As regular readers know I am a frequent car driver, topping 320 Km per week. Whilst this is nowhere close to the distances covered by truck drivers or even the travelling salesmen left in business, it does mean I spend quite a lot of time on the road. In the past it used to be the M25 and these days it is often the M4. Both are very busy motorways in South-East England (and if you think that no motorway is ever not busy, I suggest going along the M40 or the M69). The traffic along them is often congested. The western arc of the M25 seems particularly worse than it used to be, a factor I put down to so many people like myself commuting in on a daily or weekly basis from South-West and West England and the West Midlands to work in London. What exacerbates the congestion on the M25 and now increasingly on the eastern Berkshire (I know that part of the county has been fragmented into a number of consolidated authority ‘city-states’) stretch of the M4 is the variable speeds approach. This is explicitly warned about on the M25 but also now occurs on the M4.
Now, I am a person who adheres strictly to road speed limits and I have no issue about speed cameras. However, what I do not like is how the speed limit is jerked back and forth on the M4 and M25. The speed limit for a motorway is 70mph (112 kph) but the matrix signs daily alter this down to anything from 40-60mph (64-96 kph). Often you have ‘Queue caution’ appearing as well. This is ironic, because as I have discussed before: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/06/rubbernecking-far-less-common-than.html putting up any sign on the motorway causes people to slow down automatically so creating the queue that they were seeking to warn people about. The other day I actually saw a sign that said ‘Strong winds forecast’, not that they were happening then, they might as well have said ‘Long-term recession forecast’ in terms of how much it may have modified the average driver’s behaviour. The signs appearing saying ‘Fog’ always strike me as a waste of electricity. Anyway, what you find is that you are slowed down, sometimes jumping from 70 mph to 40 mph and then back up to 50 mph or 60 mph, or any combination of these speeds. What this tends to do is not actually moderate the flow in the way that I assume the Highways Agency intends, it simply creates a jam wherever the signs start.
What is the expectation of the ‘Queue caution’ sign? One might expect people to slow up so that they do not crash into the unmoving cars. They would slow up even if you put a smiley face on the matrix boards. In addition, motorways are designed so that you can see far into the distance. Particularly at this time of the year you can see the cluster of red lights long before you come close to them. Is there an assumption that we see a queue warning sign and decide to leave the motorway and try an alternate route? There are a few places where not going down the motorway will get you to your destination faster than using the motorway. I know that most days it is easier to get into Dorset via the single carriageway roads through Newbury and Salisbury than going along the motorways and dual carriageway route through Winchester and Southampton: M3-M27-A31. However, most of the time, taking the motorway is the most direct route, especially going into a city like London. The whole reason why motorways were invented was to move vehicles between cities more effectively so it seems ironic that we are now being encouraged to leave them.
Of course, not all of the blame can be put on whichever human or computer decides to put these random speeds into the mix, some of it depends on the drivers too who simply exacerbate a difficult situation. Many drivers on the M4 simply ignore the signs and keep going as fast as they can until they actually come to the start of the jam. There will always be those, like myself, who obey the speed limit immediately and the bulk of drivers who will not seek to match the limit but will simply lift their foot off the accelerator as they process the information. There are also those who speed along the hard shoulder with their emergency lights flashing away pretending that they are having a break down right up to the next junction. The other major challenge is that so many drivers see the queues as a good opportunity to switch lanes believing that in doing so they will suddenly get clear of the jam. This is particularly troublesome when an articulated lorry decides it is time to switch lanes and so a space the length of five cars is forced to open up. All of this behaviour simply adds to the jam.
I am not saying that without variable speed limits jams on motorways would not come to an end. However, it is clear that without the signalling of queues and the constant slowing down and speeding up on the M25 and M4 and probably other motorways I do not frequent too, the queues would be shorter both in length and duration. This is apparent, when suddenly for no reason the queue breaks up and you find yourself travelling again at a decent speed. If you can see an accident by the roadside you know the course, but these days more often it is simply the exclamations about queues which is creating these things and you then find the road is perfectly clear and that there is, in fact, no reason why you could not have been driving at 60-70 mph for the past two miles. My father, among others, feels that variable speeds on motorways is a game being played by bored staff at some traffic monitoring centre. I agree with him on very few things, but for now, these seems as rational explanation for this irrational behaviour as any other.
