Dangerous New 'Games' On The Road

Back in a job, I am driving daily once more, not the hundreds of kilometres I used to do in a week, just 140 Km these days.  However, this does take me around the M25 and into West London, so does expose me to quite a lot of traffic.  In the past:  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/new-bad-driving-habits.html  and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/extreme-weather-extreme-behaviour.html   I have noted trends in bad driving that seem to suddenly appear.  Some such as driving with headlights on full beam or using fog lights at all times of day and night except when there is actually any fog, seem to be continuing with us for now.  Tailgating is as popular as ever as is undertaking and slaloming between the lanes of vehicles.  However, ahead of this Christmas season two new bad driving trends have appeared that you might like to keep an eye open for.

One of them was actually suggested in the media a couple of years back when petrol prices rose sharply.  This is the impression that if you drive with your wheels on the white lines you can reduce your fuel consumption because of the reduced friction between your tyre and the road.  Back then I saw a few people try it, and now it is back in fashion, certainly through the areas I drive.  The only problem is the white lines people seem to be favouring are those running down the middle of the road.  I have had to move over hard towards the pavement as cars charge towards me not really straddling the line but certainly with their right-hand set of wheels (given that we drive on the left-hand side of the road in the UK) riding on the white line.  On many roads in London and the Home Counties, with the size of many ‘family’ cars these days, squeezing down the narrow streets, passed rows of parked cars is a challenge, but this is increased if certain drivers intend to dominate the central line.  Of course the ‘law’ of British roads is that larger, more powerful and newer cars always have right of way, anyone in a smaller or older car must give way, no matter what the actual laws, or face a stream of abuse or even being followed until you reach a convenient location where the other driver can get out and either assault your car or you.  I imagine that the amount of fuel saved by driving this way is compensated for by how much such drivers rev up and accelerate away from junctions anyway.

The other habit which certainly seems to be a ‘game’ of some kind or about asserting the size of a driver’s ego over that of people around him/her (and such habits are not confined to men) happens at traffic lights.  What happens is when the lights turn to green, the driver at the front starts off but only moves so far that half of their car is over the stop line.  They then wait until the lights go to amber (in the UK a single amber light precedes the lights turning red) and then accelerate away, meaning that all the cars behind them are compelled to wait at the red for the cycle to go through once more.  I do not really see the purpose of this, I guess the driver pulling away can drive around any lane they choose, as this often occurs, in my experience at traffic lights on roundabouts.  Given how people like to cut across or block people moving to the correct lane, I can imagine this is something desirable.  However, blocking a whole batch of vehicles from proceeding, further congests what in and around London, is already very dense traffic.  The first few times I saw this happen I had assumed that the driver had stalled, though the cars that this happens with are new models and generally powerful or that the driver was on their mobile phone (drivers holding mobile phones in their hands while driving is still incredibly common in the areas I drive through) and was not ready to drive on.  However, it has now happened to me so often in the same way that I can only assume it is deliberate.

One habit which I had forgotten, but seems to be back in a new form, is having a car come hard up behind you, overtake you just to sit one vehicle space in front of you, continuing at the same speed as you.  I know I have an old car, but I do find it incredible that viewing it is so offensive to drivers they have to go around me.  To this, on motorways has been added a new twist.  A slip road appears on the left for you to leave the motorway.  The driver behind me wants to go down that road.  However, rather than indicating to go into that lane, first he overtakes me going into the middle or the fast lane, depending on the layout of the junction, then he cuts diagonally across three lanes just in front of me to go off down the slip road.  This causes me naturally to brake and the cars further back to do so as well.  I do not understand the motives for this behaviour and can only guess that the driver is upset that I have paid insufficient attention to his greatness and it alerting me to what I will be missing now that he is leaving the motorway.

All of these behaviours stem from the fact that UK drivers clearly see driving as an activity in which their dignity is constantly being defended.  They have to assert their right to be first and noticed at every chance.  It is like preening to scare off rival creatures.  It stems from a clear sense of insecurity, that even to have a single car, especially a slower or older one is offensive.  A sense of lanes is ignored and the driver feels he or she can simply ride across them in any sequence that makes his or her journey apparently easiest or more exciting.  The indignation at anyone who does anything which whether intentional or not, disrupts such desires is instant, withering, bullying and sometimes violent.  In such circumstances, with most speed cameras switched off and traffic police numbers continuing to fall in the current austerity measures, it is no wonder that accidents are climbing in number and that daily driving is becoming still more of an unsettling activity.

New Bad Driving Habits

Driving from interview to interview (my record is having covered 240Km between two interviews on the same day) I have been encountering new elements of bad driving.  Of course, we still have the general fact of people feeling they have a right to speed (exacerbated by the fact that they think/know that the speed cameras have been turned off) and that there is no need to signal when changing lanes or going around a roundabout, but I have now spotted three new trends that I thought it worthwhile highlighting.  Driving habits are always of interest to me partly because I am incredulous at how so many people get away with appalling driving and never seemed to get caught by the police.

The first new habit is the least severe.  It stems from how the signal of flashing your headlights to other drivers has been mutated by aggressive drivers on British roads.  In the past, flashing your headlights a couple of times meant 'I'll wait, you come on' and was usually used when in a narrow road to indicate to the person that they should come through the slot.  I also use it to allow people to turn right in front of me, across my carriageway, when I see that a long queue is building up behind them.  However, many British drivers now use the headlight signal in the opposite way, i.e. 'Wait, I am coming through'.  This is the way it is officially used in France, but over in the UK it stems from the very aggressive ways in which people seem not to feel they must drive.  An example is when they come up behind you in the middle or the fast lane of the motorway and flash their lights and sometimes sound their horn too.  They are saying 'Get out of the way, I am faster and you and am coming through', no matter whether that means they break the speed limit or not.  I have had this done to me when overtaking a lorry in the slow lane briefly bringing me into the middle lane of a motorway, but clearly too long for someone racing up behind me who could not be bothered to move over to the third lane.  What has become apparent over the last few weeks is that people, usually, though not exclusively men, but certainly ones driving expensive Audi and BMW cars simply keep their headlights on permanently.  I have wondered if this was a technical element of the car like the Volvos which used to permanently have their side lights on.  However, unless someone can draw my attention to it, I have not become aware that suddenly these cars have headlights permanently on as a feature (I know motorcyclists opposed such a step as it meant they stood out even less in the traffic).  In my view, they are doing it especially on motorways to say, 'Look, I have a big, powerful, expensive car, don't even think of pulling into the lane in front of me, keep out of my way'.  Of course, seeing such behaviour encourages me to pull out in front of them and slow down, but I know that is hazardous, but indicates the kind of problem such posturing can provoke.

The next bad habit is again about bullying.  At a roundabout in the UK you are supposed to give right to traffic coming from the right.  Vehicles in side roads are supposed to give way to vehicles on the main road, there are specific markings on the road to show who has the right of way (if you do not understand these markings, please read your Highway Code).  Now, however, it is a question of judgement: 'ah yes, that car is ten years older than mine/has an engine capacity of 500cc less than mine/is driven by someone old enough to be my mother' and on that basis the driver pulls out on to the roundabout or the main road.  As they roar away, or quite often due to the heaviness of the traffic roar and then brake sharply, they are oblivious to the chaos of sudden stops and shunts they have left in their wake.  At roundabouts I think some of this stems from the fact that often you have no idea which exit people are aiming for and so people think they should jump out and take the chance.  Sat navs do not help with their reference to 'third exit' often not making it clear which they are counting (often leaving off minor road exits) and they certainly cannot cope with junctions when you have to go basically straight but jig a little to left or right (usually comes out as 'turn left, turn right'), they need terminology which more accurately reflects the erratic pattern of UK roads (try using a sat nav to get around Swindon's so-called 'Magic Roundabout' system!).  A lot of it, though simply stems from impatience and arrogance.  It is clear if you do any driving on British roads, let alone the distances I cover, that many people think they have a right to be able to behave differently to the law, let alone custom and practice on the roads.

This combination of arrogance and impatience brings me to the third bad habit which I first spotted comparatively recently, but now seem to see all the time.  This is overtaking people when they are trying to turn right.  I will clarify what I mean, (and if you live outside the UK, Japan and Australia, substitute 'right' for 'left' and vice versa in what I am saying to understand what I mean in your context) of course, when people want to turn right on an average road they move into the centre of the road.  These days they often have to sit there for a long time before someone coming the opposite way lets them turn.  In these circumstances, if there is space, then it is permissible to pass the car on the inside, i.e. in the UK, to the left hand side of it, the one nearest the pavement (though when this occurs between lanes on a motorway it is termed 'undertaking' and is illegal).  What happens now, however, is that people overake the car trying to turn, i.e. they go round it on the right-hand side.  This is madness.  If the person (whose attention is usually focused on the oncoming traffic rather the traffic behind) had decided to turn right at that moment then they plough into the driver overtaking them.  It also reduces their chance even further of getting to turn right so freeing up the highway quicker.  The driver overtaking has to go fully over into the oncoming lane so potentially exposing that car to being hit by oncoming traffic typically charging up the road.  It is no wonder so many accidents happen in low speed limit areas in towns.  However, if you have ever known anybody who has suffered the years of pain that comes with a whiplash injury, you know how bad such accidents can be.

