Cultural Traffic Calming

One of the recent discussions on the Streetsblog network was related to an interesting traffic calming measure taken in Germany. In places where speeding near school zones was a problem, the Police have been taking a new approach. Instead of just giving motorists a ticket, they’ve been making the motorists stop and explain to a group of school children why they were speeding through the school zone.

They selected groups of nine kids to do this program, and rotated them out so that none of them missed more than one hour of class. The children were supervised by a police officer and by a teacher, and were allowed to ask the motorists questions. Some questions were pre-scripted, like “Why would you speed near a school?” and “Do you think you could have slowed down in time if a child walked across the street?”

If you’re interested in reading more about it, there’s a rough Google translation of the local newspaper that reported on the story. According to the local newspaper (if I understood it right) there were 1000 children killed by speeding motorists in Germany a few years ago. The “kintergarten tribunal” is one component in a broader effort to reduce speeding near schools. So far the efforts seem to be working, as there were 300 fewer deaths in 2008 than in 2005.

The reason I think this is interesting is it’s reflective of the lesson Antanas Mockus presented in his presentations at the DeLange Conference. People are multi-motivated, and therefore multi-regulated. When giving tickets didn’t change drivers’ behavior, making drivers explain their actions to a group of children did.

One of the reasons cars are so unsafe is that they simultaneously make a driver feel powerful and anonymous. When driving, people tend to think that nobody can see them (inside the car) and that it doesn’t matter what they do (if they cut someone off, for instance) because they won’t ever cross paths with any of these other people again anyway. Power without accountability is a recipe for disaster. That’s the fundamental idea behind our entire constitution!

I wonder how much traffic would improve if everyone had to have their full name in block letters on the back of their car – or if we all had a  ”How’s my driving?” hotline that we had to answer. What if all passenger cars had the kind of CB radio system that truckers use, monitoring what all the drivers within 500 feet of us had to say? I bet we’d all drive safer.

This is just one aspect of the broader lesson Mockus was trying to teach. Many of the problems in society stem from cultural disconnects. In this case, there is widespread cultural dissapproval of speeding in a school zone, but the drivers who do it don’t expect to ever have to endure personal shame from their friends and neighbors.

There are other issues that we could address by promoting cultural awareness (or cultural change). For instance, we could dramatically reduce energy use in Houston if we’d all start dressing for the weather and set our air conditioners a few degrees higher.

I imagine there are lots of issues like this, and I’d love to hear from readers what issues you think could be handled better if the cultural factors (especially accountability or awareness) were different. Sound off on the topic by leaving a comment!