The Melbourne intersection that epitomises where our road safety approach is going wrong

We live in Melbourne’s inner west. I drive a hatchback, but commute by bike. Our son has been learning to drive for the last year. Recently, turning right at a quiet intersection, he panicked. There was no hazard; just traffic lights without a right-turn arrow. In a year of supervised driving, our ultra-controlled road system had so thoroughly insulated him that he’d never been required to exercise his own judgment in this everyday scenario.

As a professional designer, this was a red flag. In my industry, we practise user-centred design in which we distil and design for the user’s core purpose, and minimise any factors that impede this. The core purpose of any road system is to move from A to B as safely, economically and efficiently as possible. But Victoria’s “Safe System” framework has abandoned this balance. Physical and prescriptive impediments to our road system’s core function are being rolled out without restraint. More frustratingly, we’re being asked to endure a lot of usability pain for almost no safety gain.

In design, it’s a failure if the core function of a system is compromised by other objectives. If I designed a medical device that was totally safe but didn’t work, I’d be out of a job. Yet, by trying to micro-control everything, this is exactly what our road authorities are doing. And by treating the human driver as a liability rather than an accountable citizen, our roads and policies are becoming increasingly incongruent to the community they should support.

Good information design relies on visual hierarchy, which means telling the user just what they need to know at the moment they need to know it. No less, and definitely no more. However, today’s roads break every rule of visual information design.

Every suburb has dozens of instances where road signs create visual chaos, not clarity. In my own neighbourhood of Kensington, the Macaulay Road level crossing features more than 10 different signs competing for attention. When everything shouts at the same volume, our cognitive bandwidth is overwhelmed.

Transportation engineering studies show that when multiple regulatory signs are clustered together, driver comprehension drops exponentially. As drivers, we vainly try to process the prescriptive information, but completely miss the real-life dynamics unfolding before us: a cyclist moving fast alongside, or a pedestrian slowly threading through the traffic ahead. This is a key reason why pedestrian and vulnerable road-user death tolls are rising nationally.

Worse, this zero-trust model is actively deskilling us. Good design should make a user more capable, yet our system treats driving as a participation prize rather than a high-level qualification. This happens inside the vehicle too, where we’re encouraged to delegate active control to automated technologies like lane-assist, automated braking and large touchscreens that ironically draw our eyes off the road.

By removing the requirement for human judgment, our brains simply check out, which is a psychological reality known as the Peltzman Effect. When an environment is engineered to require little active thought, apathy takes over. The proof is in the performance data: Germany, which treats a licence as a hard-earned, high-skill qualification, maintains a road toll of about 3.4 fatalities per 100,000 people. Australia’s lower-skill, prescriptive model sits significantly higher at 4.8.

The data shows we’ve hit a wall. In 1970, Victoria’s road toll rate was over 30 fatalities per 100,000 people. High-impact, logical changes like seatbelts and blood-alcohol testing dropped that rate to less than 17 by 1980; an improvement of more than 13 deaths per 100,000 in 10 years. Contrast that with the past decade, where there has been almost no improvement. Our travel times and cognitive agency have been conceded for a decimal point of improvement. Meanwhile, today’s interventions increasingly seek to control more and more aspects of driver behaviour. Each layer delivers smaller safety gains while reducing the need for drivers to remain mentally engaged.

We have reached peak compliance. There is simply no more safety to be extracted from the prescriptive paradigm our road authorities continue to impose year after year. The next step-change in road safety will not come from more signs, more rules or more automation. It will come from rebuilding driver judgment, skill and accountability through a high-skill, balanced-trust road system that designs for the human behind the wheel, rather than trying to engineer them out of the picture.

Steve Martinuzzo is the managing partner of Cobalt Design, and a member of the Design Institute of Australia’s Hall of Fame.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.