Whenever you get exhausted with the political stupidity of doing nothing about Covid, study traffic…

Whenever you get exhausted with the political stupidity of doing nothing about Covid, study traffic engineering (I say). Roads are the front line of modern politics, in multiple ways. They’re the real-time proof that the politics we live under are a ridiculous lie. /1 https://t.co/6KGyObEhVA

Digital speed and other signage a case in point. Not just there to ‘inform’ the individual motorist. There to shape the *collective* behaviour of traffic. A major cause of traffic jams is drivers failing to follow speed limits. Speed limits are described so often…/2 https://t.co/HjM3szC46u

…in political libertarian terms, as a restriction on individual drivers. But the much more important function of a speed limit is to space out traffic. if everybody follows the speed limit, traffic is much less likely to congeal into bottlenecks. /3 https://t.co/Z2BObw14pE

But as George Monbiot brilliantly describes, the culture of roads and driving is political libertarianism at its most extreme and aggressive. And how do we counter it? Mostly with engineering. Like I say for Covid, engineering and N=1 politics collide. /4 https://t.co/qYwK1ZgA3C

So back to these signs. They use them now so they can change the speed limit depending on the collective traffic conditions. For example if there’s a bottleneck somewhere, rather than let everybody rush up to it at full speed and then slam their brakes on, extending…/5 https://t.co/cBHk54s4LB

…the size of the bottleneck, they try to slow approaching traffic down long before it arrives at the bottleneck. That way the traffic as a whole doesn’t become a massive traffic jam, everybody keeps moving, just a bit more slowly, while the bottleneck clears. /6 https://t.co/7vFojMmsku

It’s worth reading about ‘jamitons’ and the science and engineering behind all of this, totally fascinating. It might convince us that electoral politics is a ridiculous waste of our time in solving the problems that need solving. /7 https://t.co/l5tYnBiy41

Most of those problems have straightforward ‘engineering’ solutions. We just can’t do them because to get to that point we have to wade through popularity-based politics. Nothing can be done unless it’s popular, and it’s too easy to make what needs doing unpopular. /8

We can’t elect our way out of Covid or climate change, or traffic congestion, or anything else that desperately needs fixing. Election-based politics is the greatest *obstacle* to fixing those things. 21st century technologies are sitting in the garage unused, because we…/9

…insist upon 17th, 18th and 19th century political technology to try to manage it. As I’ve tweeted about a lot, the sheer complexity of what’s in that garage will eventually overwhelm populism. But that’s a sad way to have to force the change. /end