Showing posts with label speed limits. Show all posts
Showing posts with label speed limits. Show all posts
Tuesday, 3 January 2012
Thursday, 7 October 2010
Cameras Off? Excuse to Drive Like an Idiot?
Back in August it was announced that the Road Safety Grant, like so much other central government funding was going to be ceased. The grant was around £80-£100 million per year and was given to local authorities to install and maintain their speed cameras. Ironically, it was a self-funded grant as the number of people breaking the speed limit in the UK remains so high that fines which were handed over from local authorities to central government were the same as the grant. Interestingly, national government is still happy to take the fines, but will no longer fund the speed cameras. Of course, local authorities, being charged with making cuts somewhere from 25%-40%, saw no sense in continuing with the speed cameras, which cost £40,000 each, because they get no money from them.
Speed cameras have always been controversial and online you can read how they were apparently part of Gordon Brown's 'Stasi state' (the Stasi being the secret police of East Germany), though ironically the first mobile speed cameras were introduced in 1982 under the Thatcher government. The technology had existed since 1905. Cameras are not only used to catch speeders but also people driving private cars down bus lanes or jumping red lights or approaching level crossings, and, around the City of London for security. They attracted greatest attention, however, from 1999 when Safety Camera Partnerships were introduced to promote the use of the cameras with 15% of the revenue from fines being used to improve road safety. Whilst the scheme ended in 2007, this use of the fine revenue to boost road safety in general and not simply to install or maintain cameras continued. The fines from speed cameras averaged around £1.3 million (€1.59 million; US$202 million) per year which suggests a lot of people violating traffic laws. They were increasingly portrayed as simply revenue raisers for local authorities and this led in the early 2000s to attacks on the cameras. Right-wing councils in the late 2000s began to be swayed by the populist arguments against them and in 2009 Swindon, which has an appalling road network (I tried to navigate it back in August), was the first to switch off its cameras, followed by Oxfordshire county council in July 2010 and many more since.
I have never seen speed cameras as having anything to do with revenue. I am glad that they were self-funding, but I am also disappointed that that was the case, because it suggests that so many people are driving dangerously. Very selfish people, and you can still find them very actively promoting their arguments across the internet, said speed cameras were actually a hazard, forcing people to slow down suddenly (despite the fact that most road maps and sat navs indicate very clearly, certainly since 2006 where the cameras are and there are always warning signs and markings on the road to show them) and to keep checking their speedometers (they must be bad drivers, I can tell how fast I am doing within 2-3 mph without looking at the speedometer, from experience I know). They often blame injury to pedestrians on the pedestrians rather than their speed. I have been struck by just how fast people do speed at especially in residential areas. Just within a few streets of my house (where cars should not exceed 30mph) I have seen a car which has crashed through a brick wall and into the front of a house; cars which have almost levelled lamp-posts and others which have literally gone into houses. Even with speed cameras in action people are driving too fast especially on rural roads and in residential areas. Portsmouth felt the problem was so serious as to introduce 20mph limit throughout most of the city.
What happened when the media covered the government's announcement of cut-backs and the statements from some local authorities that they were switching off their speed cameras? Well, I guess you could have been driving in any part of the UK to know the answer. Instantly drivers seemed to assume that no camera was working, even though in many areas, of course, there had not even been an announcement that they would be switched off. Of course, even if a camera is not there to catch you, you are still breaking the law. If you exceed 33mph in a 30mph area you can be stopped, arrested, prosecuted and fined, it just takes longer than if the camera was there. This is what the speeders disliked, that they would be caught by the camera, whereas they think they have far greater chances if it is left up to the police to catch them. Now, these reckless drivers feel they are free. It was reported in August that immediately some areas where there were police patrols, speeding offences had risen 90% once people believed the cameras were off. Worse than this, it is almost as if, freed from the worry about being caught on camera anywhere, many more drivers feel it is fine to speed and, in fact, that they need to demonstrate that freedom.
