Our road toll has

gone up this year. There have been more than the usual number of concerns expressed about this. There have not been any solutions offered. People are just being asked to "slow down" and "be more careful".

I am not good in traffic. I don't like cars or travelling in them. It has something to do with my inability to judge speed and distance as easily as most people seem to be able to do. I may be quite wrong in thinking the way I do about behaviour in traffic. Tell me what you think.

Years ago now, in another lifetime, I also did some research in the area of children, road accidents and the law. In doing that work I also talked to many children. I asked them a lot of questions. Some of the relevant work went into the thesis I wrote but a lot of what I discovered did not.

I discovered that children did not move around in traffic nearly as much as I did when I was young. I pedalled my tricycle around a quiet country community long before I went to school. We all did. It was considered "safe". We crossed roads and went up rough tracks. We knew to look for cars and the people driving them knew to look for us. There was not a lot of traffic.

When we moved to the city there was still much less traffic than there is now. Not everyone owned a car. People walked. Children walked once they were too big for the "pusher" or they rode tricycles and then bicycles. We went to school on foot or by pedal power - and in all sorts of weather. Where necessary we learned to use buses and trains. There were conductors on them who saw our safety as part of their job.

Out of school hours and at weekends we were on our wheels and exploring the community in which we lived. Cricket and football were played in the streets with one of us (usually me) designated to watch for cars.  Drivers watched us too. They expected us to be out and about. The volume of traffic was much lower.

There was less of all this when I did that research. There was still some but not nearly as much. Children were being put into cars because it was considered to be "safer". They were not walking or pedalling in the way we did. Now there is even less of that. The children in this street all get taken to school in cars. Parents no longer "have time" to get them to walk to school and you do not send them alone in the way we were sent alone. Parents who did that would now be charged with "neglect" or worse.

I may be wrong, quite wrong, but I believe that this "always in the car" mode of transport is contributing to the problem. Children who do not grow up moving around independently no longer have the traffic experience they need. I suspect it is something which takes years to learn. 

Of course there are also other issues.  Boys still take more risks than girls. They still use their bikes as toys as well as modes of transport. Girls still tend to use their bikes in order to go somewhere rather than simply "ride around". They all see more "speed" than they once did. Everything from the Tour de France to the Bathurst 500 is televised. Modern cars, for all their safety features, are designed to travel more rapidly than before. Speed is a major cause of accidents, as is the use of modern technology.

But I still think the lack of experience in traffic is a contributing factor to the road toll. You may disagree.