Again with the modest proposals

A major impediment to systems to make traffic safer is resistance on the part of motorists. Like many other people, motorists tend to resist measures that could restrict what they see as their freedoms, even if they improve safety for everyone. The motoring public, which of course makes up a large proportion of the general public, will accept safety measures more willingly if these measures provide advantages for the drivers and owners of motor vehicles.

We use chip and pin credit cards and debit cards for the most trivial transactions. We deploy more technology to control the purchase of a chocolate bar then we do to control the operation of vehicles weighing tons, capable of operating at hundreds of kilometres an hour and costing tens in some cases even hundreds of thousands of dollars. We certainly have the technological capacity to create chip and pin driving licenses.

 

Such a system would require a valid license and some form of individual code to start a car, whether that came in the form of a traditional chip and pin reader installed in the car, a secure driving license app on a phone with Bluetooth, or some other form. The principle remains the same: road safety matters, and since we have the technical ability to ensure everyone who starts a car has the legal qualification to do so, we ought to use it.

Such a system has obvious advantages for road safety. An argument against the suspensions or revocations of driving licences, no matter how obviously warranted and even necessary, rests on the perceived impotence of the prohibition. People who feel entitled to drive will do so, with or without permission. The courts have only one recourse for dealing with an individual determined to drive illegally: incarceration, turning an otherwise productive member of the community into a very expensive liability. Faced with this choice, courts tend towards short license suspensions even for the most egregiously dangerous driving.

The greatest advantage will probably come from its effect on the driving experience. Typing in a code or unlocking a phone will take less than two seconds, but those seconds will impress the limits of their privilege on drivers. Driving a car does not make the operator a superhuman with an unlimited right to impose their will; it makes the driver an ordinary person exercising a privilege. The two second ritual of proving the validity of a driving license acts as a reminder that the courts have the will, and the means, to revoke or suspend the privileges of people who abuse them

 

Drivers have the same stake in road safety as the rest of the public. It does not do to imagine all or even a majority of motorists back the boy racers, road ragers, drunk drivers, and all those whose contempt for the lives and safety of their fellow humans so debase the car culture. If bad driving enjoyed wide popularity, the YouTube compilations of "instant karma", where bad or criminal drivers get their just deserts would not enjoy the popularity they do. 

 

 

Chip and pin driving licenses also have obvious advantages for vehicle security in an age of increasing thefts. The ability of the government to restrict banned drivers from operating any motor vehicle implies the ability of vehicle owners to restrict the number of individuals who can operate their vehicles to a list of named individuals

 

Despite all these positives, the minority of drivers who have something to lose from a system with the will and capacity to effectively remove their ability, as well as their permission, to drive will resist this proposal with every argument at their disposal. We should also expect many good drivers to support them, even with the enhanced risks of allowing the worst of drivers to abuse our transportation system, and despite the potential of chip and pin licenses to reduce theft. Well before the widespread adoption of motorized transport, we had a legal and social identification of mobility with freedom. The open road beckons. Mobility, which in our society means the automobile, seems to offer the solution of abandonment. No matter how bad things get, I can always leave my life behind for a new one. With the rise of motorized transport, auto advertising transposed this ideal of free horizons on to the use of the automobile, despite the many practical and legal contradictions they had to ignore.

The fantasy of "automobility" as freedom serves only as a safety valve for our anxieties. However, it remains a potent safety valve. For too many of us, it outweighs the cost all of us pay for minimally regulated use of the automobile. As the casualties of our motor vehicle addictions mount, as the designs of motor vehicles evolve from excessive to grotesque, we can only hope to accept limits on the myths of driving we sacrifice so much for.