I often drive across a large housing estate filled with pets, young children and mothers with push chairs. A mother and child in a pushchair were killed when a car decided to overtake one that was slowing and just went straight into them. The whole estate has a 30 mph limit with a 40 mph limit on the roads around the diameter. The day after the announcements about the speed cameras (which are numerous along the route I take), I was driving across the estate OBEYING THE LAW, driving at 30mph and what do I get? I have cars and vans behind me, revving their engines, hooting me, gesticulating and then accelerating past me at 50 mph and faster, just because they feel they can. I am made to feel I am in the wrong, just for obeying the law and, in fact, fulfilling the duty of every driver, which is to drive in a way I feel is safe given the prevailing conditions, which may in many circumstances, for example, foggy or icy weather or during heaving rain or when schools are turning out the children, actually be slower than the stated speed limit. I am ridiculed and insulted for trying to keep myself and other people in the vicinity alive.
The Coalition government is going to pay a high price for its policy. The price ultimately will be financial for all the street furniture damaged and, above all, for the medical costs of all the additional children and adults who are going to be maimed and killed by reckless driving. In this ridiculous situation, in which the rights to be able to behave dangerously and to drive as fast as you like are somehow taken to be greater rights than the right to safety, I encourage anyone on a housing estate or in a village or anywhere else which particularly needs cars to drive safely, to take steps. It is ironic that you can be fined for making a fake hand-held and mounted speed cameras (even though there are companies specialising in fake cameras) and even making mannequins to look like police officers. I suggest we need to find ways, such as ensuring that those cars you find abandoned, are abandoned where they act as traffic bollards or they happens to be a lot of building materials delivered in piles which happen to narrow the road and slow up traffic or mannequins of small children appear along the roadsides or 'men at work' signs, one of which I found abandoned near my house as well as some police traffic cones, find their away to places where they may make a speeding motorist think twice. If this government is going to pander to the killers, and that is what these speeders are, then those of us in favour of life and the right to live it in safety, should act.
May I suggest, if there enough of you and you have enough time, you follow the example of the people of Chideock in Dorset. This is a lovely village in a very steep-sided narrow valley (appalling for radio and mobile phone reception) through which the A35, the main road connecting Bournemouth, Poole, Dorchester, Bridgport, Axminster and Exeter, runs. There is a pedestrian crossing which in May this year, Tony Fuller kept pressing and crossing the road. He did this with neighbours, totally legally, to bring the whole road to a standstill in protest at the noisy lorries which charge through this village every day, seemingly all hours of the day.
We need to assert that it is safety and not the right to be a killer that should win the day, despite the government's foolish step to pander to the ignorant of the UK by taking away the one tool which had actually helped make our roads that bit safer at a time when knowledge of road laws, let alone road custom and practice are at all time low.
P.P. 08/04/2011
In a situation like this I hate to be able to say 'I told you so'. However, it was with interest that I noted that Oxfordshire county council has decided to switch its speed cameras back on after a sharp rise in casualties since they were turned off in August 2010. There are 72 fixed cameras and 89 mobile ones in the county. In the period August 2010 to January 2011, 18 people were killed compared to 12 in the same period the previous year, i.e. August 2009 - January 2010. To my mind, 12 was still too high, but there has been a 50% increase since the ending of speed cameras. The rise in non-fatal injuries has been even greater, from 19 in the six month period of 2009/10 to 179 in 2010/11 period, more than an 800% increase. Interestingly, what drivers who overtake me seem unaware of, there was no general switching off of speed cameras, they are still on in many areas. The number of fines imposed for speeding has fallen from a peak of 2 million in 2005 to about 1 million today (that is 1 million individual fines, the sum of money raised is far higher), not due to better driving but because first time offenders can opt to go on a training course instead. Portsmouth has only turned off its speed cameras this month. This is a real shame as it is a city with a 20 mph speed limit in residential areas which I felt was a model for other towns. Bristol is another large urban centre which has only just switched off its speed cameras. An AA spokesman quoted in 'The Guardian' noted, the public announcement of the turning off of speed cameras had a grave effect on their deterrent impact. However, as I have noted here, I think that deterrent effect evaporated the moment the ending of the funding was announced and many drivers charge through towns assuming that no camera is on and I am glad to hear that many of them are being caught, however, it seems far too few. The real tragedy is those who have been injured or killed as a result of the turning off of cameras. If the level has risen that much just in the single county of Oxfordshire with a population of only 635,000 people (compared to 200,000 people living in Portsmouth and 420,000 people in Bristol; not their surrounding counties), then the national rise in casualties must be alarming. I imagine, however, that until one of these drivers is injured themselves or has a close family member injured they will not even think once about their speed and ironically perceive themselves as the oppressed freed by this wonderful coalition government [sarcasm].
