Is there one safety factor that ranks above all others?

Can you identify the single most important ingredient in road safety? What factor does most to keep you safe if it is present, and what factor does most to cause accidents, if it is not?

The most important factor in road safety is predictability. You should be able to predict what every other road user is about to do, and every other road user can predict what you are about to do.

When that is the situation, you will not bump into each other. You will agree that even if a pedestrian leaps out into the middle of the street, or a driver shoots a red light or overtakes a queue of cars at 160 kph, there is no danger, as long as everybody in the vicinity knows that is about to happen.

This predictability principle is more important than all the laws and signs and markings and signals and systems and political drum-beating, and safety tips put together. Because it is all of those things put together.

This is why: Well before and well above all the other details of road conduct when you go out onto the road — as a pedestrian, a cyclist, a passenger or a driver — you make a social contract with every other road user.

You promise not to do anything rude or unexpected, and you receive that promise in turn from everybody else.

The master key to road safety is as simple and as absolute as that.

The problem is how to know — predictably — what everybody else is about to do, and how to tell them what you intend to do.

Clear principle

With millions of different road users, of different abilities and with different motives and needs, all interacting in a spider’s web of streets, it is important to have a common code which everybody knows and follows.

That code starts with an equally clear principle. On any given piece of road, everybody should drive in the same direction at about the same speed. That way, too, you will not bump into each other.

On an open stretch of road, these conditions are easy to achieve, with a basic rule that says 'Keep Left' (ensuring that any vehicles travelling in different directions are on a different part of the road) and a prevailing 'Speed Limit', whose primary purpose is to ensure that all vehicles on that stretch are travelling at roughly the same speed.

A bit like a conveyor belt, which is intrinsically very safe. When vehicles are travelling at the same speed and in the same direction, they do not collide.

The same speed or direction principle gets more complicated when roads intersect--where there are turn-offs, T-junctions, crossroads, and so on. In these places, vehicles must be able to change speed and direction, which is intrinsically dangerous.

This is where accidents happen--the prime circumstance — when one or more vehicles change their speed and/or direction. Unexpectedly. Whether it makes that change unilaterally or is forced to by someone else.

Proper procedures

So we have an agreed system of signs and signals that tell us what to do, and what other road users are about to do when a change of speed or direction is necessary.

If we all know and follow the proper procedures, even these potentially dangerous crisscrossing situations can be undertaken in complete safety.

Now, all of this is, of course, pretty obvious. But it is equally obvious that many road users lose sight of these ever-so-simple but absolute principles; they are seldom clearly taught and are often forgotten, or buried in a mountain of other technical details.

If everybody appreciated these 'obvious' principles, knowing the rules of the road would be natural, and conforming to them would be automatic.

Not everybody does find these basics so 'obvious', so they warrant emphasis because it is essential to have them clearly in your mind, and at the front of your mind, to understand what causes accidents and how to avoid them.

For example, it would take a hundred pages just to list all the different accident situations. But by going back to the basics, we can summarise the whole lot in a single sentence:

"When a road user changes his speed or direction, unexpectedly."

Danger zones

It follows that the great danger zones in motoring are when such changes are most common. And that means at junctions and when overtaking. Merely being acutely aware of this fact is one-third of the way towards avoiding the danger.

It will make you more alert at critical moments. If you would like a bit of dogma to go with this basic logic, it is this: MIRROR. SIGNAL. MOVE.

That means look before you move. It means signal before you move. It means move (change speed and/or direction) only after seeing that it is safe to do so and only after signalling other motorists that you intend to do so.

Come, now, is that such a lot to ask?

And when observing these principles, remember this poem:

Here lies the body of Edward Gray,

Who died maintaining his right of way.

His right was clear, and his will was strong,

But he is dead, just as dead as if he had been wrong.