Why Road Safety And Bank Queues Are Long-Lost Cousins
What if someone told you that you could be safer on the road, without you or your millions of fellow drivers (abysmal as you believe their skills often are) ever moving a finger?
Sweden’s road policy, ‘Vision Zero,’ is structured on the premise that policies should be ‘human-centered’, instead of using classical designs that may penalise the driver without sufficient thought for road safety.
Their creative methods include redesigning roads to minimise risky road ‘overtaking,’ and hiking the frequency of cameras alongside highways to deter speeding (rather than generate revenue) [1].
In traditional economics, people behave with the logical precision of modern day robots and the manners of Victorian saga heroes. Today, however, like in the Swedish case, policymakers and private players are cottoning on to the reality that people are often imperfectly rational (if not entirely irrational), and factoring this into policy design.
That prompts our next question: what do roads and bank queues have in common?
References
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3066435/how-sweden-has-redesigned-streets-to-route-around-bad-human-behavior
[2] https://timesofoman.com/article/51085/Oman/Oman-records-population-of-4155-million
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/upshot/the-power-of-nudges-for-good-and-bad.html?_r=0
About the Author
Namrata Raju
Namrata Raju is currently pursuing a Master in Public Administration degree at the Harvard Kennedy School. Before this, she worked for 7 years on consumer behaviour research, predominantly in the MENA region and other emerging markets.
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