Driving is a job.  It is often boring and needs a lot of patience.  It is not a place to get angry or be arrogant.  When you get in your car you are no longer an individual traveller but instantly a cog in a machine.  If you try to break out of the set patterns of that machine it will break quickly and people will be injured, including youself (your beloved vehicle is liable to be damaged with you to blame as well).  The ignorance of the basic rules of the road in the UK make it hard for the bulk of people whether from Britain or visitors, to drive safely without facing reckless, unexpected, unpredictable behaviour.  We need to stop bullying by drivers, we need to stop them simply focusing on how bored they are or how they want to show off and instead remember their duty to the public as a whole.  They would be furious if someone mowed down their partner or child or parent and yet they behave in a way which risks the health and lives of other people's loved ones.  We need to restore basic manners and consideration to driving and have harsher penalties for those who cannot adhere to those things.  Removing speed cameras was a step in the wrong direction and I can only see the next few years witnessing an increase in death and maiming because of arrogant, selfish driving.

Camping in the 'Me First' Era

In many ways I am a middle class person.  My parents were certainly middle class, having risen from the skilled working class through study and hard work.  I did not go to private school, but I went on foreign holidays through my childhood and attended university at a time when probably a seventh as many people did as do these days.  My parents were certainly not wealthy middle class, they always drove a second-hand car and owned a black-and-white television when many neighbours had moved over to colour; most of their furniture was second hand and refurbished.  They grew their own vegetables at a time when this was a predominantly working class activity, despite the popularity of the television series 'The Good Life' (1975-8) [about a couple trying to live a self-sufficient life in suburban Surbiton] and certainly not filling the prime time television programmes and bookshelves that it does today.  Despite being a graduate, through bad luck, bullying landlords and bad judgement over buying a flat, my income is far lower than my parents' equivalent was back thirty years when they were my current age.  Being made redundant twice in twelve months has not helped this, especially at a time when we are rushing headlong into a even more unpleasant remake of the 1980s. 

I have always subscribed to E.P. Thompson's view that social class is not a structural thing but a relative thing.  We define our class by comparing ourselves to our 'referents', the people we think we are like, those we want to be and those we want to avoid becoming.  I do have middle class aspirations: that I can replace the things that wear out, that I can own a car newer than 15 years' old and especially that I can continue to have the foreign holidays that I had in my youth, but none of these things seem likely.  According to 'The Guardian' the middle class is dying, though the attributes that the newspaper sees as being the defining ones for that class are well above anything I could aspire to, let alone possess.  Maybe I misplace myself, I am just bumping along certainly in the lower middle class (though eschewing the aggression and chauvinism still associated with such people) and in terms of income, worse of than many working class people.  Of course, skills these days are very different and are as much about computers as using a lathe.  In addition, we have 'labouring in a suit' or 'machine minding at a desk', in other words a lot of jobs look middle class but in fact are just the modern version of factory work; most notably in call centres.  Of course, even in revolutions, a class does not disappear as a mass, it is made up of the failure of family-by-family, individual-by-individual as we each lose the fight to retain what we need, let alone what we want under economic policies which seem to be charging headlong in destroying huge swathes of economic activity in the UK just because it is felt by Cameron and his henchpeople that Thatcher did not impose monetarism hard enough for the good of the wealthy.

Anyway, this is the socio-economic context of now.  What is interesting is how in the past decade at a time when we were all supposed to be becoming middle class and leaving working class jobs to migrants, the middle class may have lost some of its traditional attributes, but has also absorbed much of what was once the preserve of poorer people.  The classic examples have often been commented upon: football and large families.  Large families were once the reserve of rural people and the poorest in cities and yet since the 1990s it has been the sub/urban middle class that has started having the large families and 'family' has become a middle class hobby in a way it was not, say, in the 1970s, when private schools and nannies/au pairs were there to deal with the children while middle class adults went on foreign holidays, to cocktail parties and 'wife' swapped. There has been so much said on the gentrification of football spectating that I will leave it to others.

In 2010, we encounter another example of middle class absorbtion of working class culture.  I am not the first to notice it, all I am doing here is highlighting my personal experience of it. As you will have guessed from the title the 'in' holiday this year is not to go to a Tuscan villa or a small Greek island, but to camp in the UK.  Of course, there has always been the 'nerdy' strand of the British middle class, quite often teachers and civil servants (and their conscripted children), who have been the backbone of camping (in the UK this means staying in tents) and caravanning.  However, their ranks, this year, have been swelled by a much broader slice of the British middle class and this is where a lot of the problems are beginning to appear and this stems from a clash of ideologies.

Having laid the background at length, I will explain how I ended up camping.  Like many young British people I experienced camping predominantly as an adjunct to attending festivals (ironically never in the UK) and in the back garden.  I did have friends whose parents were of the 'nerd' middle class who camped as well and my parents experimented with one year of using a tent and one year of using a caravan before settling on renting holiday houses instead.  When I used to cycle on holiday I had enough cash that I stayed in youth hostels rather than camped.  Given how I would struggle with my panniers, I imagine my holidays would have been even more constrained if I had had to lug a tent around as well.  So, that is my personal background with camping, not overly experienced, but not a total beginner either.  The woman who lives in my house, is extremely experienced in camping on two continents and the 8-year old who shares our house, had camped in a rear garden but was certainly up for a proper camping experience.

One reason for picking camping is because it is cheap.  We had managed to get a tent to accommodate us for £35 in a sale and had picked up odd items throughout the year, at a price far less than the travel insurance for just one of us would be if we had flown abroad let alone an aeroplane ticket.  The campsite space cost us only £15 per night, about the same as we would spend for burgers for all three of us.  We had inflatable beds, but no luxury sleeping bags (we took bedding from our beds, pretty necessary to have a lot of it, plus thick socks and jumpers as the woman in my house knows from experience in a British summer it can become bitterly cold at night) and the most high-tech piece of equipment was a wind-up torch and radio.  We drove for an hour to reach our campsite in Dorset.  The one we had intended to visit (which you could not book ahead at) was full and the next one could not accommodate our 3-person tent.  The third site, however, one of four new ones in the area, could fit us just precisely for the period we wanted.  Despite battling the wind while putting the tent up, we got it all sorted and felt immediately to be on holiday.

The camp site is attached to a working farm and it certainly appears that for some little investment a farmer can kit out some fields and then have a solid revenue through the summer.  I think the field of possibly 100 tents probably, even at the rates, we were paying brings in far than a herd of sheep or cows on the same plot.  What was striking was that we so soon felt on holiday.  I realised that having had four days of diarrhoea in Bath and two stressful days in Belgium in the past five years was an insufficient quota of holiday for a properly healthy life. 

The other thing which struck me immediately, though I do not know why I forgot it, given my sensibilities, especially seeing it has been discussed by the commentators of the new middle class enthusiasm for camping, was the communal nature of the activity.  I suppose it is more the surprise for Britons, used to keeping behind closed doors and only interacting with our neighbours when they do something 'wrong'.  However, on a camp site, you cannot avoid having to collaborate with the society around you.  Even on the best equipped you have to share the communal facilities.  I know many caravans have their own showers and toilets but they still have to come out to replenish water supplies, and certainly anyone in a tent has to go and use the communal toilets, showers and dish-washing facilities.  You have to take your rubbish to central points and these days sift the recycling.  No-one seemed to be needed to regulate these activities.  People waited patiently to take their turn with the each particular facility, not elbowing in.  There was sharing of washing up liquid, scrubbing sponges and anything else others seemed to have forgot.  Perhaps simply not having so much of everything was in itself healthy.  It was incredibly easy to slip into this manner of behaviour and I found it incredibly relaxing, though in fact, having to walk 5 minutes to urinate should have made it tiresome.

Unsurprisingly there were an immense number of children in the camp.  That may have been a facet of the particular site which had facilities appealing to children.  The first one we had visited had more teenaged people and the second one seemed almost purely adults.  Camping for children will always be a challenge.  There is the excitement of doing something different, going on an adventure, but there is also a lot of sacrifice.  In one big leap they are suddenly cut off from their television programmes (though most caravans seem to have television aerials) and their games consoles (bar the odd Nintendo DS or other hand-held), their own beds with most of their soft toys, the place where they usually wash in favour of one with tens of strangers in it, food cooked in an unusal way and probably tasting pretty different, and generally new smells and noises.  However, bar a few tears, usually from people not taking turns properly in the games or children falling over, there did not seem to be despair.  I could imagine teenagers being less impressed which may explain why most of the children there were younger than 13.  Certainly for the one child in our party it was an excellent adventure and he seems to have come back seeing the experience camping as different, but not less than the delights at home, and perhaps, more appreciative of those things.  Not a bad lesson in this age of consumerism.

