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The UK Is Considering a Bizarre Solution to Slow Drivers Down

If you thought you were the only one trying to cut down costs and reduce your spending, you must be delusional: the whole 99 percent of the population does it, and it’s not just restricted to individuals.
British road 1 photo
Photo: Sludge G on Flickr
Governments do it too. Some of them aren’t very happy with the “lousy spenders of the public money” label they’ve got over the years and so are doing their best to find simple and inexpensive solutions to all the problems that come with the responsibility of ruling a country.

One of these problems is the ever increasing driver’s tendency to exceed the speed limits. Blame it on the fast pace of our lives or the more and more powerful and accessible engines, but whatever it is, it costs people’s lives. It’s not who says it, it’s statistics.

Local British administrations are currently testing a weird solution to this problem, and according to preliminary results, it appears to be working. Given a month’s time to think about it, you’d probably never come up with the right answer, and that’s because it’s so counterintuitive at first sight: they’re removing the road markings.

Who would have thought that those white stripes that tell us where the road ends were the reason we were going so fast? Well, they weren’t, but in their absence, drivers don’t feel as comfortable going fast, so speeds have been dropping by as much as 13 percent. Transport for London hasn’t removed all markings, just the one central line, and it was enough to slow drivers down by an average of over 8 mph (13 km/h) compared to when the line was still visible.

And yet, this idea seems like a double-edged sword. Making the roads less safe so that people don’t drive as fast? That’s like giving everybody guns to curb violence, in some way. Surely there are better solutions, even though slightly more expensive.

Others think the same. Paul Watters, head of roads policy at the AA told Auto Express, “Without exaggeration it is true to say that a simple pot of paint can save lives. In particular, highly visible markings at the edge and centre of the road that can be seen on a wet night are enormously cost-effective in saving lives."

Surely road markings didn’t precede the roads themselves, but were created specifically as a safety feature to minimize the risk of going forward at night while the road went right or left. But people have evolved since then and if the new findings show we’re better off without them, then so be it. For the moment, though, the Transport for London makes it very clear that there are no plans for a widespread implementation of the system.
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About the author: Vlad Mitrache
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"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie)
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