The master key to road safety isn’t rules, it’s predictability

However, there is a way of easily remembering them with certainty, precision, and almost for ever. Here is another list of words to read to your pal: “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten”. You could read these as fast as you like to anybody and then talk about anything you like for as long as you like and they would still remember them.

Now try joining two lists together: “One-gun, two-shoe, three-tree, four-door, five-hive, six-sticks, seven-heaven, eight-gate, nine-vine, ten-hen”.

If you don't notice that the couplets rhyme, then you're past help. If you did get the rhyme link, then you will already remember the first list of words. Completely. Exactly. In this order.

“Gun, shoe, tree, door, hive, sticks, heaven, gate, vine, hen.”

And you will probably be able to remember them tomorrow, and the next day, too. You can take this technique a step further and knock the knickers off your girlfriend (for gender parity, use your imagination) by inviting her to give you a verbal (!) shopping list of 10 items (and with practice 20 or even 30) and coming back with everything  just right.  It has to do with conjuring a bizarre mental picture of the first item on the list, linked to a gun, the second linked to a shoe, the third to a tree, and so on. The visual needs to be a bit crazy – a gun firing a stream of milk, cats eating out of a shoe, a tree dripping with fruit that looks like mini cornflake packets…But that's another matter.

For now, let's just stick with the basic idea that memory has two distinct main elements – information that exists in your head, and the hooks to ‘recall’ the bit you want to extract from millions of pieces of stored data. Things are easier to recall if they make sense; if you can link them in a logical way to something you already know. 

Could this be a way of getting motorists to stop at a red light, indicate when they intend to turn, look before they cross the street, etc.? After all, locusts with brains the size of a grain of sand can fly in swarms of billions without bumping into each other, so it can’t be all that difficult. Let's try. 

The link word to remember is “predictability”.  Because it is the single most important factor in road safety – that 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.

This principle is more important than all the laws and signs and markings and signals and systems put together. Because it is all of those things put together.

Before and 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 (and traffic flow) is as simple and as absolute as that. And if you understand that almost every road rule is a way of making traffic interaction predictable, you are more likely to remember the rule even if you read it only once. And you are more likely to obey it.