What was striking at the camp site was the autonomy the children had.  They were running around playing everywhere, conscious of cars coming in and out and often warned about knocking over barbecues with their balls, but there was not that every-second concern that they were going to be abducted or injured.  This created a far more relaxed attitude compared to the usual attitude of mewing up children in suburbs.  I assume it does not work all the time, but it did while we were there.  Conversely, children are also set to work.  They tend to dominate the washing-up facilities in the evening and even primary school children are sent to accompany even younger siblings to the toilet and especially to fetch water.  I am not saying that we should try to get children to ape what their counterparts in the Third World would do nor go as far as my parents did in assigning chores that filled the weekend, but there seemed to be benefit in having children do these little jobs.  I suppose it is the 'all mucking in' attitude that has been commented on in the newspapers, in force.  Certainly it restored the woman who lives in my house's faith in humanity to the extent she now wants to go and live in a commune.

When you are living day-by-day with 'walls' as thick as your fingernail, privacy and respect for those around you becomes vital.  You see this in shanty towns and refugee camps.  Whilst it is good to live communally, you also need to be able to absent yourself from it and not have the voice of your neighbour intruding into your conversation and similarly not to think everyone can hear your discussions.  Thus, in line with camp site rules (well, more guidelines, we later found out), people had spaced themselves out properly, leaving 6 metres between tents.  There were a lot of people there, possibly something over 400, but it did not feel crowded or oppressive.  It worked through 'unwritten' rules and the fact that if some was asked to be a little quieter they did not take offence or turn aggressive, they seemed to know that if they were upsetting people it would put a chink in the dam and the structure they presumably were enjoying could crumble.  It was no idyll, but it worked better than society does in most streets I have lived in (the current one is an unusual exception).

Of course, as anyone who has been a regular follower of my blog, something always goes wrong very soon into my holidays and this one was no exception.  We spent a wonderful day away from the camp site in the town of Swanage which is as much of a time warp place as any I have been to.  It seems stuck not in the Victorian era but something like the mid-1960s.  There are some modern eateries and we had some really excellent sea food at a very unassuming cafe, but a lot of architecture and things like dedicated toyshops seem to date from when I was born.  It only has a steam railway (diesel in the evening) running into it so I suppose that adds to the feel.  Families fish by unwinding fishing line sitting on the hard and there is a punch and judy show on the beach assisted by a PA system.

Arriving back from a day in Swanage and seeking to have a doze before firing up the barbecue for dinner we found that four families had moved right into our area.  Rather than the six metres between our tent and theirs, there was less than 10cm.  They had a wide assortment of tents, two of which could have housed our one inside it three or four times over.  I have no problem with large tents, in the 1970s they all used to be heavy metal framed ones with plastic windows and always high enough to stand up in.  The more pod-like strutures of the 1990s are still the norm, but now have grown so the average adult can stand erect within them.  Some now have an atrium with wings off it; one looked like a chapel.  I imagine these appeal to the new category of middle class campers wanting to bring as much of home to the camp site as they can.  I have no problems with that as long as it is not erected, rather than parallel to the already pitched tents but at an angle which leaves the residents bare centimetres from where my head is going to lie.  I could hear them more clearly than the child in the other part of our tent.  These people seemed to have no understanding of what they had done wrong, they seemed to think that because their door faced in a different direction to ours that was fine.  However, they clearly had not paid attention to the numerous signs about spacing nor the pattern that every other tent in the field was laid out along.  The woman from my house was bitter and complained quietly too them.  One offered a bottle of wine as recompense, the others still did not seem to understand what the problem was.

The camp site authority came and like us, realised that with their four main tents and their smaller storage tents around already they could not be compelled to take them down and re-align.  The regulations plastered on numerous signs were revealed to be only 'guidelines' anticipating expected EU legislation.

There was no option but for us to leave which we did in record time, feeling that all that we had enjoyed about the mutual respect had been violated by people who could not see anywhere beyond their own wishes and certainly had none of the communal spirit everyone else seemed to operate by.  I swore at them as we left, because though I had not wanted to let my temper show, I realised that I had to do something to at least raise some attention that they had upset us.  It seemed to beyond their comprehension that they had done anything wrong that I despaired that they would understand.  It is painful for me that these people probably no doubt the children of very selfish parents, cannot even recognise when they have upset others and broken the rules which made the site such a nice place to be.  I suppose it is unsurprising.  I see it every time I go driving.  No-one signals, they drive around dangerously and park carelessly because their own concern is their own ease.  There is no recognition that when you drive or camp or simply live in a town you impinge on others whose rights (though they fail to even comprehend this) are as legitimate as yours. 

Given that the current political culture based on the creed of a woman (Margaret Thatcher) who said (to 'Women's Own' magazine in 1987): '...you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.'  It is ironic she mentions looking after neighbours, because I think that aspect has been left behind too.  The horizon of far too many people in British people is only 'there are individual men and women and there are families'.  Yes, you see that on camp sites, everyone in their own tent or caravan but they are still inter-linked we cannot live in isolation,  The trouble is that too many take the 'people must look after themselves first' and see that as the justification for not taking any consideration of not only the needs of others but simply how their own behaviour impinges on the human and physical environment around them.

In the space of a couple of days I saw the best and the worst of British society.  I had found an oasis of respect for others and the benefits of communal living and yet it could not keep out the pig-headed inability to comprehend that other people have a right to enjoy facilities too and that means you have to sacrifice a little, just a little of your desires, and think before you act rather than assuming everyone you do, however inattentive it is, is perfectly fine because it gives you the outcome you want.  I hope that next year the selfish middle class move on from camping to some other activity, possibly even one they have not comandeered from other sectors of society to distort to their own tastes and then contaminate with their self-centred perspectives on things.  For myself, realising that I am too unfit to return to cycling, have my eye on hiring a canal boat, but please do not tell the middle class idiots, I want at least one holiday per decade that selfish morons do not stamp all over.

Extreme Weather; Extreme Behaviour

As many commentators have noted during the recent snowy and icy weather, the trouble in the UK is not that we experience extremes of weather, and in fact what we have seen is considered normal in many neighbouring states (remember London is as far North as Moscow), but that we do not experience them often enough.  For comparisons we have to look back to 1981, 1963, 1947 and beyond rather than, say, 2006 or even 2001 which other countries could draw comparisons with.  This applies to all 'extremes' of weather in the UK.  The hot summer of 1995 could only be compared to 1976, 19 years earlier.  The bulk of the weather in Britain is tepid and this allows us all to forget how to cope when it gets a little colder, hotter, wetter or drier than has been the case in the past decade.  Combined with this is the tightness of public funding especially at a local level as councils have been facing constraints really non-stop since the mid-1970s when 'cuts' first became a common phrase for British local authorities.  So, given that you are likely to only have harsh weather in winter one year in twenty or thirty, it is clear that it is a gamble they are willing to take to save a little money in not buying salt or grit and keeping it in storage and the necessary lorries maintained. 

The other factor is the privatisation of so many public services in the UK. Why would a train company risk being sued by stranded customers or penalised for a string of late arrivals by trying to run a comprehensive train service.  In a hot summer, it is far easier for water companies to declare restrictions on the use of water and to reduce the water pressure than for them to spend money to repairing the high level of leakages in the British system which means around 25% of British water is lost compared to 14% of French and 10% of Dutch.  Greed and penny pinching make it far harder for the UK to be adaptable when something slightly different occurs.  Of course, we have just finished one six-year war and are still in the middle of one that has now be raging for coming up to its ninth year (almost as long as the First and Second World Wars combined) so costing millions of pounds in resources and a constant haemorrage of British people through death and injury.

Anyway, given the context that the weather and the response of the local authorities, who I acknowledge do the best they can with the resources they have, creates, how do the British people respond to it?  Well, this goes to 'extremes' as well.  People talk of the 'Blitz spirit' or the 'Dunkirk mentality', once again having to rely on nostalgia for a war that ended 64 years ago (in fact going back 69-70 years to those specific events) rather than finding anything of merit from the British public in those intervening years.  It is fascinating how with a single snowfall British people suddenly start talking to each other.  I know the weather is a common topic of conversation but it seems that it needs to really begin disrupting people's lives before they break through to talking to their neighbours let alone strangers.  Even among colleagues I have seen a change.  Those stranded at home yesterday did not sit in front of their radiators whining they were out checking on elderly people, fetching food and helping people dig out their cars.  In some ways the British cannot be stirred from their apathy unless it is by a 'crisis'.  It has to be a tangible crisis, as the failure to alarm us all about terrorists in the early 2000s showed, something which is intangible will not stir us, it has to be immediately visible and physical and so snow and floods in particular flick the switch in the average Briton's head.  Ironically, it seems, in my experience, and I accept that is very limited, to even push aside the usual whining about immigrants, dole 'scroungers' and so on and emphasise for many people the commonality of humanity. 

