The road back to Kampala

Alfie Pearce-Higgins has a useful Critic piece on the contagious nature of lawlessness. He uses the ease with which road vehicle laws are evaded to make his point.

Lawlessness is contagious

Enabling the lawless and pursuing the law-abiding will result in mass non-compliance

For several years I helped to build SafeBoda — a motorbike taxi company in Kampala, Uganda. Our aim was to make the roads safe, or at least safer, by improving compliance with traffic laws. One of our most telling findings was that stopping at traffic lights was contagious: if the first two or three motorbikes arriving at a red light stop, others are much more likely to follow suit and hold the line. As soon as one breaks ranks and speeds off, others will follow. This is a lesson that appears to be becoming increasingly relevant both for our roads and our society as a whole.

A parliamentary enquiry recently heard that as many as one vehicle in fifteen on our roads may now be carrying a “ghost plate”. Some are cloned: a driver simply buys a copy of someone else’s registration. The unsuspecting owner of the original then receives a stream of parking and speeding fines and has to prove a negative. More common still are plates that are deliberately unreadable, treated with coatings or fonts that make them invisible to most traffic cameras. Trials of new cameras capable of detecting them logged thousands of offenders a day.

The contagious nature of human behaviour may be familiar, but the whole piece is well worth reading as another aspect of political and official incompetence in the UK.

The inevitable result is mass non-compliance. Having worked in economic development across sub-Saharan Africa I have seen the challenges of a low trust society: an economy weighed down by high security costs, uninsurable risks and uncertain contract enforcement while the government passes endless rules that never become anything more than words on a page. Through our aid budgets we have spent decades and billions of pounds trying, and largely failing, to understand how one builds a higher trust society. What we do know is how to destroy one. Unless laws are visibly enforced and everyone can see they are being treated alike, we are on the road back to Kampala.