“If we are thinking about injury prevention and the dominant ‘safe system’ approach used within road safety, there is actually a strong case for redesigning infrastructure over relying on other methods of changing behaviour.”
So says Shaun Helman, chief transportation scientist at the Transport Research Laboratory. But what particular problem could he be addressing? Cyclists taking their lives in their hands every time they mount their bikes? Drivers who sit in the middle lane of motorways, steadfastly going no quicker or slower than 50mph, thereby causing other drivers to tear their hair out?
No - Mr Helman is addressing those zombies who are glued to their mobile phones, to the discomfiture of anyone else within 15ft. You know the sort - there they go, faces glued to their little screens, oblivious to anyone who might actually want to be getting somewhere, except Mr Numpty has just received a vital message and must stop in his tracks, causing an inevitable collision and dudgeon from Mr Numpty that you have tail-ended him.
Yet far from taking a well-justified cudgel to the back of Mr Numpty’s head for his selfish behaviour, it seems there might a nannyish solution, namely embedding strips of red lights on kerbs to tell mobile phone users to stop at junctions or special lanes on pavements marked as “text walking lanes”.
Has the world really come to this, that pedestrians with a seriously bad phone habit have to be cosseted and mollycoddled? Far better to have a bloke with a loudhailer, at busy places, ready to bellow: “Oi, you, the selfish halfwit, watch where you are bloody well going. Do try acting like a human being and put that phone back in your pocket.” Failing that, I shall insist on my democratic right to barge into these plonkers and cause maximum annoyance. You have been warned, Mr Numpty.
• Jonathan Bouquet is an Observer columnist
