Road sharing - does it matter what road users think of each other?

More documents

Recommendations

Info

3Road sharing - does it matter what road users think of each other?• Avoidance of collisions. While there are probably exotic exceptions, it seemsreasonable to assume that everyone interacting on the roads is trying toavoid bumping into everyone else.• Achievement of goals. By contrast, different road users have many differentgoals in their use of the road, not all of them related to getting to a destination.• Quality of experience. Again, road users are likely to differ, responding indifferent ways whether positively (relaxation, excitement, well-being) ornegatively (stress, fear, anger) to different aspects of their experience.It is worth making an immediate observation on this basic structure whichfollows from the simple observation that the desire to avoid collisions isuniversally shared, while goals and experiences are not.At the first level, interaction is successful to the extent that people are avoidingcollisions. If no-one ever collides, everyone gets what they want. Whether ornot an interaction is successful is a purely factual question, and one for whichquantification of the answer is relatively straightforward, through access torecorded collision statistics.At the second and third levels, by contrast, it is not possible for everyone toget everything they want. The best we can hope for is a fair distribution ofgoal-achievement and experience-quality among those who are interacting.To establish whether an outcome is fair, we have to ask whether what peoplewanted was reasonable in the first place. The success of interaction at theselevels is not just a matter of quantifiable fact: it introduces an unavoidablemoral dimension.For instance, in one of the research workshops conducted as part of our recentresearch with cyclists and other road users (Christmas et al., 2010), some ofthe participants complained about the tendency of some cyclists to ride ingroups, two or more abreast, making it hard for car drivers to get past.‘There’s normally a group, they’re just well up the road, there arecars going about 20 miles an hour behind them. Move over, I thinkit’s selfish.’In one of the groups, however, a participant who himself cycled in this waylaunched a spirited defence of the practice in the face of opposition andquestioning from the rest of the group.‘You got a group of 20; you can’t keep pulling in to single file all thetime because it’s just not practical. [They can’t ride single file allthe time] because they’re talking and training, you know. They’reworking as a team. [It’s] exactly the same as a slow car. You haveto… everybody’s entitled; you know… it’s not against the law.’
Introduction4These two responses differ fundamentally. For the first respondent, teamcyclists are selfishly making unreasonable claims on the road. For the secondrespondent, team cyclists are doing something that is perfectly reasonable,and justified by the practical requirements of training: if anything, it is theexpectation of drivers that they should always be able to get past cyclists (in away they cannot always get past other cars) that is unreasonable.These two different participants have different moral models of the people theyinteract with on the roads: different stories about why these people do whatthey do, different views on whether their claims on the road are reasonable,and – as a result – different judgements of whether the outcome is fair.Put simply, an individual’s judgement of the success of their interaction withother road users depends not just on the facts of what happens, but also ontheir moral model.Perhaps this insight helps to explain an observation – although, like much elsein this report, the observation, the insight and the explanation all remain stuckat the level of anecdote and conjecture until more research of the kind we willbe arguing for is undertaken.The observation is as follows. Ask some road users in London – some cyclists,for instance – how successfully people are interacting on the roads, and youmay get surprisingly different answers. We, for instance, have heard everythingfrom ‘it’s war out there’ to ‘drivers in London are very considerate’.What explains this divergence? It’s possible, of course, that these two cyclistsuse consistently different routes, or that one has been luckier than the other.Maybe, however, the difference lies in their having different moral models.1.3The structure of this documentSo far have we been considering the question of successful interaction from theperspective of those interacting. Those whose job it is to make policies, designinterventions and commission research have a (necessarily) different perspective– along with their own goals and definitions of successful interaction.Even if the above is all true, therefore, it is legitimate to ask: is it somethingthat policy-makers and practitioners need to worry about? Do moral modelsrepresent just a (we would say interesting) theoretical framework, or woulda better understanding of that framework enable policy-makers to do thingsdifferently, and in such a way as to increase the ‘success’ of road sharing?To answer this question, we first need to provide some more detail aboutwhat is meant by the term ‘moral model’; for although, as shall be seen, theconstruct draws on familiar theories (such as Attribution Theory) and concepts
Page 1 and 2: Road SharingDoes it matter what roa
Page 3 and 4: CRoad SharingDoes it matter what ro
Page 5 and 6: iiContentsForewordExecutive Summary
Page 7 and 8: ivBy offering some theoretical foun
Page 9 and 10: vi• Understanding the ‘customer
Page 11: Introduction2In our response, we ha
Page 15 and 16: 6Road sharing - does it matter what
Page 17 and 18: 8Road sharing - does it matter what
Page 19 and 20: 10Road sharing - does it matter wha
Page 33 and 34: Why study moral models?24While the
Page 35 and 36: Why study moral models?26models wil
Page 37 and 38: Why study moral models?28Acceptance
Page 43: The Royal Automobile Club Foundatio

Road sharing - does it matter what road users think of each other?

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?