A new focus of complaint, however, are those who warm us about global warming.  There is a saying 'one swallow does not make a summer' and the same can be said in this case 'one snowfall does not mean there is no global warming'.  The climate does shift steadily, we know the 11th century was warm enough for people to farm on Greenland and the 17th century cold enough for people to have bonfires on the River Thames but within those periods there were hot or cold, dry or wet seasons.  As a spokesman for the Met(reological) Office noted on BBC1 yesterday, even if in 20 years when the global temperature is 2-3oC warmer we will still get snowy winters.

This beneficial, communal spirit which gets turned on by 'extreme' weather does have a counteracting behaviour too, sometimes among the very same people.  Britons are, on the whole, very selfish and often find it difficult to comprehend that anyone else may have equal and/or different needs that have any validity let alone greater validity than their own perceived needs.  This is most apparent when British people drive.  The bulk of British drivers want no-one else to be on the road and if there are other drivers, for them to get out of the way.  They see themselves as driving in a bubble, looking only a short distance ahead rather than what they are in fact, a cog in a complex machine of traffic.  This situation has worsened and drivers now often do not feel obliged to signal, they complain at attempts to make them stick to a speed limit, and in my experience, these days occasionally feel it is appropriate to drive on pavements if it can get them where they 'need' to be, that little bit quicker.  They take no responsibility for their actions, always blaming the others, especially if those others are cyclists or pedestrians. 

Rather than tempering this behaviour the snow has apparently exacerbated it.  Partly, I think, it is accentuated by the fact that 4x4 drivers, who assume they should be granted a superior position on the road at normal times, actually have it in such slippery conditions so apparently legitimising their arrogant attitudes and the fact that they are driving so far removed from the road.  Ironically, talking to a man this week who lives in rural Devon, he said that now the 4x4 drivers have conditions which suit their vehicles many drivers are too afraid and lack the expertise to use them properly and so end up blocking village high streets.  Despite the conditions many drivers are going too fast and are impatient with people trying to get over icy patches or going up and down hills cautiously.  In my office we discussed how one car was tipped on its side on a road.  Even stunt men find this a challenge, it is not the result simply of ice and snow unless the vehicle has slid sideways off a particular camber, it is achieved by driving too fast.  Too many people in the UK speed in normal conditions and apparently have no appreciation of the stopping distances needed even on dry roads let alone on icy ones.  Speeding among too many people, including, it seems newspapers like the 'Daily Mail' (complaining this week about the £15 increase in speeding fines to pay compensation to victims of other crimes, seemingly forgetting that speeding is a crime and that people who speed are criminals), is not seen as a criminal offence, rather it is perceived as a right, one that even outweighs commons sense.

The occasions on which such behaviour becomes insane is in the attacks on workers driving snow ploughs and gritting lorries.  Interviews last night with such drivers showed that they had had objects thrown at their vehicles on some occasions smashing the windscreens.  Apparently this stems from frustration that the roads have not been sufficiently cleared or not soon enough or that side roads are neglected or routes in rural areas cannot be kept open constantly.  Attacks on the gritting vehicles is like shooting yourself in the foot because you are tired from walking.  Yet, to too many people it apparently seems rational behaviour.  However, perhaps it is unsurprising in a country where ambulance and fire fighting crews are attacked when carrying out their duties.  If you have a problem with the services protest to the people who actually control it, vote for someone who will adopt a different policy, do not attack the people trying to deliver a life saving service, doing an ordinary job like the rest of us, under tough and dangerous circumstances anyway.  Think about it, someone who drives a gritting lorry has to get up early on the coldest days of the year and drive constantly in the most hazardous conditions.  Less severe, but equally moronic is the people who rush to overtake gritting lorries and snow ploughs.  Think about it.  If the road did not need a plough or gritting, the lorry would not be there and before a lorry has passed over a particular section the road is likely to be even more dangerous than usual, and you want to hurry on to that untreated road surface?

The other unhelpful thing is the attitude of employers who are given privileged opportunities to whine about how much the weather is damaging the economy.  It is the same whenever there is a bank holiday, they are allowed to come on to radio and television and produce some huge figure about how badly industry is missing out by people being off for a day or two (in the case of bank holidays, of course, the UK has five fewer than the next nearest number in the EU and many of our competitors have many more than us.  I imagine only the fact that the additional 2012 bank holiday is linked to the Queen's diamond jubilee that has meant no complaints from business leaders about it).  Apparently the snow is losing business £600 million per day.  Of course fuel utility companies and even many supermarkets (given the British tendency to stockpile food at any hint of a crisis) are actually benefiting from the cold weather.  The new twist is the complaint from employers that too many schools have closed too quickly and so compelling parents to take time off to look after their children. 

What the employers forget (or choose not to notice) is that often teachers cannot afford to live anywhere near the schools they work at because house prices have risen far faster than teachers' salaries over the past forty years and schools are fearful of being sued if any child has an accident even in good weather so are terrified they will get a slew of litigation if children slip over in the snow.  Added to this, much investment in school buildings and heating facilities has been neglected over the past thirty years, there are regular reports on the poor conditions many schools actually are in, so it is unsurprising when their aged boilers pack up or single-glazed classrooms are too cold to study in.  None of these considerations is allowed to get in the way of employers yet again telling us we are lazy and negligent and so are costing the country money (though of course not reducing their salaries or bonuses a jot).  Hassle from employers makes many people feel they must get on the road to reach their work, often adding the hazards and accidents.

Extreme weather shows how shabby the UK's infrastructure has become from decades of cuts and when this is combined with an unassailable belief that satisfaction of all individual wishes is the only legitimate concern, it creates 'crisis' that neighbouring states must look upon with bemusement/amusement. I wonder what happens in places like western Normandy and Brittany which, like the UK, benefit from the Atlantic warm currents that stop the climate being as cold, most winters, as, say, northern France, the Benelux countries and Germany.  In these regions of France they must have mild winters but the occasional harsh ones too, yet I never hear Cherbourg or Rennes or Brest grinding to a halt when this occurs.  I suspect it means keeping things in store that you might only use once per decade, but at least you know they are there.  I guess to it stems from an attitude which is not all 'me, me, me' when harsh conditions bite.  I may be wrong and would be interested to hear from people who have had experiences in these regions.  I have certainly travelled around Belgium in the winter when the temperature is often -10oC or worse without difficulty and without the madness that seems to affect too many Britons whenever snow comes.  The weather might be extreme for the UK but let us hope that negative extreme behaviour can be moderated and the positive behaviour become normalised rather than needing extreme weather to trigger it.

P.P. 12/01/2010: One contributory factor to schools closing that I had missed, but is now being reported widely, are the league table ratings around percentage of attendance.  This means that if a school opens and say, even a third or a quarter, in fact anything more than about a tenth, of its pupils cannot get in then it slides quickly in terms of its standing for attendance.  I should have remembered the messages that I have seen coming home from the school that the 8-year old who lives in my house attend.  The headteachers writes of figures like 92.4% attendance and a drive to get this figure higher.  It is unsurprising then, that heads shut the school and so have that day null-and-void for the statistics rather than risk dropping even a 1-2% and so looking worse than last year when we had a mild winter.

Another point of behaviour that I forgot to mention is drivers using their fog lights when visibility is good.  Many drivers, even now where there is a lot of thawing going on, certainly in the counties I have been driving through, seem to assume these lights are simply 'bad weather' lights.  They forget that on frosty days often the air is far clearer than even on rainy days and so there is no need for fog lights.  You can be fined if you have them on when visibility is more than 50-100 metres.  On the back fog lights can be up to 30 times more powerful than normal rear lights.  I know when you are driving up and down valleys on foggy days you go in and out of fog and may be excused for leaving them on in clear patches, but some people switch them on just when it is cold and frosty, every one car in ten I passed this morning had them on and there was not a scrap of fog on the 190Km I covered.  I do wonder, if, as with drivers who keep full beam on at all times, whether these drivers actually know how to operate the functions on their cars or get stuck with a certain setting.

