The removal of road markings is to be celebrated. We are safer without them
This article pulls me both ways, because on the one hand I sympathize strongly with the libertarian idea that people should be left to judge their own risk, but on the other hand I don&#x27;t buy the argument that the only reason for having white lines on roads, traffic signals, etc., is nanny-state control of people&#x27;s behavior rather than letting them judge their own risk.<p>To me, the lines on the road and the traffic signals are not there to make me feel safe; they&#x27;re there to provide Schelling points. If I have two-way traffic on a road with no line down the middle, how do I know where the division between lanes is? And more importantly, how do I know all the other drivers will think it&#x27;s in the same place I think it is? The line is a simple solution to that problem. Similarly, if I come to an intersection and there is a 4-way stop sign, how do I know when it&#x27;s my turn? And more importantly, how do I know all the other drivers will think it&#x27;s my turn when I think it is? Traffic lights are a simple solution to that problem. The article just assumes that the root cause of accidents is drivers behaving recklessly, rather than drivers making different judgments about where boundaries are. But it presents no data to support that.<p>Also, at the end of the article, we get this:<p>&quot;Traffic engineers, who maim and kill us with their regulations, lights and paint pots, merely go on dreaming up ever more of them. They pretend they are making our lives safer when they are doing the exact opposite. And we let them.&quot;<p>This suggests a completely different root cause of the problem: the people who put the boundaries and regulations in place bear no responsibility if they turn out to be badly placed. If that really is the root cause, the solution is obvious: make the people who place the boundaries--the traffic engineers--legally liable for making the boundaries function properly. If painted lines down the middle of the road, or traffic lights, increase accidents, make the traffic engineers pay. That would give them an incentive to only make regulations that are net benefits. But of course the article does not talk about such a solution at all; it only talks about fighting one one-size-fits-all regulation with another.<p>Btw, I am not advocating the above solution; I am merely saying that it is a logical consequence of the observation I quoted from the article. To me, the correct solution to what the article claims is the problem--lack of incentive for personal responsibility--is to increase the incentive for personal responsibility. You don&#x27;t do that by removing obvious Schelling points for coordinating behavior, like lines on roads and traffic signals. You do that by making people suffer the consequences of wrong decisions. If you are at fault in an accident, your insurance company should raise your rates. If you are at fault in a serious enough accident, you might not be able to afford to drive at all. If we have a problem with personal responsibility in our society, it&#x27;s because we refuse to acknowledge that responsibility has to work that way if it is to work at all.