Alex Klaushofer has an interesting Critic reminder about Vision Zero.
The empty road to serfdom
“Vision Zero” is a tyrannical anti-driving dream
Those of us who appreciate the ability of vehicles to get us from one place to another will have noticed a strange phenomenon besetting Britain’s roads.
First came the planters, the wooden roadblocks deposited by some of our councils in the hope that closing roads might halt the spread of Covid. The measures were part of central government’s Active Travel programme, which morphed into environment-based road closures enforced by cameras and fines. Since then, the reasons have changed, varying from pollution and congestion to health and safety. But restrictions on driving have continued apace.
Few people know this, but many of these policies are underpinned by a new ideology called Vision Zero. Like Zero Covid, it offers a seductive blend of idealism and virtue, “a fundamentally different way to approach traffic safety” aimed at eliminating the number of serious accidents on the roads. The idea, originating in Sweden and promoted by organisations such as Vision Zero Network, is being embraced by authorities around the UK. Witness Transport for London’s Vision Zero statement: “The Vision Zero approach is based on the fundamental conviction that loss of life and serious injuries are neither acceptable nor inevitable”.
The whole piece is well worth reading, although I suspect many people do know about Vision Zero because it was a minor but interesting news item when adopted by Sweden in 1997. To the surprise of nobody who pays attention to these matters, it has evolved into a miserable bureaucratic dream of complete control over anything to do with travel.
It’s not just local government taking this autocratic approach. Without any public debate, the UK government has signed up to “the Safe System”, a generic term for approaches such as Vision Zero advocated by the World Health Organisation and other supra-national bodies based on the idea that “human beings’ lives and health should never be compromised by their need to travel”.
13 comments:
If they were intellectually consistent they'd campaign against "smart motorways". Do they?
If you are having trouble sleeping, I recommend a visit to the Vision Zero website; a plethora of jargon-ridden Meghan-level word salads interspersed with multi-coloured word clouds (or, as I like to think of them, shit-jumbles).
There’s stiff competition out there but I think you may have uncovered the most meaningless mission statement ever.
dearieme - good point, no they don't campaign against "smart motorways" and Vision Zero suggests they must. Joined-up thinking goes AWOL again.
Macheath - I've had a peep at it, but I have trouble reading the jargon-ridden word salads because as you say, that's what it is. Adults should be ashamed of being associated with it, but they are not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD2CwVBAfKk
There's a small manifestation near us. Several local roads near a primary school are closed for a time when the children are going in, and then again when they are collected. Parents in hi-vis jackets police this vigorously, blocking off the entrances. There seem to be frequent arguments with motorists. I don't much care either way, but I'd like to see what the evidence is for needing such a scheme. I suspect someone just read about it, and had the zeal to sell the idea to the local authority.
If only the Tories could have been clever enough to have understood and uncovered this scam before the election, and made the effort to tell everyone what this was really all about, we might not be looking at five years of mayhem under Starmer.
The word salad decribed above comes is a perfect description of the way fiction is turned into facts...
Hey, that was me above? I'm not anonymous!
Inching closer and closer to totalitarianism.
Sackers - la route est dure mais je suis not so fort these days.
Sam - I bet those frequent arguments with motorists are part of the attraction, that and the hi-vis jackets. We still see parents in big cars squeezing in anywhere.
Probably Scrobs - the Tories didn't seem at all keen on telling us about any of the approved scams. Captured by the loons in my view and there is no going back without an effective team at the top which they don't appear to have or want.
James - and always closer than people generally realise.
The empty road to serfdom will not be acceptable to The Zealots That Be until it is overgrown, made of packed mud and gravel, and certified 'green' by horse droppings.
Getting to a regional hospital or out of town shopping centre or large 'Comprehensive' school will be much more difficult, but then we can't have people aspiring to a good life can we?
(sarcasm)
DJ - it seems to be one of those schemes where the main value is lots of meetings and lots of taxpayer's money thrown at projects which don't make life better. They hit problems such as access to regional hospitals or out of town shopping centres and just tack on more projects.
They probably claim that the end product is the good life, but ours not theirs.
All this reminds me of the government-backed professor announcing some years ago, “Whatever your salt intake, you will benefit from reducing it” - advice which put two health-conscious elderly people I knew in hospital with acute sodium deficiency.
Maybe it’s reductio ad absurdiam, but it almost sounds as if their ultimate goal is a speed limit as close to zero as possible and for most of us never to leave the house at all, with work, education and social life all taking place online.
It makes EM Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’ - written in 1909 - seem alarmingly prescient:
‘The story describes a world in which most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual now lives in isolation below ground in a standard room, with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Travel is permitted, but is unpopular and rarely necessary. Communication is made via an instant messaging/video conferencing machine with which people conduct their only activity: the sharing of ideas and what passes for knowledge.’ (Wikipedia)
Macheath - that's an interesting salt story. It's not easy to understand why a professor would say something so dubious, but we know they do and people listen to them. Professionals seem to lose part of themselves when they are sucked into the government ethos.
I reread ‘The Machine Stops’ not so long ago, it's one of those stories which stays with the reader for years, maybe because it's so horribly fascinating. Even more so now we have the technology and as you say, it is possible to envisage work, education and social life all taking place online. Every now and then we all like to get away from everything, so buried within that vision is something we enjoy doing. It is possible to imagine drifting towards it without being horrified by any particular stage in the drift.
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