Cars as Weapons

Earlier this year I produced a posting asking 'When Will Cars Be Considered the Weapons They Are?' because I noted that in contrast to using a gun or a knife, which kill far fewer people in the UK, you were likely to get only 4 years imprisonment at most, often less for killing someone with a car (and only a £2,200 fine if you run them over and kill them with a bicycle - see the death of Rhiannon Bennett killed by cyclist Jason Howard, but that is a far less common occurrence). Last week I came across an article in a magazine in Hampshire by a man called Professor Colin Pritchard who has a long line of titles. His article was actually about how the media distorts our perceptions of British society. It alerted me to something I had not realised that the US media apparently portrays UK society as facing 'social collapse' though our in 2007 we had 64 males murdered aged 15-24 compared to 4,191 in the USA (which has a population about four times larger), the rate is 17 per million in the age group, in the UK compared to 209 per million in the age group in the USA. Apparently such reports are continuing to make older people fearful. Last year 98 people over the age of 65 were murdered, one third of them by members of their family, given that being over 65 is a much bigger category in fact the rate is only 7 per million per year compared to the US rate of 27 per million per year.

Anyway, this posting was not intended to bring out the fact that Americans should stop condemning Britain as being a hazardous place to live when in fact their country is far more dangerous, it was to back up my points about the fatalities from death from motor vehicles which I outlined earlier in the year with someone else's analysis. Professor Pritchard rightly says 'UK youth road deaths, which the media at the national-level virtually "air-brushes" out of the news'. I think this is as with the American media talking about gun crime, that many British readers, especially men, see it as offensive to even raise the issue of deaths caused by the thing they love: cars in the UK, guns in the USA. Any news programme or newspaper which started going on about how many people are killed by speeding would soon lose viewers/readers. As I noted before there are websites dedicated to trying to demonstrate that most it is 'the fault' of most pedestrians when they are killed or severely injured by a car and that proper speed limits in towns is somehow more dangerous than no speed limits because drivers are always checking their speedometers (suggesting they are indeed very poor drivers if by now they have no idea of how fast they are going if they are not reading it off their speedometer!). According to Professor Pritchard the number of people aged 15-24 in the UK killed by vehicles was 630 in 2007, which works out at 169 per million per year, compared to 17 per million per year for all other forms of murder. (The USA has 7,325 deaths from road accidents of people aged 15-24 last year: 365 per million per year, still higher than their deaths from other murders, but by a far smaller factor than in the UK).

As Pritchard outlines, one reason why the road deaths are so much higher than other forms of murder is because the UK is actually a very safe place, even given the rapid rise in attacks with knives. However, it is not portrayed as such. We have regular crime programmes but possibly one programme per year on driving safely. In fact dangerous driving is lionised by weekly programmes notably 'Top Gear' on BBC2 which has become the home of laddish behaviour leading to one of its presenters Jeremy Clarkson becoming the voice of populist, conservative, slightly bigoted politics in numerous articles and now books. The presenters keep striving to do more dangerous stunts with motor vehicles under the pretence that it is a 'normal' car show, which it used to be when it started back in 1970. It entered its current laddish format in a (what has proven successful) bid to gain more viewers, in 2002. It has been criticised for showing presenters drinking gin while driving and presenter Richard Hammond was almost killed in October 2006 when a car he was driving crashed at high speed. This is how so many UK drivers envisage themselves when they are behind the wheel, with real arrogance and a very self-centred approach. Contrast this to the 1970s when there were regular 'public information films' of a couple of minutes showing the consequences of hitting pedestrians (they used a hammer and a peach to good effect) and interviews with people crippled after crashing a car while not wearing a seatbelt. We need hard-hitting broadcasting like that which shows the tragedy not the glamour of bad driving.

Proper sentencing which treats murdering someone with a car equal to murdering them with a gun or a knife is also needed, i.e. a minimum of 14 years for manslaughter and 30 years for murder, this would concentrate the minds of men in their 30s and 40s to realise they would not be driving again until they had passed retirement age. Getting a maximum of 4 years and in most cases 2 years or less, is totally insufficient. As so much of the US media is cowed by the gun-owning lobby so is much of the UK media by the bad-driving lobby. I know these people pretend they are good drivers, but in fact that is a lie as anyone who drives down our major roads regularly knows. Even if there was not another single vehicle on the road, these people (and they are women as well as men) would be a danger, but mixed in with the average level of rush hour traffic they are as dangerous as someone running around a shopping centre with a pistol with no safety catch.

Maybe there is hope for the future. Pritchard's article notes that statistics show that 14-15 year olds in 2005 were less likely to be involved either in smoking tobacco, taking narcotics or having sex below the legal age of consent (16 years old) than their counterparts in 1985. This seems contrary to what we are told in the media. Of course, I have come to realise much of the media tells us what it thinks we want to hear rather than attempting to relay the truth. So possibly 10-15 years from now we might find slightly more considerate drivers prevalent on the roads, but in the meantime many more hundreds of people in the UK will be murdered and maimed by drivers.

P.P. The saga seems to persist. Today (18th July) I heard that a 19-year old man driving an uninsured car was given a 20-month sentence for killing an 11-year old by running him over. The man fled the scene and did not report the murder and he gets less than 2 years in prison. If he had stabbed the boy he would have got 14 years. In Northern Ireland though I noted this week one man had his sentence increased from 4 years to 7 years for killing two men while drunk driving.

In addition, courts are now being advised to be tougher. The BBC reported this week that causing death while holding a mobile phone could now get 7 years (rather than 4 years) and drunk or drugged driving leading to death can get 14 years, the same as for manslaughter committed whilst on foot. However, death by 'careless' driving as opposed to 'reckless' is still likely only to get a maximum of 3 years but 'careless' will now be treated as 'reckless' if drugs or drink are involved. Unsurprisingly people feel this guidance is still not going far enough. If you want to kill someone and get away with a far shorter sentence, run them down with a car when you are sober and you will be out in 3 years, stab them to death and it will probably be 14 years and shoot them and it will probably be 30 years. No wonder more people are killed in the UK by cars than guns or knives or any other weapon.

Link to BBC story about sentencing guidance: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7506668.stm

The Hazards of Cycling in British Society

I suppose one of the benefits of driving through an area with a bigoted radio presenter spouting out his views as if he was a talk radio 'shock jock' is that it stimulates me to comment in a way that probably would not happen if the man just got on with his job and played tunes and reported on the traffic. Yes, I am back in the area with that man again and today he was slagging off cyclists. Probably quite a safe thing for him to do on morning radio as the bulk of his listeners will be in cars or the kitchen and not on their bicycles. I was going to email the man directly but I guess there is little point, he is so mired in his prejudices that it would take a miracle to excavate him from them.

Now, it is interesting how much difference 3-4 years makes. If I had started this blog in 2003 or 1999 you probably would see lots of postings about my latest cycling trip around London or Buckinghamshire probably illustrated by photographs scanned in of where I had been. In those days cycling was one of my keen hobbies. I was never one of these people who got out to do his 50 miles no matter what the weather was. I preferred to cycle in good weather if I could help it and I always had a target something like a stately home or a beauty spot or at least a pub for a nice lunch. I would do 25-40 miles on a Sunday and enjoy not only getting out on quiet roads (yes they do exist in Britain) but also a sense of achievement at a time when I felt I was achieving little. I was not fast enough to be a member of a club (in my town of the 2000s you had to be able to sustain 15mph (24kph) for 50 miles (80km) and I could not achieve much beyond 10-11mph average. However, that did not matter, what I did do, I enjoyed. I would spend two weeks in June cycling in northern France, seeing really beautiful landscapes and eating very well too. It could be tough and got harder as my health got screwed up but looking back, as with most things, I see the good points. Having failed with a different type of holiday this year, I am going to revert to that kind of holiday in 2009 and am thinking of the Champagne or Burgundy regions, parts of France I have never visited as yet.

Anyway, it is that context that I write this posting. Drivers hate cyclists but a lot of the time it is on the same basis that they hate small car drivers. Most drivers feel they are the best on the road and think everyone should get out their way. They do feel a twinge of guilt when they see a cyclist because they know actually they are polluting the environment far more than a cyclist. They also feel guilty because they know that that man (and sometimes woman) is far fitter than them and likely to live longer. Drivers always fall back on tarring all cyclists with the same brush as the worst (and yet get upset if we tar all drivers the same way). There are cyclists who jump red lights and who do not have lights on their bicycles at night-time; yet who is it that comes off worse in any such encounter between a cyclist and vehicle. I know to most car drivers that a scratch on their paintwork is more important to them than the life of another human, but I have yet to hear a case in which a cyclist killed a car driver in an accident where as the reverse is extremely common (I remember a poster which stood out showing a cyclist's teeshirt with 'soft vehicle' in the style of those 'long vehicle' signs on lorries, on it. In that case recently of a drive who killed a cyclist whilst she was texting while driving a lot of the commentary was how hazardously the cyclist was supposed to be travelling, not that the woman was behaving so dangerously that she killed someone without noticing! Getting on a bicycle automatically makes you a focus of blame; getting in a car somehow excuses you even from murderous behaviour. Cyclists who ignore the issues of safety and the basics of the Highway Code put themselves and others at risk and should be condemned by all road users. However, the foolish actions of a few should not then provide a carte blanche for attacking all cyclists.

