Language and framing are so important when we are thinking about how we frame public policy measures. Today I was presenting at a conference on ‘Tackling Speed’ for the UK’s Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety which made the point powerfully.
At the beginning of the day, I asked the question on the left “Should we be adopting 20mph as the default limit on restricted roads?” which, as you can see from the graphic, clearly divided opinion. Despite an audience made up largely of engaged and active professionals working on transport matters, the voting achieved a Brexit level split!
After some great sessions during the day, I decided to return to the question but framed it differently. This time I asked “Is 20mph the right speed limit in most urban settings (where people live, work & play)?” Suddenly opinion lined up significantly behind the idea of slower speeds where people and traffic mix.
In practice, if we were to adopt either as a national policy position, public experiences of the implementation would have great similarities, but the devil is clearly in the detail. Questions around level of engineering, exceptions criteria, local accountability, managing compliance etc. all jump to the fore when we ask the first question.
The framing of the second question, which moved away from the technical discussion of ‘how’ we reduce limits, by asking the audience to express views on ‘what’ we are looking to achieve engendered a very different response.
Of course, for any policy to have genuine merit, the detailed discussion around implementation needs to happen, but for motivation and ambition we need to consider the future that we would like to inhabit rather than the challenges to getting there!
So, is this just clever salesmanship – rebranding the proposition so that we take the audience with us, or worse still, so that the audience doesn’t realised it has been manipulated into moving? When we engage in this sort of consultation, we are undoubtedly establishing presuppositions, and these can be help or hindrance. Often, we presuppose that the status quo is the desired state and that we would need to see some collective surge of opinion behind an alternative to make the idea of change worth engaging with. But often the status quo is awful! It can mean poverty, social immobility, congestion, community severance, premature mortality and unequal health outcomes. So we need to consider our presuppositions and we often need to presuppose change if we want something better. When we articulate a more ambitious future and offer up the wonder of why, its perhaps little surprise we get a more positive reaction than when we leave our audience grappling with the headache of how.
Photo by Aphiwat Chuangchoem on PEXELS