Speed cameras have always been controversial and online you can read how they were apparently part of Gordon Brown's 'Stasi state' (the Stasi being the secret police of East Germany), though ironically the first mobile speed cameras were introduced in 1982 under the Thatcher government. The technology had existed since 1905. Cameras are not only used to catch speeders but also people driving private cars down bus lanes or jumping red lights or approaching level crossings, and, around the City of London for security. They attracted greatest attention, however, from 1999 when Safety Camera Partnerships were introduced to promote the use of the cameras with 15% of the revenue from fines being used to improve road safety. Whilst the scheme ended in 2007, this use of the fine revenue to boost road safety in general and not simply to install or maintain cameras continued. The fines from speed cameras averaged around £1.3 million (€1.59 million; US$202 million) per year which suggests a lot of people violating traffic laws. They were increasingly portrayed as simply revenue raisers for local authorities and this led in the early 2000s to attacks on the cameras. Right-wing councils in the late 2000s began to be swayed by the populist arguments against them and in 2009 Swindon, which has an appalling road network (I tried to navigate it back in August), was the first to switch off its cameras, followed by Oxfordshire county council in July 2010 and many more since.
I have never seen speed cameras as having anything to do with revenue. I am glad that they were self-funding, but I am also disappointed that that was the case, because it suggests that so many people are driving dangerously. Very selfish people, and you can still find them very actively promoting their arguments across the internet, said speed cameras were actually a hazard, forcing people to slow down suddenly (despite the fact that most road maps and sat navs indicate very clearly, certainly since 2006 where the cameras are and there are always warning signs and markings on the road to show them) and to keep checking their speedometers (they must be bad drivers, I can tell how fast I am doing within 2-3 mph without looking at the speedometer, from experience I know). They often blame injury to pedestrians on the pedestrians rather than their speed. I have been struck by just how fast people do speed at especially in residential areas. Just within a few streets of my house (where cars should not exceed 30mph) I have seen a car which has crashed through a brick wall and into the front of a house; cars which have almost levelled lamp-posts and others which have literally gone into houses. Even with speed cameras in action people are driving too fast especially on rural roads and in residential areas. Portsmouth felt the problem was so serious as to introduce 20mph limit throughout most of the city.
What happened when the media covered the government's announcement of cut-backs and the statements from some local authorities that they were switching off their speed cameras? Well, I guess you could have been driving in any part of the UK to know the answer. Instantly drivers seemed to assume that no camera was working, even though in many areas, of course, there had not even been an announcement that they would be switched off. Of course, even if a camera is not there to catch you, you are still breaking the law. If you exceed 33mph in a 30mph area you can be stopped, arrested, prosecuted and fined, it just takes longer than if the camera was there. This is what the speeders disliked, that they would be caught by the camera, whereas they think they have far greater chances if it is left up to the police to catch them. Now, these reckless drivers feel they are free. It was reported in August that immediately some areas where there were police patrols, speeding offences had risen 90% once people believed the cameras were off. Worse than this, it is almost as if, freed from the worry about being caught on camera anywhere, many more drivers feel it is fine to speed and, in fact, that they need to demonstrate that freedom.
