............
My mother, who in the Autumn of her years still goes by bicycle to do her shopping at Sainsbury’s in Cromwell Road, makes a modest proposal about road safety. Outlaw seatbelts. Instead, fit a large spike to every steering wheel, point toward the driver’s chest. Well, it may never catch on. But like Swift’s modest proposal to end child poverty by eating poor children, it would solve the problem. Drivers take more care, and an innocent cycle ride to the supermarket is much less hazardous.
Like any sound satire my mother’s proposal has good sense behind it. Mountaineering is dangerous: but climbers rarely fall on anyone else. Your Atlantic cod is the product of a hazardous industry: but the risks are born by men who chose to accept them with their pay packets. Fair enough. But with cars it doesn’t work like that. In the road safety numbers published here yesterday you can discover that for every two people who died driving a car, one person got run over.
In cost-benefit terms, motoring is a plumber’s nightmare. You get in your car; you know it’s hazardous; but the risk of death is the cost of comfortable travel, and you accept that. What you didn’t know is, you’re getting a subsidy. The boy playing footie in his street, the merchant banker coming out of Guildhall tube, or for that matter my mother with her panniers full of organic lettuce, are bearing risks created by your travel happiness. One third of your risk is suffered by someone who is not getting anything in return.
Any economist will tell you that where benefits go to people who don’t bear the costs, wrong choices get made. Airbags and crumple zones create a sense of invulnerability in the driver. Worse, this sense is not illusory. I can drive more recklessly in a Volvo than in a Morris Minor, without taking any more risks. For the poor mug on the pavement or in the cycle lane, though, it makes no odds whether I have a side impact protection system. It’s a ton of steel at forty miles an hour either way. The safer I feel, the faster I drive, the more likely I run you down.
Road safety is just one egregious example of the crossed up incentives in which all motoring is clouded. Driving is jolly pricey, but you pay it all up front. Every hundred miles you drive costs you £41, but only a quarter of that is what you take out of your wallet at the point of decision. Poor old Thomas the Tank Engine is cheaper all round, but the punter pays something close to the full cost of the journey every time he steps on the platform. This is the real reason for congestion charging and road tolls and higher fuel duty. Not to punish the motorist, but to help us read the price tag. Driving is not wicked, but we do more of it than makes us happy, because what we pay for it today doesn’t tell us how much it costs over a lifetime. In much the same way, people smoked more before they knew it would kill them.
Of course, many of the solutions are worse than the problem. One of the worst by-products of motoring is a hideous body of costly, unenforceable laws which lower the respect in which the Law in general is held. Multiplying laws, even to untangle cost and benefit in the motoring economy – that way madness lies. We might try pay-as-you-drive insurance, with which some insurers are experimenting already, or even plough road charges back into subsidising third party cover. Or how about some prohibitions on accident insurance? Both bring the cost of driving this journey closer to the lifetime cost; the second makes drivers warier, without resorting to the spike.
One thing’s for sure though: the less driving we do, the less we will want to do. Often one gets in a car because it’s the only place free from the stink and racket of other cars, and safe from the alienated anger of other drivers. To this extent, driving is a sad but apt metaphor for the mental condition of our times. We are at odds with one another because my pursuing my own personal fulfilment goads you to pursue yours, and vice versa; we hide in sealed capsules that make us less worth finding; we wear armour because everyone else is wearing armour. That’s the real hidden cost of motoring.