A Faulty Handbrake Analogy

Imagine a busy intersection where one main road meets twice with one minor road. Let’s call them Government Drive and Opposition Crescent, respectively. One of the intersections is controlled by traffic lights and the other intersection is controlled by give-way signs.

Imagine that all people living on Opposition Crescent drive red or green cars with only a couple of cars that are red & black with a white stripe. These cars are allowed to cross Government Drive but never to turn onto it unless they have a blue, blue-green, black, or yellow adult in the front passenger seat, a restriction similar to those for inexperienced youngsters on a Restricted Licence.

Imagine that all other people not living on Opposition Crescent drive blue, blue-green, black, or yellow cars. And they only ever drive on the main road. Sometimes they have another person sitting in the front passenger seat. Most of those cars are blue, followed by black, yellow, and last but not least, a few blue-green cars.

Imagine a blue car approaching the intersection controlled by traffic lights and the lights turn orange. The blue driver speeds up and runs a red light but nothing happens, fortunately. The one and only cop car is rarely paying attention to what drivers on the main road are doing and he leaves them unbridled and rarely enforces traffic rules that appear to be subjective & selective.

Imagine another blue car speeding on the main road and the same things happens, the light turns orange. However, this time a black passenger pulls the handbrake, which will make the blue car skid, almost lose control, and cause an accident but stop in time before it crosses the intersection on which there are now red and green cars slowly making their crossing. There may be rare cases when the speeding car doesn’t stop in time before the intersection in which case people will have to brace themselves for impact and hope for the best as safety strategy.

Such nerve-wrecking near-collisions may fortunately just be figments of our imagination and most of the time, blue, blue-green, black, and yellow cars will keep moving unabatedly even when they occasionally do something stupid or hoon around like idiots on the road.

There are other times, though, when blue, black, and yellow cars may go way too fast and over the speed limit on the main road and they may overtake dangerously. Their drivers may be time-short very busy people who hate the inefficiency of slow speed and love to beat other traffic and traffic jams even if it puts others and themselves at risk. Sometimes, blue-green passengers will talk to those drivers to slow down a little, but there are not many blue-green cars around and therefore not many blue-green passengers, as they tend to want to drive their own little cars, as they do. Over time, blue, black, and yellow drivers may even stop giving lifts to blue-green passengers because they don’t appreciate their handbrakes being pulled and actually don’t like the idea of car-pooling and sharing the cars with others.

There may even be instances in which a blue-green passenger tries to pull the steering wheel hard to the Left. Those passengers will no longer be allowed in the front seat and will be relegated to the back seat, next to the strapped in dog and child.

Unsurprisingly, as you can imagine, there will be many traffic incidents on the main road that cause a lot of costly material damage and high insurance claims, traffic delays, and high medical bills and health insurance claims, and people having to take time off work to recover from their injuries. One would expect that there will be calls to make the roads safer and more accessible for all users, also for those who don’t own a car and/or don’t drive. But imagine that the blue, blue-green, black, and yellow cars hold a slim majority and that black cars my not want to risk losing their privilege of driving on Government Road and thus they’ll vote as a bloc against any changes or improvements. At best, they will be willing to block one lane, temporarily, with no more than 3 road cones, to fix a pothole. But other than that, it’ll be business as usual.