Friday, July 12, 2024

What Diderot might have said about traffic cones

What the hell took him so long? That’s the only question arising from Transport Minister Simeon Brown’s belated crackdown on traffic cones.  

I wrote about the traffic cones lunacy nearly three years ago. It was a racket and a disgrace that had long been obvious even then.

I devoted another post to it in March last year and identified the traffic management cult as a prime symptom of the precautionary principle, which risk-averse regulators use as moral justification for imposing costly, wasteful and intrusive controls that defy common sense.

All the while, the problem has grown more intolerable. And we meekly fall into line even while cursing the irritation and inconvenience because we are essentially a passive, compliant people.

There’s an ideological element in all this. The urge to control human behaviour is central to the mentality of the bureaucracy, even in a supposedly liberal democratic state.

Traffic cones are just another means by which people can be made to submit to authoritarian edicts for which there’s no rational basis. The Covid-19 lockdown, which by common consent is now regarded as having been needlessly oppressive and damaging, can be seen in the same light.

While Brown’s belated initiative may be welcome, it’s also disappointingly half-hearted.  He says the government will be introducing a "risk-based" approach to traffic management, which raises the likelihood that decisions will be left in the hands of the same control freaks who got us into this mess in the first place.

The bottom line is that New Zealand built a network of state highways without a single traffic cone and no one, to my knowledge, has ever advanced a cogent reason why that needed to change. 

The 18th century French philosopher Denis Diderot famously said that men could never be free until the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest. He might have added: “… and the last traffic cone is buried in a landfill”.

3 comments:

Mark Wahlberg said...

A couple of months ago I was driving on the Pahiatua Track Road on my way to Palmerston North when I was halted by a traffic flow technician in charge of their end of a one lane vehicle control device. . I waited as one car from the Opposite direction passed me and I was allowed to continue on my journey at 30kph

As an alternative to flagellating myself with wet flax, I started counting cones. I gave up after 300 and along the way I passed two service vehicles with drivers, a fluoro vested person I believe was counting cars and one sad looking individual armed with a pointy stick and plastic bag who was picking up rubbish from the grass verge well away from the road. I eventually passed the second traffic flow technician and I merrily motored on my way.

Phil s said...

https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/checkpoint/audio/2018945621/kiwis-build-giant-road-cone-for-burning-man-festival
Until the last come is burned at burning man.

Gary Peters said...

I have been called many things over time but "passive" and "compliant" would not feature I am pleased to say 😎