Smart thinking

Being a bit of a slow weekend, I took the opportunity to thumb through the pile of the magazines, brochures, and newspapers which had been delivered to us during the week and had been gradually piling up at the back of the kitchen table. Usually I read about some sale which finished 2 days ago, so it's often a bit of a pointless exerceise. Other than keeping my level of Swedish current. Anyway, this time there was a technical newspaper which comes to one of us every month. I enjoy reading those as Sweden is pretty good at thinking outside the square when it comes to quirky solutions to problems of a technical nature. I don't know why they are so good at this stuff. Maybe they don't realise that the rest of the world likes to follow along behind each other in an orderly fashion.

One item interested me. It was centered around mobile phone applications, which continue to be the latest craze around the world. The application itself was pretty simple. It was published by Nationalföreningen för Trafiksäkerhetens Främjande which is a traffic safety organisation in Sweden who works closely with the official transportation agency, Trafikverket. Their funding comes primarily from Trafikverket. Anyway, what they have gone is to create an application which is connected to Trafikverket's database and displays in realtime the speed limit for the section of road that you're on. Hardly seems clever or necessary, but Swedish speedzones do change often. More so than I've found in my travels through other countries. It's very easy to miss a short distance speed change sign out in the country, or along a motorway, or to forget after a while what the last sign said. With this application, you'll always know the speed limit for the metre of road you're on. GPS systems do the same thing, but you have to rely on their information being up to date, and you have all the rest of the crap on a GPS screen.

The company had gone a little further with this. During their Swedish trials, they added an incentive. During the one month course of the trials, any user who had not exceeded the maximum speed was entered into a lottery to win 10 000 kronor. Donated by Trafikverket. Their plan is that vehicle insurance companies will join in on this, by offering reductions in insurance premiums for non speeding drivers.

I really like the approach behind this. Traffic safety is Sweden is proactive. I appreciate that. It's not about gaining revenue from fines as a priority. That sets Sweden apart. Yes, the "nollvision" package is not practically achieveable. But that's no reason to stop trying to get as close as possible to the target. "It can never be ethically acceptable that people are killed or seriously injured when moving within the road transport system." Other countries, such as Australia, have since been won over to this argument and are starting to follow the same principles.

As part of attaining my Swedish driving license, I had to attend a "skid training" course. A few years previously I had attended the same course back in New Zealand. There it was called an "Advanced Driver" training course. In reality we were asked to do exactly the same things. What interested me was that the approach, the aim of the course, was completely different in the two countries. In the NZ course they had you put the car into a high speed skid in order to show you how to correct the skid and keep on driving. The message was that you can fix the problem when it happens. The Swedish course went the other way. They put you into a high speed skid, but offered no instruction on what to do next. They chose to address the cause, rather than the problem. Their message was not to drive at that excessive speed in the first place. Don't get yourself into the situation where you need to know how to correct a skid. To put it in basic terms, drive to the conditions.

Both approaches were idealistic. There are going to come times when people mis-read the conditions and drive too fast. The Swedish system doesn't prepare them for what happens next. The hope is that the memory of the terror on the track of skidding out in a car will be enough to keep people aware of the potential for things to go wrong and to prepare accordingly. The New Zealand system told people that it was ok to drive faster than what was appropriate, because you could probably fix it at the last minute. The problem I have with that idea is that it relies on people recalling what they practised one time for 5 minutes, several years ago, and rembering how to implement it in a split second during a state of panic.

Like the cellphone app, Swedes do have clever ideas from time to time.