FiT ROADS = Amber alert and Filter in Turn
Would our cities be safer and less congested if we were free of traffic lights and free to filter in turn? A body of evidence suggests they would. FiT Roads aims to prompt change by exposing the defects in the current system, and showing that simple solutions to our congestion and road safety problems are at hand.
We support the right of all road-users to use commonsense and common courtesy on roads free of counter- productive traffic controls. Based on a trust in human nature rather than an obsession with controlling it, the FiT approach could launch an era of peaceful co-existence on our roads.
Blog & News Feed

20th May 2008
Message From Founder

The aim of the campaign is to expose the defects in our traffic control system, especially the main road priority rule which spawned a "need" for traffic lights and turned our roads into conflict zones where we have to fight for survival, gaps and green time.

Without priority, all road-users - on foot or on wheels - can do what comes naturally: filter in turn. This is the parallel aim: to show there are simple solutions to our congestion and road safety problems.

We need rescuing from decades of negative conditioning so we can watch the road and act on context, compassion and commonsense.

Happy filtering - on fit roads, roads fit for people.

Martin Cassini


21st May 2008
More about the campaign

This project is pro-environment but not anti-motorist. It identifies traffic policy as the unreported cause of congestion, and offers simple, inexpensive solutions. Although widely accepted as essential, traffic lights are an unnecessary evil. The Transport Research Laboratory itself says they can make matters worse. The safety claims made for lights have been fatally exposed again and again by the deaths of cyclists such as Victoria Buchanan, 28, Emma Foa, 51, and Amelia Zollner, 24, crushed by lorries as they waited at lights. There is a report which Transport for London sought to suppress, which says that cyclists are safer NOT waiting at lights.

The root of the problem is the main road priority rule, introduced in 1929. In the teeth of common law principles of equal rights, which enable people to take their turn in the sequence in which they arrive, main road priority confers inferior rights on side road traffic and pedestrians, forcing them to wait for a gap or risk getting hit. Lights were introduced to interrupt the new main road streams and enable other road-users to cross in relative (but not guaranteed) safety. They are a manufactured solution to a self-inflicted problem.

It's not just that lights make matters worse, e.g. by forcing us to fume at red when no-one is using the green, they foul things up in the first place. When we're left to our own devices – as seen at junctions where the lights are out of action – courtesy flourishes, and we filter in turn without incident or delay. Priority and lights frustrate our instinct to co-operate, and force us to behave in ways that are alien to our nature. There is something inhumane about a system that instils greater respect for a traffic light than for human life.

Martin Cassini


23rd May 2008
Tax on fuel

Isn’t it time we had a petrol tax DEcelerator to prevent Treasury profiteering from rising oil prices? How can government justify a sliding percentage tax rate on fuel when crude oil prices have rocketed from $20 a barrel two years ago to $135 today? The Treasury took 70% tax then, and takes70% tax today. Where do many of those dubiously-raised billions go? On control measures such as congestion charging that add new tiers of bureacracy and enforcement which do nothing to reduce danger and delay at junctions plagued by traffic lights.

Martin Cassini
FiT Roads - Roads FiT for People
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