Driven to distraction
Saturday, September 16, 2023 at 18:15 As Wales introduces a default 20mph speed limit on all built-up areas, here’s an edited version of a post I wrote last year about driving in Britain today.
I’ve always enjoyed driving.
I passed my driving test in 1977 when I was at university. I didn’t have a car and didn’t know any student who did, but having a driving licence was useful when I went home because I could borrow my mother’s car, a two litre Triumph Vitesse.
In 1978 my parents moved from Scotland to Cumbria and I embarked on my first long distance drive. Well, I thought it was long distance, but it was actually from Kendal to Glasgow where Dundee United were playing Rangers in a Scottish Cup semi-final.
Today the 142 mile journey would take 2.5 hours via the M6, A74 and M74 but in those days you could add an hour and possibly two because the old A74 from Carlisle to Glasgow was a lot slower.
In fact, before it was upgraded in the Eighties, drivers had to meander through small towns like Lockerbie which became infamous in 1987 when a Pan Am plane exploded above the town after a bomb went off on board.
When I moved to Edinburgh in the early Nineties I was frequently driving to London. Even today I do a lot of motorway driving and I’ve always believed that speed limits should reflect the road and traffic conditions, and the weather.
I’m not advocating dangerous or reckless driving, but I’ve never understood why, on a deserted motorway at two o’clock in the morning in good conditions, for example, you shouldn’t be allowed to drive significantly faster than the current national speed limit.
That was set, let’s not forget, in the 1960s when very few family cars could go much faster than 70mph anyway.
The problem is that despite having safer (three or even four-lane) motorways and more reliable cars (with better brakes and tyres), our national speed limits don’t reflect that.
We have overhead gantries that instruct us to slow down because of congestion or obstacles on the road, but why can’t those same gantries advise us that it’s safe to drive at 80, 90 or even 100mph at certain times of the day or night when visibility is good and there are relatively few vehicles on the road?
An acquaintance of mine, an IT salesman, used to spend long hours on the road. On one occasion he was stopped and prosecuted for driving in excess of 100mph on the M6 in Cumbria in the early hours of the morning when there was nothing on the road apart from him and an unmarked police car!
I think he escaped with a six-point penalty and a fine which could have been worse because, had he lost his licence, he could have lost his job as well, a fate wholly disproportionate to the offence.
Anyway, speed restrictions seem to go only one way, which brings me to the horror that is driving in London today. All over London, and central London in particular, the roads are painted with the number ‘20’ in a white circle to indicate that the speed limit is 20mph.
That’s fine if you’re in a line of slow moving traffic and it’s impossible to go any faster anyway, but when the road opens up ahead of you (along the Embankment, for example) the natural inclination is to press the accelerator and within seconds you might be doing, oh, I don’t know, some crazy speed like 30mph.
Today, as someone who drives in London once or twice a month, I am forever getting caught out by the ‘new’ 20mph limits because I’m not used to them. So far, more by luck, I think, I have avoided anything more than a fixed penalty notice and a fine and that was for entering and getting stuck in one of those box junctions with criss-cross yellow markings.
The ‘offence’ took place in Hammersmith but I was unaware of having done anything wrong until the FPN arrived. There was photographic ‘evidence’ so I didn’t challenge it but I certainly wasn’t conscious of it at the time.
More recently I was sure I got flashed by a speed camera as I crossed a junction just as the traffic lights turned amber and then red. I was probably doing no more than 20mph but I couldn’t slam on the brakes in case another car was behind me, so I accelerated slightly to make sure I got across the junction as quickly as possible.
That was when I saw a camera on the other side of the road flash three times but it could have been targeting cars that were going in the opposite direction. So far I’ve not received the dreaded brown (?) envelope and I’d be pretty hacked off if I did because I genuinely don’t think I did anything wrong.
My point however is this. Driving in Britain today is no longer fun because every journey is an opportunity to inadvertently commit some minor transgression that may result in a fine or, worse, three points on your licence leading to higher and possibly exorbitant insurance costs.
All it takes is the sight of a speed detection vehicle or a lone copper on a bridge holding a speed gun (M11 last week) and that’s when the paranoia kicks in. In London the threat feels even worse.
It was never like this in the Eighties or Nineties and although I’m not a conspiracy theorist it feels like a deliberate ploy to discourage people from driving in London.
As for cyclists and pedestrians, don’t get me started. The roads in London today are unrecognisable from the city I knew in the Eighties when hardly anyone cycled to work. Most of us got the bus or walked.
At rush-hour the roads are now swarming with cyclists. Sometimes (near Blackfriars Bridge for example) it’s like the Tour de France has hit town such is the speed they’re going.
Wherever you look there’s a pack of cyclists, many of them swerving in and out of traffic. Some are either oblivious to the rules of the road or they seem to think the onus is exclusively on the driver of a car, bus or lorry to avoid any accidents.
