Driving us mad

20 November 2008.

Today it was announced there are proposals to impose penalties of 6 licence points for people caught driving at over 20mph over the statutory speed limit. When are these speeding limit fanatics who have almost certainly never had to actually drive a car going to realise speed is one of a plethora of factors contributing to the number of accidents and deaths on the roads?

Maybe one of these intellectually-constipated toe-rags will wake up one day and comprehend that in the real world the average Joe who doesn’t have fifteen of their own personal helicopters to choose from spends more time in gridlock on the UK’s road network each day than Andrew Sachs’ granddaughter spends on her back as it is without slowing them down further. Or perhaps the hapless campaigners are actually plonkers who have lost their licences in the past and consequentially have nothing better to consume their days with now because they can’t go anywhere.

In reality, most people involved in accidents are hopeless drivers who only passed their test by virtue of pulling out the shortest skirt in their wardrobe or by slipping the examiner a monkey. It’s pretty obvious that if people are actually able to drive at 100mph on dual carriageway it’s because there is nothing in front of them to crash into.

This makes them a hell of a lot less of a threat to the nation than people who slam on the breaks on single-track or two-way roads when leaving a 60mph zone for a 30mph area. Or those:

1. who use their rear-view mirror more to apply make-up and check their hair in the morning than to identify potential hazards situated in their vicinity. Frankly, if the issue is that desperate that you’re forced to apply make-up in the car you’re looks are probably so far beyond reprieve that a dab of blusher’s going to make as much difference as Josef Fritzl donating a tenner Rape Victim Support;

2. with at most one hand on the steering wheel as they busily text message or telephone someone which cannot wait five minutes until their journey is over because the recipient is in fact a £1.50 per minute/text sex worker or toy boy the illicit relationship with they don’t want the other half to discover;

3. watching on their portable DVD player material which is doubtless of a questionable nature requiring their hands to be otherwise engaged down their undercrackers if it is that important that it can’t be watched at home in the evening with the wife;

4. too dependent on their errant satellite navigation system such that they follow it the wrong way down a one-way street, onto a railway line or into a river, who would therefore presumably volunteer to put their noggin down a toilet if persuaded it would be a good idea to do so.

The only reason drivers doing 100mph are in accidents is because some half-wit coincidentally doing 69mph pulls out right in front of them or is needlessly sat in the overtaking lane because they still don’t comprehend the concept of mirror, signal, manoeuvre and the outside lane being for overtaking only and not general consumption.

For those still in doubt about this consider someone I met whilst at university who confessed to being in a total of thirteen separate car accidents by the time we graduated. Given the age of university students, a simple calculation means that at best she was involved in on average more than three accidents per annum depending on at what age she passed her test.

Someone involved in so many incidents is simply a hopeless driver. The proliferation is completely unrelated to speed. This young lady drove a Cinquecento after all which does 0-60mph in around 35 minutes. The fact that this girl was tall, slim, blond-haired and an owner of ample twin airbags proves there is more of a correlation between that and passing a driving test than actual driving ability.

This ridiculous obsession of trying to slow the nation down because road campaign groups wrongly insist speed is the sole reason for the UK’s 3,000 road deaths last year has to stop. I sympathise greatly for the sad loss of all you campaign group members’ relatives but frankly you need to look to those who simply can’t drive, those under the influence of various substances and ultimately the UK’s diabolical road system if you want somewhere to shift the blame.

There cannot fail to be a link between these deaths and the prevalence of UK’s underage joy-riders and (minimum of) 500,000 uninsured drivers who have not even been educated about driving either. Or, in the majority of cases, look to yourself because their death probably owes a great deal to the inheritance of your lack of hand-eye coordination skills and flagrant inability to comprehend the concept of common sense.

If there is to be a speed limit it should be a universal flat rate so that there is no sudden change in speed that might surprise drivers behind and cause them to shunt into the car in front or veer off the carriageway. And while you’re at it let’s rip up the abundance of traffic lights which now have a population density of roughly one set per twenty metres across the UK which often serve to have the same brake-slamming effect.

This should sit well with the environmentalists who endlessly tell us that driving at a constant speed is better for emissions, and the saving of electricity from reduced traffic signalling.

