NORTHERN PLANNER

I can't remember if i've talked about Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic or not, but I've been dipping back in for something or other at work. If you haven't read it and you work on something to do with cars, you should, there are lots of fresh perspectives on stuff. If you don't work on cars, you should too, it tells you new things about people. Anyway…

I'm still amazed by the bits that remind you what an amazing feat driving is.

It's made up of 1,500 sub-skills, we make about 20 decisions per mile, process 1,300 pieces of information per minute. It's incredible. But we do it so easilly, we don't really dwell on it, but in world where they can build robots to calculate in a second what it would take a human all their life, the best any robot can do is last a couple of seconds driving in an average high street.

I think that's interesting from a road safety persective. Instead of the usual 'shock and awe' stuff you usually see on from government funded stuff, how interesting would it be to start with a complement tell people how amazing they are every day? The fact we take it for granted leads to over confidence and most accidents. We're all vain, why not seduce with flattery rather than bludgeon with fear?