People say that why do cyclists not use cyclepaths where they exist (by these I mean separate routes rather than painted off sections along the side of the road), well it is because they are always covered in broken glass and most of them going in ridiculous, time wasting directions. Milton Keynes has loads of cycle paths, but they were drawn on a map by someone who wanted pretty spiral patterns not to provide an effective way to reach somewhere. They contrast sharply with grid road system in the city. I only found one cycle path that actually saved a cyclist time compared to going on the roads (which as hazardous in Milton Keynes as the in-city speed limit bar on one road and in the real city core is 70 mph (112kph) which madly is the same as a motorway) because randomly it went diagonally across a block. Most of the cyclepaths took longer and were often over hillier terrain than taking the road. I took the cyclepaths from South Milton Keynes to an area near the North end (about 8 miles (12.8 kph)in distance) and did the same journey via the roads and on the roads it was 25 minutes quicker and far less tiring as the road cut through the long hills rather than going right up the side of them. Cyclepaths are fine if you just want to tour around, they are no good if you actually want to get somewhere.

People complain about how cyclists signal, i.e. by putting their arms out. Well, to me this is far clearer than a pale blinking light on a car. You can always see where a cyclist who is behaving properly wants to go. In fact what the car drivers are complaining about is that they want the cyclist to be simply out of the way. Most drivers I meet do not realise a cyclist has the right to go into a right-hand lane at a roundabout if they want to go right (if you are reading this outside the UK, Japan or Australia, think left-hand lane to go left) and they will hoot and shout at you, when in fact you are simply obeying the Highway Code. Like a car or van or motorcycle, as a cyclist you are another road user. Car drivers want you to use lights and stop at traffic lights in line with the law, but then they do not want you actually to get into the proper lane for the manoeuvre you want to do. It is frightening enough trying to navigate around a large roundabout without ill-informed, arrogant people bellowing at you. Of course, many car drivers never signal at all whether going round a roundabout or changing lanes on the motorway or turning into a side road, they just do it and seem to think it is alright.

Drivers complain about cyclists travelling two abreast. Well, I think the only reason why they despise this is because it makes it far harder to push the cyclists into the gutter. Two cyclists abreast is still narrower than the average car let alone a 4x4, so just overtake. One noticeable thing in the UK which is in sharp contrast to cycling in France or elsewhere across Europe, especially Belgium and the Netherlands, is how much space car drivers give cyclists. Many British drivers wobble all over their lanes anyway, but they think a reasonable amount of space to leave a cyclist when overtaking them is nothing (and they only think about the physical space, not how much their passing sucks up the cyclist with its wind and so complain about this reflective bars protruding from bicycles, less popular now than in the 1980s). They resent turning the steering wheel that miniscule amount to move a decent distance around a cyclist. French, Belgian, Dutch drivers all pull out as if they were overtaking another car, British drivers do not. I once cycled, one glorious sunny day along the road from Bolougne to Calais in northern France. This was on the coast road so pretty quiet as most people stick to the motorway in land if they want to get somewhere. However, some people take this route for the stunning views and by the time I reached Calais I could tell you the nationality of the driver approaching me from behind before they had even passed me. The British all seemed to want to strip my panniers off my bicycle they came so close, even though there was never a car coming in the other direction. No British driver will give a cyclist the width of their body let alone a safe distance, and again it stems from British drivers seeing others unlike themselves as scum that it is fine to kill.

This issue of space on the roads even occurs when there are cycle lanes marked out along the side of roads. These are very common in many UK towns and I naturally stick to them, because they go along the way the road is going and get you where you want to be in reasonable time. Many have boxes marked out at traffic lights which allow cyclists to get in the correct position to turn right (i.e. in the UK across the flow of traffic). Once in Whitechapel, east London I was waiting at a traffic light, sitting in one of these boxes. I wanted just to go straight on so was on the side by the pavement. As the cyclist box was ahead of the cars I was peripherally aware of a large car behind me. I set off heading straight on as intended. Suddenly a short way up the road a 4x4 pulls across in front of me, blocking the cycle lane and mounting the pavement. The driver leaps from it swearing at me, trying to snatch my bicycle and trying to punch me. My 'crime' had been to go straight on when he wanted to turn left, somehow I had 'blocked' him from powering away down the side road and so was deserving of being beaten up. Of course I powered away from him leaving him away from his car and unable to get back to it to catch up. I just hoped it had all been caught on CCTV. This incredible arrogance, this assumption that somehow I was out to ruin his day by him having to slow up for a few seconds and that needed me to be punished by violence shows how distorted the world has become. (That was not the first time I was threatened on my bicycle, the first time a man almost reversed into me from his driveway and when I shouted at him to be more careful, he also blocked the road leapt out and started trying to punch me.) Cyclists, to the average driver, we are scum worthy of a beating (just this week someone reached out of a passing car and pushed a 42-year old man off his bicycle: Why? What offence was he causing? He is just a human), not humans just trying, like them, to simply get somewhere. Most drivers clearly only read tiny bits of the Highway Code and have no recognition that actually it is about all road users. I have never ridden a horse, but I am sure many horseriders would simply echo these sentiments. (My favourite joke when passing a group of horseriders when on my bicycle, especially climbing a hill was to say 'I know how they feel').

Another criticism of cyclists is that they look ugly and should not be in lycra shorts. Well there is a simple riposte to that, have you seen the average car driver? At least a cyclist is using their body and even if going aty the slowest speed is getting a lot more exercise than a car driver and at less cost to the world. People disparage cyclists who dress up in team colours, but somehow fat men in football shirts and drivers with Ferrari stickers or baseball caps are exempt from such negativity. People like to associate with a team, cyclists no less than anyone else. Why is there one rule for one set of people and another for a different set?

The dangers that cyclists face stem from an endemic problem in Britain. The boorish, arrogant, consumerist and self-centred section of the population are the ones who define our culture. They kill. They kill cyclists and pedestrians because they are so wrapped up in their egos. Cyclists do not stand around car parks ridiculing the obese as they cram themselves into their cars, they get on with their lives and let other people live theirs. If British culture was more defined by the cyclists (and walkers) of this country not only would it be safer and healthier, but finally we might begin to reduce the level of hatred that the average Briton has for the ordinary people they encounter every day. When radio presenters try to stir up even more hatred against cyclists they simply damage British society (which they profess to love) even further.

When Will Cars Be Considered the Weapons They Are?

Driving through one English region recently I was struck by the range of sentences handed down for similar crimes. These were:

Wife attempting to murder her husband using anti-freeze leading him to be disabled but to survive: Attempted Murder - 30 years

Man punched and kicked a man to death in a fight: Manslaughter - 14 years

Woman killed a cyclist by running him over in her car while texting someone on her mobile phone: Death By Dangerous Driving - 4 years

On these grounds it is actually more risky in terms of a prison sentence not to kill someone with anti-freeze than it is to murder them with a car. While researching this posting I came across similar comments from the late 1990s about people getting light sentences for being convicted for the offence of Death By Dangerous Driving:

http://www.iankitching.me.uk/articles/death-driving.html

Ian Kitching points out that if this offence which carried a sentence of 6 months to 2 years in those days, though in theory it has been raised to 14 years so in line with Manslaughter (though I yet to hear of a case in which a dangerous driver gets 14 years and guidance to courts is generally 2-5 years). Kitching shows cases in which drivers who have killed one or more people were getting sentences as short as 6 months. You can get 5 years for Actual Bodily Harm and Greivous Bodily Harm sentences can be 5 years to life and in these cases the person attacked is still alive; in addition aggravation such as a racial motive adds typically 2 years to the sentence. So for beating up someone on racial grounds you could get 7 years in prison but if you ran them down with a car you could get away with 6 months to a maximum of 4 years it seems.

Why is it in the UK that the car is not considered to be a weapon? I think partly it stems from the people who are judges. In 2004 16% of judges were women; judges earn £96,500-£129,900 (€128,35-€172,235; US$194,930-U$261,590) which is four to six times the national average salary so they are all very rich people. Though I accept that there are aggressive female drivers the bulk of the aggression on the roads is caused by men. The number of incidents of drivers following others home to attack or berate them has increased sharply even in the past two years (this happened to me and is very frightening, the motives for why they are offended by you are usually obscure). Thus, I believe that judges who rarely walk around outside or find themselves fighting in pub car parks are more sympathetic to accused who harm people using a big car like they drive. They can easily see themselves mowing down some defenceless pedestrian or cyclist without noticing, so they are lenient on the people like themselves, careless, rich men in many cases. It also explains why sentences for rapists are so lenient too and why attempted murder by women of their husbands conversely receives such strong punishment as the judges want to send a warning to their own spouses.

