Voorrang voor wapens; priorité aux armes
Danger on the roads is addressed using insurance: so why aren’t guns insured?
From bottom to top, we have the name of the road (Old Market Square), together with the crest of the local authority, a “reminder” sign, to indicate that motorists are already in a 30 km/h zone, and this is now repeated, and the cross in a triangle to warn of an unmarked crossing ahead.
When I first moved to where I now live, around 26 years ago, the closest motorway access involved traversing a one-mile section of country road that had been improved in the 1930s, routing it away from the farmyard that up till then it had crossed, to run up the hill well behind the farm and its house and outbuildings, to leave the cows in peace and speed travellers on their way. The road is called Bosstraat, and, because of the fact it now ran through open countryside, the speed limit imposed on traffic using it was 90 km/h. In the 1930s, that was as fast as you like.
Some time ago, the Flemish government decided that, as a safety measure to save lives (so they said) and also to reduce air pollution, the speed limit on all roads other than motorways and other specially designated roads was to be by default 70 km/h. That’s just over 40 mph. So, the speed limit was reduced on Bosstraat, as elsewhere.
But even when it had been at 90 km/h, Bosstraat featured, and still features, a junction known in Dutch as voorrang van rechts (or priorité à droite in French), which is known in English as an unmarked crossing. Unmarked crossings date from a time when traffic was sparse and it was not therefore really worth defining rights of way on the roads. But, as volumes increased along with speeds and because Belgium only introduced its driving test in about 1975, even in those early days accidents were starting to occur, in response to which two things got developed at pretty much the same time.
First, motorists were required to take out insurance to cover the risk of causing harm to others through the use of their vehicles (at that time, in Belgium, this was deemed sufficient to cover the risk of accidents, without requiring drivers to take a test). And, second, roads authorities started to erect signs and paint lines to regulate rights of way on the carriageway, in order to apportion liability for accidents to the holders of the new insurance policies.
Whilst road traffic legislation is ostensibly there to regulate safety, its ultimate purpose is to allocate liability, so that insurance companies know which policy is to pay out in the event of an accident. However, the new signs and lines could not all be installed at the same time, so the default rule of “right of way from the right” continued and still continues as the default position today.
The Place de l’Étoile in Paris, at the centre of which stands Napoleon’s iconic Arc de Triomphe, is a road junction at which no fewer than 12 major boulevards converge and there are no lane markings. The general rule, which Parisians are familiar with and apply, is that a vehicle that is even slightly ahead of you has priority. But, accidents do occur and the rule at the Place de l’Étoile is that fault and liability are always apportioned fifty-fifty.
Place de l’Étoile is a far cry from the junction between Bosstraat and a certain side road named (somewhat inappropriately now) Nieuwstraat (New Road). That junction has been unmarked for all time. Cognisant of the fact that an unmarked junction can only function as such if road users are actually aware of its existence, road authorities nowadays regularly erect signs (like the one above) to indicate the presence of an unmarked junction. Unmarked junctions are marked as unmarked, and that is logical in a sort of Belgian way.
The road situation spoken of.
But having an unmarked junction that is hidden between the hedgerows on a main road that has a 90 km/h speed limit, or even, as latterly, a 70 km/h speed limit, means that virtually every car passing towards Veltem would need to as good as stop to verify whether anything is emerging out of Nieuwstraat. Nobody ever does. Nieuwstraat is a very unfrequented road, still with its ancient cobblestones, a single track on a steep descent towards the intersection, and if ten cars use it in a day, I think that will be a lot. In 26 years I once saw a car emerging from it. But, if I’d struck it I’d have needed to pay, or my insurer would’ve. They had priority.
It’s for this reason that the unmarked crossing rule is generally reserved for roads on which there is a 50 or even 30 km/h speed limit. As a talking point, such as it is in this post, for 26 years, I told my passengers that I felt it was wrong to have this unmarked crossing on a road with a speed limit of 70 km/h. There just isn’t time to stop if something emerges. To my mind, the obvious solution was to get out a pot of paint and paint a stop sign for the minor road, and allow the major road traffic to continue unhindered.
Well, a month or so ago, the local authority, which must have been thinking along similar lines, did resolve this contradiction of an unmarked crossing on a major road with a high speed limit, but they did not adopt the solution I had so brilliantly thought up. Instead, they reduced the speed limit and have now made it 50 km/h. The entire length of Bosstraat is now 50 km/h, with the exception of about twenty metres, where a cycle path crosses it (to nowhere—literally, it emerges from the woods and just stops), where the limit is 30 km/h.
This is starting to look like a rant. But, I assure you, it isn’t. It’s a preface. Because my point has not got anything to do with Belgian speed limits. It has to do with American gun crime.
What the story above illustrates is a bit like the recent Louvre crown jewels heist: if you want to protect crown jewels, either you need to increase security or, another solution, simply put them in a vault and tell people they can’t see them. Either way, the jewels are secure. Just, with one of the ways, they can’t be viewed.
Reducing the speed limit on Bosstraat is a pest. But, it’s safe. I wonder when they will close the road altogether, but we live in hope that the motor car still has some future.
And guns. Note that it was when accidents started to occur that the motor insurance policy was invented. Well, our newspapers are peppered with reports of assassinations, wars and shootings, killings, drive-bys, wanton discharge of firearms. In Australia, in America, in Gaza, in Ukraine, in many, many places. And, to the best of my knowledge, whilst the operatives who discharge these weapons may be covered by a general form of insurance covering their conduct, or subjected to a criminal law that prohibits their discharge without authorisation, it is astonishing to realise that the ownership and use of a firearm does not require the holder to take out insurance to cover accidents, unlike the owners of motor cars. If compulsory insurance were introduced on all wielders of firearms, from street gangs up to armies, would they be concerned at upping their no-claims bonus? What it would mean is that anyone with a firearm would be subjected to an annual outlay that would make them think twice about actually having the thing sitting in a drawer just in case. It would restate the level of responsibility that flows from ownership of a gun. For once in my life, I am actually advocating in favour of the insurance industry: set the premiums sky high, and build a compensation fund for those who are harmed or, if killed, for their next of kin.
Advocates of gun freedom say it’s not guns that kill, but people with guns. Taking away their guns would be like saying that cars kill, rather than people using cars: what, would you want to ban cars? they complain. Well, no, not banning cars, but deeming guns to be ordinarily safe but potentially lethal, and requiring them and their owners therefore to be insured, would simply have the effect of putting them on a par with cars: benign on the whole, but lethal in the wrong hands.
However, I do recognise that, just as the solution of reducing speed limits also addresses the issue of unmarked crossings on fast roads, the National Rifle Association might well then lobby, not to make an exception for guns, but to have insurance abolished for cars: a solution to putting them on a par with each other, if not to addressing their lethal qualities.