I often drive across a large housing estate filled with pets, young children and mothers with push chairs. A mother and child in a pushchair were killed when a car decided to overtake one that was slowing and just went straight into them. The whole estate has a 30 mph limit with a 40 mph limit on the roads around the diameter. The day after the announcements about the speed cameras (which are numerous along the route I take), I was driving across the estate OBEYING THE LAW, driving at 30mph and what do I get? I have cars and vans behind me, revving their engines, hooting me, gesticulating and then accelerating past me at 50 mph and faster, just because they feel they can. I am made to feel I am in the wrong, just for obeying the law and, in fact, fulfilling the duty of every driver, which is to drive in a way I feel is safe given the prevailing conditions, which may in many circumstances, for example, foggy or icy weather or during heaving rain or when schools are turning out the children, actually be slower than the stated speed limit. I am ridiculed and insulted for trying to keep myself and other people in the vicinity alive.
The Coalition government is going to pay a high price for its policy. The price ultimately will be financial for all the street furniture damaged and, above all, for the medical costs of all the additional children and adults who are going to be maimed and killed by reckless driving. In this ridiculous situation, in which the rights to be able to behave dangerously and to drive as fast as you like are somehow taken to be greater rights than the right to safety, I encourage anyone on a housing estate or in a village or anywhere else which particularly needs cars to drive safely, to take steps. It is ironic that you can be fined for making a fake hand-held and mounted speed cameras (even though there are companies specialising in fake cameras) and even making mannequins to look like police officers. I suggest we need to find ways, such as ensuring that those cars you find abandoned, are abandoned where they act as traffic bollards or they happens to be a lot of building materials delivered in piles which happen to narrow the road and slow up traffic or mannequins of small children appear along the roadsides or 'men at work' signs, one of which I found abandoned near my house as well as some police traffic cones, find their away to places where they may make a speeding motorist think twice. If this government is going to pander to the killers, and that is what these speeders are, then those of us in favour of life and the right to live it in safety, should act.
May I suggest, if there enough of you and you have enough time, you follow the example of the people of Chideock in Dorset. This is a lovely village in a very steep-sided narrow valley (appalling for radio and mobile phone reception) through which the A35, the main road connecting Bournemouth, Poole, Dorchester, Bridgport, Axminster and Exeter, runs. There is a pedestrian crossing which in May this year, Tony Fuller kept pressing and crossing the road. He did this with neighbours, totally legally, to bring the whole road to a standstill in protest at the noisy lorries which charge through this village every day, seemingly all hours of the day.
We need to assert that it is safety and not the right to be a killer that should win the day, despite the government's foolish step to pander to the ignorant of the UK by taking away the one tool which had actually helped make our roads that bit safer at a time when knowledge of road laws, let alone road custom and practice are at all time low.
P.P. 08/04/2011
In a situation like this I hate to be able to say 'I told you so'. However, it was with interest that I noted that Oxfordshire county council has decided to switch its speed cameras back on after a sharp rise in casualties since they were turned off in August 2010. There are 72 fixed cameras and 89 mobile ones in the county. In the period August 2010 to January 2011, 18 people were killed compared to 12 in the same period the previous year, i.e. August 2009 - January 2010. To my mind, 12 was still too high, but there has been a 50% increase since the ending of speed cameras. The rise in non-fatal injuries has been even greater, from 19 in the six month period of 2009/10 to 179 in 2010/11 period, more than an 800% increase. Interestingly, what drivers who overtake me seem unaware of, there was no general switching off of speed cameras, they are still on in many areas. The number of fines imposed for speeding has fallen from a peak of 2 million in 2005 to about 1 million today (that is 1 million individual fines, the sum of money raised is far higher), not due to better driving but because first time offenders can opt to go on a training course instead. Portsmouth has only turned off its speed cameras this month. This is a real shame as it is a city with a 20 mph speed limit in residential areas which I felt was a model for other towns. Bristol is another large urban centre which has only just switched off its speed cameras. An AA spokesman quoted in 'The Guardian' noted, the public announcement of the turning off of speed cameras had a grave effect on their deterrent impact. However, as I have noted here, I think that deterrent effect evaporated the moment the ending of the funding was announced and many drivers charge through towns assuming that no camera is on and I am glad to hear that many of them are being caught, however, it seems far too few. The real tragedy is those who have been injured or killed as a result of the turning off of cameras. If the level has risen that much just in the single county of Oxfordshire with a population of only 635,000 people (compared to 200,000 people living in Portsmouth and 420,000 people in Bristol; not their surrounding counties), then the national rise in casualties must be alarming. I imagine, however, that until one of these drivers is injured themselves or has a close family member injured they will not even think once about their speed and ironically perceive themselves as the oppressed freed by this wonderful coalition government [sarcasm].
