Regulating cars

Before I begin, I use the word “car” to describe all passenger-first vehicles regardless of their design and so-called market segment. Whether it’s a sedan, hatchback, or an SUV, or one of those ridiculous two rows of seats “pickup” truck designs with a short and almost useless flatbed, they are primarily used to transport people and so they are all cars to be regulated as passenger vehicles. Also, electric or fossil, these issues don’t change.

While mass auto violence makes the headlines and is horrific, routine auto violence kills and injures thousands every year. I want to take a safety and harm reduction focused look at how we can stop this. So, what are the variables?

1. Access to deadly devices. I see a car as a deadly device, a gun we use to travel around in, which kills unless operated almost perfectly. Who can access a car? How do we control access to a car?
2. Speed and Proximity. Any speed greater than 50 kph leads to almost certain death. So how do we control speed? The closer cars and drivers get to vulnerable people, the more likely they are to hurt them. Cities, downtowns and other dense spaces have many people walking and biking about, and cars pose much more danger than on a freeway. 
3. Design. The heavier and taller a vehicle, the more likely it is to kill. If a subcompact car is a pistol, a large passenger “truck” car is an AK47. So how do we control car design?
4. Human skill and attitude. Driverless car hype aside, cars are operated by humans. The more unskilled, distracted, angry they are, the more likely they are to kill
5. Necessity and frequency of use. The more people are forced to use killing devices for transport, the more likely they are to kill people. 
6. The system. We currently assume that use of killing devices by untrained amateurs as transportation is normative. This is the default way to be, and any changes to the default are catastrophic. People call this motonormativity, car brain, you pick the term. 

If you were not motonormative, how would you tackle this issue of car violence?

Access

Right now, car access works as follows. You pass a one-time driving test in a country in your teens. That gives you access to drive most passenger vehicles anywhere in the country for the rest of your life (and in many cases, other countries too). Yes, your license can be suspended for various reasons. But that does not prevent you from driving a car, it only prevents you from driving one legally. So, we have hundreds of instances every year of people who are not allowed to drive hurting others with their cars. This is not an actual restriction of access, it’s administrative. 

Solution: Take the next logical step. Tie car access to a functioning license. The technological solution is as simple as installing one more security system that does not allow a car to start/move unless a valid license is tapped or inserted. This way, people with suspended licenses will not be able to drive unless they take extreme measures.  If someone is in a mental health crisis, then instead of jailing them on suspicion, you simply restrict access to deadly devices just like you would restrict access to a gun, or sharp knives. This is not a 100% stop as there will be exceptions (steal a license, hack the car, get an enabler), but it will stop most access issues. You could get more nuanced and tie certain cars to certain licenses as well, that way if you don’t want your car to be driven by anyone else than yourself, you implement strict access control. This way, you give people with mental health issues, or substance issues the time it takes for them to get help while restricting their access to dangerous devices, not their entire freedom. 

Speed

Right now, cars are designed to go 3-4 times faster than kill speed with no physical restrictions (armed and dangerous). Once again, restrictions like speed limits are just administrative. Most humans don’t comply, and inappropriate speed is a major factor in auto violence. Cars are also almost always allowed in very crowded spaces where they are operated near vulnerable people. 

Solutions: These solutions sound draconian if you are in car culture. Remember, in addition to being a transport device, the car is also a killing device. You’re driving around in a gun! Speed restrictions are linked to proximity. The closer you are to people on bikes and on foot, the slower the top-speed on your vehicle needs to be. And this is a technological speed limit, not an administrative one. We have the technology to tie speed limiters in cars to GPS. Why, we even restrict ebikes to 32 kmph currently. Even though imperfect, this could be a starting point. I would go a step further. All cars are, by default, in “city” mode. That means their speeds are capped to a max of 25-50 kmph depending on location. I would start with a 30 kmph default maximum and have GPS-linked increases up to 50 in places where there are fewer people walking. Then, when you are on a highway you press the highway or speed button to allow the car to go faster in places where it is less likely to encounter vulnerable people. Highway speeds are hard-capped at 10 kmph above the maximum speed limit in the country in addition to being limited by GPS. We will need a way to light up a car very prominently to display its highway/speed status, and ways to disable back to city mode if activated in the city. If a vehicle is seen in a city on speed/highway mode, the assumption is that it’s armed and dangerous. The status quo, remember, is all cars are armed and dangerous! Tie this to robust and affair utomated enforcement with speed cameras, radar etc. so the police can’t choose not to enforce traffic laws (like they are currently doing in Victoria BC)

Proximity

The more people walking/biking in an area, the greater your access restriction to cars and the tighter the speed control. Whether it is creating car-free streets, adding congestion tolls to cities and busy neighbourhoods, or putting up real barriers to prevent access during a festival/gathering, the goal is to greatly reduce the interactions between killing devices and unarmed people. There is so much work going on in this space, the 15 minute city for example is one such framework to think about design that minimizes deadly car interactions.

Car design 

This one is simple. Cars cannot be allowed for sale if they are too tall, or too heavy. Cars are not cellphones, they have to be regulated with safety as the overwhelming priority. The safety approval process must take equal care of people outside the car, not just inside. There’s overwhelming evidence (and physics) that shows large cars like “trucks” or “SUVs” cause disproportionate harm. If you need to carry more people, design appropriately to bring the harm levels back to baseline car. There is also the disturbing trend of touchscreen menu-based interfaces for cars that is terribly unsafe. All of these need changing. 

Driver skill and attitude

This is tied to access and design. If you think of the car as a gun, then it should horrify you that amateurs with one-time testing and no continuing professional development are allowed unlimited access to cars. Driving  a car is a cognitively demanding task, and research shows that any level of distraction away from simply driving on a highway with no people and no distraction increases risk.  Given that, it’s quite amazing more people are not hurt more often. It is proof that most people are working hard to do the right thing and concentrating on driving most of the time. It is clearly not enough. People have suggested more frequent retesting may help, continuing education as well. But ensuring driver licenses aren’t just pieces of plastic would go a long way. Same with driver attitude. When you’re performing a cognitively demanding task, you must stay calm. Unfortunately, the act of driving in proximity to hundreds of other drivers you don’t know and can’t communicate with increases stress in an already distrustful and dangerous environment, hence the common road rage issues. Add in the unpredictability and extra difficulty level of negotiating crowded urban streets, it’s all so demanding. Some of this can be handled through access restriction, some through speed control. However, the underlying issue is that driving is stressful and causes stress. Even with all the tools of so called “self-driving”, anything other than complete attention is dangerous. So you have to address necessity and frequency

Necessity and frequency, and the system.

Many books have been written on this topic. So I won’t go into much detail. For example, Life After Cars, or Car Free Cities, and so many more. The overarching point here is to reduce the necessity and frequency of private driving by designing our living and working systems appropriately. For example, I have a car, but I use it maybe once a week on a longer office drive (which I would not need to if we had a better transit system), or for getting into nature quickly. The rest of the time, most of what I need is within a 10 minute sweat free ebike ride: Groceries, medical appointments, kids school etc.

Needless to say, each of these interventions major and minor face a motonormative culture and entrenched opposition. So expect none of them except possibly the system design (which is happening in many places).