Until the sentences for causing death using a car come in line with sentences for using a knife or a gun or your fists (or ironically tools from a car like the jack) to commit violence then people are going to continue to drive around recklessly fast, using hand-held equipment and know that they are going to get off lightly.

I always warn the six-year old who lives in this house that he is far more likely to be killed by a driver than any other weapon. In 1997 following the Hungerford and Dunblaine attacks most handguns in the UK were banned and deaths from shootings in England, Scotland and Wales combined were only 58 in 2005/06 and 67 in 2006/07 (down from a peak of 102 in 2001/02). In 2005, 3,201 people were killed by or in cars; 48% of these were people not using the cars themselves, which suggests that 1,537 people were killed through a car inadvertently or intentionally used as a weapon. Hence you are 22 times more likely to be killed by a car than by a gun in England, Scotland and Wales (in fact the chance is far greater in Scotland where gun deaths have been in single figures through the 2000s). In 2004 in England and Wales, 282 murders were committed using a sharp implement, predominantly knives so it suggests that in England and Wales you are approximately five times more likely to be killed by a car than a knife.

Why then do courts and sentences see cars for what they really are? Commonly available lethal weapons given to people who would often be refused any firearm or even a knife? A kitchen knife, like a car, is a mundane object, but that does not stop people for recognising it for the lethal object it can become. A car is many kilogrammes of metal able to travel fast enough to smear people across a road and kill them instantly. Even at 30mph (56 kph) someone hit is 10% likely to be killed, this rises to 90% by 40mph. Cars drive down my residential road at 60mph (the speed limit is 30mph but is uneforced by speed cameras) guaranteeing anyone who steps or is on their bicycle and is hit by a car will die. Pro-speeding organisations like SafeSpeed contest the government's figures for road deaths, but to me 827 pedestrians killed by cars in 2001 plus 39,470 injured is far too high and exceeds by many times the deaths from shootings or stabbings for which people receive far, far longer sentences. Speeding in Britain is seen like gun ownership in the USA as some kind of God-given right and one that to these arrogant, usually prosperous men (who resent that the rest of society comes anywhere near their perceived 'level' of course in fact none of us want to go down to their caveman behaviour) is far more important than life itself. The death of even one person from a car is excessive and the sense that there are 'tolerable' levels such as the 107 child pedestrians killed by cars in 2001, is sickening, to seek to do as SafeSpeed does to put the blame on pedestrians for daring to get in the way of their speeding cars, is akin to a gunman saying it was the dead person's fault for not moving out of the way of the bullet that was being fired at them.

It is simple:

Cars are weapons. Reckless drivers are armed murderers. Murderers should be sentenced in line with the law on murder.


P.P. After posting this, another thought came to my mind in regards to sentencing of criminals. In setting down the sentence the judge will often consider how much there is a risk that the criminal will offend again. This is why sometimes people who have murdered their partner or family members get quite light sentences on the assumption that they do not have such a close relationship with the bulk of the population and so are not a hazard to people they are not related to. The things about killer drivers is that they are highly likely to offend again and they are a threat to anyone in society. In the large majority of cases they have no idea who they actually killed, often they have not even seen them when they run them down, and as SafeSpeed makes clear, these kind of people blame the victim for the collision not themselves. Thus, they are actually far more dangerous to the population as they do not believe they did anything wrong and also because their victims are totally random. Even someone running round a US town with a rifle tends to target people he knows or knows of whereas a killer driver in the UK is a risk to all of us. Thus, on this basis their sentences should be higher rather than lower than those people who have a restricted pool of targets. I fear that the issue comes round premeditation and that killer drivers are seen as 'accidental' killers. That is generally true but they have taken a premeditated decision to drive too fast and dangerously and so are effect setting themselves up to kill even if they have not yet selected their target. This is playing Russian Roulette with other people's lives and they should be sentenced in the way you would sentence someone who runs through a city centre blindfolded and firing a pistol and kills someone, they are as dangerous as that. The judges cannot apparently see that, as they are so similar to these criminals in their own behaviour.

What Annoys Me About ... Drivers

As I have commented before I drive around 400 miles (640 Km) per week. Last weekend I covered 680 miles (1088 Km), so I experience a lot of traffic. I have driven in the UK, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Greece so have quite a good deal of knowledge of driving conditions and behaviour in my part of the World. I have heard that in some countries driving is worse than in the UK, and Italy and Malta in particular have been pointed out to me as examples, but I have no experience of driving in those two countries so am in no position to comment. However, I would still imagine that the UK is near the bottom of the table for bad driving.

One reason why drivers in the UK are so bad is because they carry the social consciousness of British society on to the road. Those with big, expensive cars, especially SUVs, expect others to move out of their way and that they are exempt from the regulations, especially in terms of speed limits and parking restrictions. However, at all levels in the UK people feel that they have the right to bully people in a smaller or older or cheaper car with no regard for what the rules of the road are. Every British driver (and this includes many women as well as men) sees driving as somehow a test of their virility (or whatever the female equivalent is) and to be challenged on the road and lose is somehow a serious slight to their personality. This is no basis on which to drive, it is not a gladiatorial competition, it is about getting from A to B as safely as possible, but it seems very few UK drivers recognise that. For them it is about showing off their wealth and status and getting around as fast as they can.

I have already touched on a couple of types of behaviour by UK drivers that I will not revisit here, but will mention again briefly at the beginning for completeness. The first is complaining about speed cameras. So many people say they are simply fund-raising devices and extreme groups even vandalise them. Much print and many hours of radio talk is spent complaining about speed cameras. Of course if you never break the speed limit you will never be fined as a result of a speed camera, but to many UK drivers this insults their freedom to drive as fast as they like (to them it is equivalent to saying to an American that he does not have the right to have bullets for his gun because they may kill people). These people want to the right to drive dangerously and whine incessantly because they are penalised when they do.

Overlapping with the speed camera opponents are those people still using mobile phones in their cars. Hands-free kits have been available for years now and can be bought in any service station. Despite the increased fines and the greater penalties for anyone holding a mobile phone while driving, every day I see people continuing to do it. Their silly phonecall is deemed more important than the lives of the people around them. As with speeding they have the ultimate arrogance that a) they are very skilled drivers b) that laws do not apply to them c) that their petty concerns are greater than the welfare of hundreds of other people. Even skilled police drivers cannot hold mobile phones and drive well; it is not simply the obstacle to gripping the steering wheel but also the mental distraction. You see people wobbling all over the road, braking suddenly and generally causing disruption to the flow of traffic.

Now, moving on to new areas of terrible driving. Different things bubble up through the year, but one persistent one I have faced over the past few weeks is 'tailgating'. If you are not familiar with what this involves, basically it is driving so close to the vehicle in front of you that if it stops suddenly you will be unable not to crash into it. The stopping distance for a car travelling at 30 mph (48kph) in dry weather is the length of 6 average cars (75 ft or 23m) at 70 mph (112kph) - the highest speed you are legally allowed to travel on UK roads, is 24 car lengths (315 ft or 96m). These distances double in wet weather. Now, constantly I have cars behind me at less than 3 ft (i.e. 1m), which means even driving in a residential road where the speed limit is 30mph, if I stop when a child or an old person or a cat runs out, they will definitely crash into me and shunt me forwards quite a distance. You can imagine how hazardous it is on motorways. This is the reason that every day I see cars that have 'shunted', i.e. one has smashed into the rear of another. On a 30 mile (48 Km) journey each morning I typically see three of these accidents. Now, I accept that not all of these kill people, but they wreck cars and contribute to the slowness of traffic.

There are a couple of variations on tailgating. One is the behaviour of lorries (trucks) on motorways (freeways or highways). In the UK their speed is limited to 60 mph (96kph). If you are in front of a lorry and your speed falls to 59mph they will be less than 3 feet behind you, flashing their lights and hooting you to get out of their way, even when you have nowhere to go as there are vehicles blocking the way in front of you. They make no consideration for the fact that you may have moved into the inside lane because you want to turn off, they expect you to charge up to the junction. Having a 30-tonne plus lorry bearing down on you is hardly likely to lead to confident driving. The other thing is the racing between lorries. If one finds that because he is unloaded he can get 1-2mph faster than the one in front he pulls into the middle lane and slowly edges past that other lorry. It is an agonisingly slow race. Of course the lorry on the inside lane never yields any space and sometimes the overtaking lorry has to drop back. All of this is going on for some foolish pride of lorry drivers, but it causes chaos for other road users. It drops the speed of the middle lane suddenly from 70mph to 60mph when the lorry moves out and these large vehicles sweeping constantly back and forth between two lanes sends turbulence and disruption to the other road users that the lorry drivers seem simply to despise. Coach drivers who can go up to 70mph (and usually go much faster despite their passengers) are even worse.

