous), visible signs showing a camera and the speed limit, you paint the camera yellow and ensure it is not hidden, and bingo, your offending rate goes down. It’s common sense really.

The TfL review goes on to question the effectiveness of PCNs:

“The researchers have demonstrated that the impact of reactive mechanisms, where drivers are sent penalty notices after infringing the rules, such as being caught in the act by a camera, are now lower overall than the impact of proactive mechanisms, which deter drivers from committing the offence in the first place. The impact of the issuing of PCNs on compliance occurs after a time delay of one month, which is assumed to relate to the delay between committing the offence and receiving the notice.”

Note that because of the delay you can potentially be caught (and fined) committing the same offence over and over again because you are unaware of the surveillance and enforcement until you start receiving PCNs.

So there you have it, overt, not covert surveillance is the key to reducing the number of traffic contraventions; be proactive and help drivers to avoid committing an offence, and not reactive by issuing PCNs at the drop of a hat. It all makes total sense.

The quotes are taken from the same report (Traffic Enforcement: Impact Analysis and Future Strategies) used for my post ‘Numb3rs’ below.