This paper makes a general review of the roles that traffic rules and their enforcement can reasonably be expected to play in the field of road safety. Because regulations play an important part of the learning process for drivers they need to be simple and also to lead to proven safe driving practices and to uniformity of driving behaviour. There will be some cases where these objectives cannot be achieved simultaneously and other situations where, for the sake of uniformity and predictability, skilled drivers will have to tolerate regulations that they feel are unnecessarily restrictive. Enforcement is a limited resource. Because of this, rules and devices that depend heavily on enforcement should be used sparingly. As far as possible rules should be self-evident and not aim at major modifications of existing driver behaviour. Enforcement and regulations must be recognised as merely two tools, each with its own proper but limited use, in a full kit of tools available for road safety. If the whole kit is used properly it will be effective but excessive reliance on tools to do jobs that they are not designed for, only blunts their effectiveness where they could have been useful. (Author/publisher) This paper was presented to the new Zealand roading symposium, august 1975.
Abstract