Another variation on tailgating goes back to the social status issue. Many drivers seem to feel that small cars should not be on the road (lorry drivers seem to have the same view of all car drivers). They hoot and flash at them, trying to get them to pull off the road, even when there are other clear lanes to pass on. If you yield the car zooms past and you catch up with it at the next junction anyway. Presumably it is offensive to them to see a small car in front of them and they wish they had some special route just for them (I believe this is one reason why the Conservative Party in the UK want the top speed limit increased to 80mph. Even the Citroen 2CV with an engine capacity of 602cc can make 70mph but most cars under 1 litre [i.e. 1000cc or more usually 998cc] capacity find it difficult to reach 80mph meaning that they would be reconciled to being terrorised by the lorries in the slow and middle lanes). There are drivers who take this further and I have encountered a couple. One will move around back and forth across the road to block your progress and go in front of you and brake suddenly. Another will simply follow you, sitting tight behind you no matter where you go, even if you pull over or speed up or slow down, as if you are in some trashy horror movie. Why these people want to do this I have no idea, clearly they have nothing better to do with their lives.

Other behaviour that is both dangerous and annoying on the road, are people who change lanes, go round roundabouts, turn into side roads, etc. all without signalling. Every car now has clear, easily operated indicators, but some people seem to have an inability to use them. Again they slow up the traffic and increase the danger to others for the sake of them moving their hand a few centimetres. Why people like moving back and forth across all lanes of the motorway I do not know. Then they see their junction and move right from the fast lane to the exit slip road without signalling at all. Again, clearly they simply think the road is just for them.

A similar problem is with people 'undertaking'. By this I am referring not to funeral directors (they at least have the grace to drive slowly) but to people who pass your car on the inside and then pop up in front of you. Like those who wander across all the lanes, they are seeking the quickest route anywhere. By definition they are speeding. The main hazard is that they come back into a middle lane at the same time as someone is coming across from the fast lane and so crash three cars at once. If they have the power and the speed, why can they not simply expend the effort to overtake properly, no-one has any gripe with that. A variation on this comes at junctions when they creep up, say the lane to go left or straight on then jump out right in front of you as you try to turn right. Clearly even a few seconds lost on their journey is more of a concern than their or anyone else's life. The same impatience happens when two roads are merging. In the UK in such situations cars are supposed to merge with one from the main road followed by one from the joining road then one from the main road and so on. However, of course, rather than waiting their turn people push as far forward as they can and shove in as many of them as they can. Again such behaviour not only is hazardous but also actually slows up the whole flow of traffic for everyone, the people carrying out the action too. I must say I have experienced this in Germany as well as the UK, though less often. Another variation is people doing this creeping up when you are queuing to join a ferry or go over a toll bridge or something similar. Why do they think they are exempt from queuing when everyone else has to do it?

In contrast to many of the problems above that stem from arrogance and even self-righteousness, there is one form of bad driving which comes from hesitancy. Maybe this if forgivable given all the overly-assertive dangerous drivers around, but it does add to the difficulties of driving around safely. This is the issue of people who 'hover'. This is notable on motorways where people sit just behind you in the faster lane to you which is a difficult location as it is often in a 'blind spot' for car mirrors. The front of their car is just level with the rear of yours so you cannot move across into their lane and yet if you slow down to get in behind them, they slow too. You end up paying more attention to where they are for fear of them knocking against you, than the rest of the users on the road. Either they should fall back to give you enough space to get in or accelerate and get past you. The same happens with feeder roads, very common on both motorways and dual carriageways. I pass many of these on a daily basis and I know it is often difficult to join the main road from them, so I slow up in advance of the junction and signal for the people to come on, but do they? No. They move forward a little but do not go, then they might go and of course by then I am closer to them and have to slow more, endangering myself from whoever is tailgating me. It also happens in reverse when you are joining from a feeder. Lorries will simply not let you in and you have to hang at the entrance until they all pass, but some cars again will not accelerate past you nor slow enough to let you in and you get pushed to the end of the slip road in a very dangerous situation. Of course I simply put it down to incompetence and a lack of understanding of how the British road system works, but maybe it is malice and they just enjoy toying with you.

I am sure there are probably a hundred more things I witness in terms of bad behaviour on the roads, but these are the most common and probably provoke the most accidents. Other ones that come to mind is people driving around with full beam headlights constantly at night time seemingly unaware that they are dazzling everyone around them, they do this even on well lit and busy roads. People who drive the wrong way into service stations and then expect you to get out of the way when you have come in the correct way and have queued patiently to use a pump. Now that people drive big SUVs they seem to think that the rule that any vehicle pulling a caravan travels no faster than 50mph (80kph) has been scrapped and they charge along at 70mph+ with the caravan flapping side-to-side hazardously. People who do not understand that when approaching a junction what was previously the fast lane, say on a dual carriageway, is now the lane to turn right, so you can go into it and slow down and should not be forced to travel at 70mph right up to the junction just because they think it is still the fast lane.

Generally the quality of driving in the UK is appalling. This stems primarily from arrogance. Most drivers travel around in a bubble and think they are free to drive how they wish with absolutely no interest on anyone else they are sharing the road with, and often with an intention to somehow humiliate many of the people around them. Over 3,500 people are killed each year on Britain's roads; over 290,000 people are severely injured. Of these incidents only around 5% are caused by drunk drivers, which means that 95% of the accidents are committed by someone who is sober but driving in the idiotic ways I see on a daily basis. As the UK's roads become ever busier we need people to wake up and realise when they get in their car they are not starting a computer game or going into battle, they are simply driving and not alone, but with thousands of people around them. The arrogance needs to decrease sharply and a recognition that you are moving with a dangerous weapon in a confined and ever shifting space, needs to come to the fore.

Our Selfish Society 1: Road Littering

There are probably so many selfish people in the world today that I could produce a blog just on that. I envisage a string of postings on such topics: selfishness has been increasing over the last few decades and certainly in the English-speaking world took a real boost in the 1980s, the 'greed is good' era. I drive 60-90 miles (96-144km) per day and on the road is where you see a great deal of selfish behaviour and a lot of bad, arrogant and ignorant behaviour too. There is something about getting in a car which seems to free people from the normal constraints of society and also make them feel they are back in historic times in which they have to fight for their name and challenge others to duels. I intend to do a posting just on the bad aspects of driving in the UK. However, today I am going to focus on just one element of selfish behaviour combined with driving: road littering.

What prompted this was news today that according to the UK Highways Agency the amount of litter along the UK's roads has reached an all time high. It is the agency's job to clean it up and it is taking staff and funds away from road repairs. This is not the end of the problem. They have to employ more people to clear the litter from the road and from roadsides and this is a really hazardous occupation. Last year in one county, Hampshire in southern England, 2 of their staff were killed and 19 were injured, collecting litter along the roadsides. They put signs up well in advance of the litter clearing both in terms of days and in terms of distance on the road so everyone has fair warning. The litter collectors wear high visibility clothing, they keep to the verges not the road, and yet, people are still running them down.

They reckon you have a life expectancy of 10 minutes if you break down on a UK motorway. In the UK, unlike France, it is not compulsory to have high-visibility vests or warning triangles in your car, but many people do. Neither of these, however, seem to reduce your risk of being killed on a UK motorway. It does not matter if you are in the middle lane or on the hard shoulder you are still at risk from drivers in cars and lorries (trucks) drifting over the lanes. It is apparent people pay little attention to what is in front of them and do not slow down when they see a broken-down car or a litter collector; they literally get away with murder.

Litter throwing, and when I say throwing, that is exactly what I mean, not dropping, is in itself causing accidents. UK drivers, according to government reports, are no longer happy simply to drop cigarette butts out of the car window, they are actually throwing drinks cans and fast food packaging out of their windows and across lanes, causing cars to swerve.

Do these reckless drivers and passengers live in some bubble? Do they think they are only playing a game on their Playstation or their Xbox? Have they no thought of what their actions are causing? Have they no idea what it is like to have your car hit by a drinks can at 70 mph (112kph)? These are probably the same people, who despite the higher fines and stricter penalties introduced this year, are still driving one-handed with a mobile phone pressed to their ear. The number of people doing that, in my experience, has not dropped at all. These people are utterly selfish, they have no concerns for anything beyond their petty, exploitative lives. To them disposing of litter or taking a phone call is far more important than a person's life. How sick can you get?!

A car is a more dangerous weapon than a knife and in some cases than a gun. The penalties for using this weapon recklessly should be as high as if a knife or a gun was used. People should not just get 18 months imprisonment and a driving ban for a year, they should get 25 years. If they ran around the town, blindfolded, with a gun, firing off randomly and killed someone, that is what they would get, but somehow using a car so recklessly is seen as alright. It still ends someone's life, it does not matter what the actual weapon is. The only way we are going to change this lethal behaviour which wrecks so many lives is to impose proper penalties on dangerous drivers.