Letter accepted for publication in Significance, December 2008. This is a much abbreviated version of the letter submitted.
Apologies for my delayed reply to the Controversy piece by Richard Allsop, et al (Significance, June 2008) – challenging my piece Britains seatbelt law should be repealed (Significance June 2007). The myth that seat belt laws save lives is so deeply entrenched that I no longer entertain hopes of their repeal. But I take a tiny bit of consolation from the creeping acknowledgement of risk compensation the idea that people, in this case drivers, respond to changes in their perception of risk.
The debate has shifted from denial of the existence of the phenomenon to an argument about whether in particular circumstances the compensation is partial, complete or more than complete.
Let us for the moment grant Allsop et al their dubious contention of many more deaths saved than caused by seat belts. Who are the saved and who are those sacrificed for their benefit? The saved are people in cars; the lives sacrificed are those of pedestrians and cyclists. The best protected (and usually the economically best off) are provided further protection at the expense of the most vulnerable.
This is a perversion of cost benefit analysis. The central tenet of cost benefit analysis states that a change from the status quo can only be considered an improvement if it makes at least one person better off while leaving no one worse off. Since there is no way of compensating a dead cyclist or pedestrian, their argument fails. Or, in non-economist speak, it is unfair.
For many decades road safety measures have emphasized deference to traffic. Pedestrians are channeled by guardrails or forced to use underpasses and footbridges. Cyclists are offered inadequate cycle paths and encouraged to believe other roads are dangerous. Policy has been to withdraw vulnerable road users from the threat, rather than to withdraw the threat from the vulnerable. The group most seriously affected by this policy is children. The fears of parents and the admonitions of safety campaigners have led to their almost complete withdrawal from the threat. Traditional childrens independence has been lost, and with it a host of experiences vital to their physical and social development.
We can end on a more cheerful and constructive note. Seat belt laws rest on a model of human behaviour that assumes that motorists are stupid, obedient automatons who are unresponsive to perceived changes in risk and who need protecting, by law, from their own stupidity. The idea of risk compensation underpins an alternative model of human behaviour: we are intelligent, vigilant, responsive to evidence of safety and danger and, given the right signals and incentives, considerate. Road users motorists, pedestrians and cyclists are now discovering, in pioneering shared space schemes, that safe and attractive urban environments can be devised to encourage the convivial coexistence of all road users.