Right on red, and the increasing discussion around banning it in some cities—Washington, D.C. just did at most intersections—is really interesting. It’s one of those things you can view as either a behavior/responsibility issue, or a design/incentive issue.

Personally, I like right on red.

But I also increasingly think it should be prohibited—if not everywhere at least in urban environments. I like it because it saves me 20 or 30 seconds pretty frequently. I dislike it because I can see how it erodes my discipline as a driver, and introduces judgment and uncertainty into a situation that is perhaps best governed by hard rules. (Now I can see why an intersection with no signage at all, or a roundabout, is useful, because it heightens everybody’s focus. It adds enough complexity that it really makes you alert. At least that’s my experience as a motorist.)

This really struck me when, one night coming home from a friend’s house, I paused at the red light and then turned left. Luckily, the road was completely empty, and there was no cop waiting for an easy ticket. But once I realized what I’d done, I realized that my brain wanted to interpret “right on red” as “you can turn at a red light when it’s clear.” In fact, I frequently find myself having to pause at red lights at left turns, and remind myself that, well, right on red doesn’t apply doesn’t apply to left turns. But that’s hard when the rule has effectively been rewritten. It introduces a judgment, a struggle, and an annoyance at every single turn.

You start to feel like you always have the right of way, as long as you come to a half-hearted stop first. You feel like the person crossing the crosswalk is getting in your way, even though they actually have a green. Because sitting behind a windshield reduces the level of detail we can see, and because it encourages this impatient attitude, right on red is associated with increased chances of car-pedestrian and car-cyclist collisions.

In other words, right on red alters the primary rule governing turns from “red means stop” to “red means stop sometimes.” In effect it destroys the rule. It’s the difference, as Mark Twain put it, between lightning and the lightning bug.

This reminds me of something a professor once said, which I’ve recounted here before: “It’s easier to do the right thing 100 percent of the time than 99 percent of the time.” That little exception is the hairline crack that grows until it shatters your discipline.

Now, some people would read this and conclude that I simply lack the requisite discipline to handle the rules. That, in effect, the rules don’t matter because we are, and are supposed to be, responsible for our actions. My brain is wrong for treating the right-on-red exception as a larger exception. I’m abdicating my responsibility, and asking to be ruled over, by asking for rules that do the work of driving for me. Nobody has said all of these things at once, but I’ve heard or read all of them before.

I understand that view. But I think it’s the wrong way to look at this; the wrong frame. It follows from a certain view of individual liberty and individual responsibility, and it’s common among people for whom the death and destruction of car crashes is largely an abstraction, and not an urgent and/or solvable problem.

The other way to think about this is design. A system with fewer and simpler rules is easier to learn and remember and navigate. In exchange for that stability, yes, we give up a little convenience. It’s a judgment call whether you think this is worth it, but it’s a tradeoff I’m willing to make.

Put it this way: I don’t want to trust people to take responsibility; I want to make it easier for them to take responsibility. I want design that works with, and not against, the right behavior. The idea that bad rules, or bad situations, are opportunities to test our virtue or built character is really, at heart, a denial that there is any such thing as a public realm, or a public interest. It’s an idea I sense often, speaking to people about these things. Maybe it’s a sort of puritanism; maybe it’s an over-application of the notion that anything worth doing is hard.

Good design is good. Using the right tool isn’t cheating. Making the right thing easier to do is not abrogating personal responsibility or robbing us of the opportunity to grow in virtue. And sitting for 30 extra seconds in traffic, in order to enhance the safety of more vulnerable road users—and safeguard the driving principle that red means stop—is perfectly reasonable.

In fact—as the last related reading link discusses—learning to sit in traffic without frustration is itself a virtue, and a difficult one. Maybe that’s the one we should be mastering.

Related Reading:

The Path of Most Desire

With Great Power

Speeding and the Eucharistic Prayer

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