Frankly I don’t care if cyclists go through red lights if the road is clear. That’s one of the perks of riding a bike. What does bother me is when cyclists undertake or don’t slow down for moving vehicles that may obstruct their path.
A couple of years ago I had a small disagreement about this with Jeremy Vine on Twitter and he blocked me! That said a lot about the attitude of some cyclists and their refusal to accept even the mildest suggestion that the driver might not be wholly to blame.
Recently there was another spat on Twitter when a video was posted showing a close encounter between a Waitrose delivery lorry that was in one lane and a cyclist who was in another.
It was clear from the video that the lorry driver had never left his lane and had done nothing wrong but despite that (and the fact that no-one got hurt) there was the usual blame game.
Waitrose, I'm pleased to say, stood by their man and after examining the evidence exonerated him of any fault.
I'm sure there are many cyclists who are more sinned against than sinning (this week I was in a black cab that came perilously close to a cyclist who took umbrage and shouted at the driver) but the Waitrose lorry incident highlighted the worst side of the more extreme cycling fraternity.
I’m not sure too why cyclists should be allowed to ride their bikes on the pavement, but that’s another story which I addressed in 2016 (Today’s cyclists are a real test of my liberal instincts).
Drivers in London (and Cambridge, where Forest has an office) also face another hazard - e-scooters - that appear from nowhere when you’re least expecting it. The other day an e-scooter undertook me at speed before swerving inches in front of my car before crossing to the lane on my right. Moron.
Again I’m not against e-scooters but I get the same sense of entitlement from some of their riders as I do from many lycra-clad cyclists. The difference perhaps is that many e-scooter riders are still learning how to use them without falling off and you can sense both their vulnerability and their instability.
Meanwhile, do cyclists and e-scooter riders ever bother to indicate? When I was at primary school aged six we had lessons teaching us how to ride our bikes on the road.
The most important lesson was signalling to drivers when you were about to turn left or right. You did this by checking the state of the traffic behind you and holding out your left or right arm to indicate your direction of travel.
Even at the age of six I could understand why this was necessary and advisable. I rarely see any cyclist do that these days. Instead drivers are expected to anticipate what the cyclist is about to do. Or that’s how it seems to me.
As for e-scooter riders, they’re far too busy holding on with both hands and if they do have a spare hand they’re probably using it to hold their mobile phone. (OK, I’ve only seen one person do that but I suspect it's not uncommon.)
Finally, pedestrians. When did pedestrians decide they were immune from harm and start crossing the road without a care in the world?
Don’t get me wrong. I would hate to live in a country where jay-walking is an offence and you can be fined for crossing the road at an unauthorised place or when the lights declare ‘Don’t Walk’ because I’ve done it thousands of times myself.
But when I cross the road I at least check for oncoming traffic. Many pedestrians today don’t because, in many cases, they’re too busy looking at their phones. Or they’re wearing headphones and can’t hear an approaching car.
Excessive and sometimes random speed restrictions, speed bumps, box junctions, cyclists, e-scooters and mindless pedestrians, these are just some of the many irritations that are taking the joy out of driving.
Anxiety and fear of prosecution for the most minor infringement are now part and parcel of almost every car journey and it’s doing my head in.
Update: Incredibly, the Labour MP for York Central recently suggested that councils should introduce speed limits of TEN miles an hour in residential areas. See What do public vaping ban and 10mph speed limits have in common?.
Reader Comments (2)
Mark Drakeford doesn't approve of any kind of combustion no matter how much enjoyment anyone derives from it.
Welsh city and town centre smoking ban proposed by Mark Drakeford
12 November 2018
"Mr Drakeford, considered to be the favourite to win the Welsh labour leadership election, tried to legislate for a partial ban on e-cigarettes in 2016, but the law was binned after members of Plaid Cymru withdrew their support.
His manifesto proposes to "extend [the] smoking ban to outdoor areas of cafes and restaurants and city and town centres".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-46180030
He was never going to stop at smoking.
“He was never going to stop at smoking”
Of course he wasn’t. These people never do. Rather gives the lie to Ms Arnott’s standard reply to the slippery-slope argument that “smoking is a uniquely dangerous product” and thus there wouldn’t be a slippery slope. Maybe she thought so at the time, but it seems that many of her anti-smoking pals from back in the day privately didn’t agree, although clearly they didn’t tell her that they were just going to springboard from the creeping prohibition of one thing they didn’t like onto the creeping prohibition of something else they didn’t like, taking her carefully-crafted (but very useful) anti-smoking template with them! I just remain amazed that she – along with so many other anti-smokers – didn’t see this coming. Did they really think that the type of zealous control-freaks that they were mixing with and/or supporting would just slink back under their rocks once the smoking ban was a “done deal?” Really?