Seeing as the Government likes to tell us that green issues are a massive priority of its, the flat rate limit should therefore be around 65mph seeing as emissions are at their lowest in top gear at around this speed. Crawling along at 29mph because of a speed limit is worse for the environment.

The 30mph urban speed limits were only imposed to ensure that the density of pedestrians would not be killed if a car should hit them. Frankly, if a child is hit they’re going to kick the bucket whether it’s at 29mph or 99mph. They might just survive at 5mph – which coincidentally is about the average prevailing speed on most of the nation’s roads during rush hour – but other than that it’s curtains.

For adult pedestrians, if you’re getting hit by a car then there’s blatantly something seriously wrong with you. The rest of us have managed to steer clear of cars as a pedestrian by putting into practice the magic notion of opening our eyes before crossing the road. If this is a concept too complicated for you to understand then really you deserve to be six feet under.

And as for the overhead traffic information signs which tell us to lower our speed because of an accident or congestion to e.g. 40mph on a motorway, go pour petrol on your genitals and set them on fire. If the message has appeared we’ve already been sat in first gear for the last half hour and would give our right arm to go at the speed you’re ‘limiting’ us to for the purpose of ‘protecting’ us.

Meanwhile, the Government also wants to do something about the drink- and drug-driving thresholds. Apparently there is currently no test for driving under the influence of drugs but the Government wants to introduce a limit. With a limit which cannot be policed the test is going to involve a policeman making a driver walk in a straight line and take the stoner’s word for it.

Seeing as people who take the most drugs tend to be those most tolerant to their affects, this approach could also encourage drug-users to up their intake in order to increase their tolerance so they can drive under the influence yet escape getting caught.

In any case, I could be wrong but I thought that there were tests out there for drugs. Some chap by the name of Dwain Chambers, half of all cyclists and the majority of the Russian 2008 Olympic squad spring to mind. What’s the name of that test they do on sportsman? Oh yes, a urine test (or failing that a blood test). State-of-the-art, ultra-expensive, time-consuming and environmentally-harmful? No, it’s a piss-take.

Furthermore, what no-one seems to realise is that the whole problem with the drink-drive limit is that it’s very existence is impracticable. All we hear from health campaigners is that alcohol affects people in different ways, for instance a young, slim woman will be less tolerant to alcohol than an older, stockier male.

In light of this, having a single limit for all discriminates against the less tolerant. In fact, you could interpret this as an invitation to become obese if you want to drink and drive without getting caught. And, believe it or not, rumour has it that there’s a tiny concern that there’s a problem which needs to be addressed and not compounded in respect of one or two people in the UK starting to get a little chubbier.

As it is, I couldn’t even reel off the legal limits if asked to so I’m assuming that is also true of many other people. Is a large glass of wine enough to put people over the legal limit? If it is, there are plenty of people who should not be allowed to take hold of a karaoke microphone after having one (although that also applies after having none in many cases) let alone get in a car.

But there are also many people whose glass of wine would have as much effect on them as Russell Brand’s lewd telephone calls until a few complaints get reported by the media three days later. Imposing the same limit on everyone is therefore ridiculous.

All of these aspects point to the fact that the limit should be nil, but seeing as there is no viable alternative to driving in most parts of the country – because of astronomical taxi costs or a non-existent rail or tram network – this is also impractical.

It seems to me the simplest answer on all these grounds is to electrify the road system. Stay with me on this: The Government purports to support the production of electric cars but is barely enticing manufacturers to do so to keep them turning a healthy profit or to introduce more places to charge the car up.

If the Government were truly committed to lowering emissions, it would look at a much grander scheme in the form of putting electricity lines all along the centre of the roads and fitting each car with a conductor such that the road network becomes one massive but personal tram system.

The environmental improvement is incomprehensible but it can also improve road safety since the electricity-controlled network could be governed by computers such that there is no real need for human involvement at all. Each car could have a box into which an individual inputs their destination upon embarkation.

The computer system then guides the car along the electrically-controlled network to the destination, with the ability to avoid other cars by virtue of the system containing complete knowledge of each and every car’s complete journey.

A speed limit becomes pointless as the computer takes the human error – and by error that means for some of today’s drivers the complete inability to wipe their own backside let alone judge the dynamism of the road system – factor, and subsequently collisions, out of the equation.

This may be radical in the extreme but it would make a change for improvement to be linked with these words rather than terrorism. It is the future.