Tuesday, 15 July 2008
Caught At Speed 2: Swindon & Safety Cameras
Last year I did a posting in response to the rising hostility to speed cameras in the UK which has even led people to vandalise them, let alone constant whining in public and in the media about how they are a 'stealth tax' on motorists. Of course, in fact they are only a very visible fine on criminals who break the law by speeding. Yet, the British feel they have a right to drive at dangerous speeds unchallenged by anyone else. They blame the people they hit for the accident not their own poor driving. One of the highest rated irritations on the road is 'people not getting out of the way of faster cars'. If you are driving at the speed limit then there is no need to get out of the way. I have been driving through the road works on the M27 and there is a limit of 50 mph right through them and they are covered entirely with speed cameras, but this does not stop people trying to force me to go faster, constantly flashing their lights and hooting.
Anyway, this brings me to Swindon council. I do not drive as much in Wiltshire as I used to, but it is a rural, quite prosperous county in western England and Swindon is one of its main towns. In the town, the council has 16 speed cameras, 3 cameras to catch people jumping red lights (it is important to remember that not all safety cameras are speed cameras and some do other road safety jobs, I saw a man jumping a red light caught by one the other day and was very pleased) and 11 mobile units. They pay £400,000 for these to Wiltshire & Swindon Safety Camera Partnership for these. Now they want to scrap them all arguing that it is 'a blatant tax on the motorist' and again I emphasise, in fact they do not affect any motorist who stays within the law, who drives at the correct speed in towns and does not jump red lights. In fact what is going on here is that Swindon Council is actually annoyed that it does not get the money raised by the fines, this goes to central government. If it went to them I am sure they would be putting up cameras all over the town. Even if Swindon Council pulls out of the scheme the cameras would not go (despite what many in the media think) as £1.2 million comes from Wiltshire County Council. In its effort to get more money Swindon Council has foolishly lashed itself to the bandwagon of the virulent libertarians who seemed to be becoming dominant in the UK and insist they have the right to behave how they like unchecked by any authority. Of course people elsewhere will use the 'stealth tax' argument to campaign for the removal of other cameras when in fact it is simply criminals wanting the policing of their activities put to an end. Would anyone pay any attention if shoplifters insisted that CCTV cameras in shops should be removed because it was a tax on them as they have to buy goods instead of steal them? The relationship to speed cameras is no different.
A lot of this is about social class. Alongside the reports about Swindon council's actions is an announcement about more plans on behalf of the government to tackle youth crime. One proposed action is to evict families from council houses whose children behave in a criminal manner. Few people these days live in council houses as so many have been sold off, but clearly this is aimed at the poorest segment of society, it is not aimed at the 4x4 drivers whose children are equally as criminal, often spending far more on drugs because they have the cash. I think we must insist that expensive cars are repossessed in situations when it is the wealthy children who break the law. Who thinks making families homeless for the sake of their children's behaviour is a sensible policy anyway? It will just make the parents have to turn to crime too. Given the current love of the Thatcherite policies, no-one seems willing to face up to the truth of what those policies brought. The denial of society by Thatcher, very explicitly, and her emphasis on individuals and the popularity of 'greed is good' ethics, the sense that you are no-one unless you own things, especially a house, have all led to a society in which children behave the way adults to and bully others to get what they desire. In addition, no different to the adults, they feel they have to keep consuming all the latest items or be no-one. No credit is given in UK society for achievement in any other field except consumption and this is fuelled by the obsession with celebrity.
