This can also be read as Kinderstreets, as in Kindergarten
Make roads safe for children, and you make them safe for everyone.
The key is to change the basic rule of the road from priority ("Get out of my way!") to equality ("After you"),
and to put the onus for road safety on the driver, instead of the child, as the current odious system has it.
This is a sister site to Equality Streets
The biggest indictment of the current system? It makes the child responsible for road safety. It makes the child learn age-inappropriate road safety drill to help him/her survive on roads made lethal in the first place by the dysfunctional rules of the road. Many children don't survive, or are damaged for life. The rule of priority licenses main road drivers to neglect pedestrians, including children, regardless who was there first. Traffic control blocks natural flow, maximises congestion and emissions. Children are at the ideal level to inhale the toxins that lodge in the bloodstream, damaging brain development and lung function, killing us all softly and invisibly.
In the absence of priority, e.g. when lights are out of action, all road-users are free to take it more or less in turns and merge sociably at low speeds. Freedom to filter avoids the stop-restart drive cycle produced by traffic control. Filtering at low speeds and low revs cuts fuel use and emissions by a factor of no less than 29. Instead of blighting streets with traffic lights (those weapons of mass distraction, danger and delay), we should rewrite the rulebook, the driving test and the law, enshrining equality at the heart of a common law system of live-and-let-live. To reinforce the new culture, we should redesign streets to express equality and sociable shared space.