Some parents are bad at their jobs, but the bulk try their best. It is just that in our society they have very little control. The only way they can punish children is by denying them access to the consumer goods they want, and so what do the children do, they simply go out and steal or deal to get what they want. People blame the permissive 1960s for where we are now, but a lot of what is seen bad about that era, was in fact about gaining respect for people especially those from ethnic minorities and women. What we are seeing now is the consequences of the fragmentation, 'me first' culture of the 1980s. If the rich libertarians want to be free to commit crime, they have to realise everyone else will want to and in fact there is no difference between dealing drugs, shoplifting, speeding or running down a pedestrian, they are all crimes and are all about disrespect for other people and for society. The break down in law cannot be selective and the rich cannot be exempt and blame the poor for all society's ills.
I can see why Swindon Council has behaved as it has done, but the councillors have foolishly opened a can of worms which I believe will simply exacerbate lawlessness among all sectors of society in the coming months and years.
Anyway, this brings me to Swindon council. I do not drive as much in Wiltshire as I used to, but it is a rural, quite prosperous county in western England and Swindon is one of its main towns. In the town, the council has 16 speed cameras, 3 cameras to catch people jumping red lights (it is important to remember that not all safety cameras are speed cameras and some do other road safety jobs, I saw a man jumping a red light caught by one the other day and was very pleased) and 11 mobile units. They pay £400,000 for these to Wiltshire & Swindon Safety Camera Partnership for these. Now they want to scrap them all arguing that it is 'a blatant tax on the motorist' and again I emphasise, in fact they do not affect any motorist who stays within the law, who drives at the correct speed in towns and does not jump red lights. In fact what is going on here is that Swindon Council is actually annoyed that it does not get the money raised by the fines, this goes to central government. If it went to them I am sure they would be putting up cameras all over the town. Even if Swindon Council pulls out of the scheme the cameras would not go (despite what many in the media think) as £1.2 million comes from Wiltshire County Council. In its effort to get more money Swindon Council has foolishly lashed itself to the bandwagon of the virulent libertarians who seemed to be becoming dominant in the UK and insist they have the right to behave how they like unchecked by any authority. Of course people elsewhere will use the 'stealth tax' argument to campaign for the removal of other cameras when in fact it is simply criminals wanting the policing of their activities put to an end. Would anyone pay any attention if shoplifters insisted that CCTV cameras in shops should be removed because it was a tax on them as they have to buy goods instead of steal them? The relationship to speed cameras is no different.
A lot of this is about social class. Alongside the reports about Swindon council's actions is an announcement about more plans on behalf of the government to tackle youth crime. One proposed action is to evict families from council houses whose children behave in a criminal manner. Few people these days live in council houses as so many have been sold off, but clearly this is aimed at the poorest segment of society, it is not aimed at the 4x4 drivers whose children are equally as criminal, often spending far more on drugs because they have the cash. I think we must insist that expensive cars are repossessed in situations when it is the wealthy children who break the law. Who thinks making families homeless for the sake of their children's behaviour is a sensible policy anyway? It will just make the parents have to turn to crime too. Given the current love of the Thatcherite policies, no-one seems willing to face up to the truth of what those policies brought. The denial of society by Thatcher, very explicitly, and her emphasis on individuals and the popularity of 'greed is good' ethics, the sense that you are no-one unless you own things, especially a house, have all led to a society in which children behave the way adults to and bully others to get what they desire. In addition, no different to the adults, they feel they have to keep consuming all the latest items or be no-one. No credit is given in UK society for achievement in any other field except consumption and this is fuelled by the obsession with celebrity.
Some parents are bad at their jobs, but the bulk try their best. It is just that in our society they have very little control. The only way they can punish children is by denying them access to the consumer goods they want, and so what do the children do, they simply go out and steal or deal to get what they want. People blame the permissive 1960s for where we are now, but a lot of what is seen bad about that era, was in fact about gaining respect for people especially those from ethnic minorities and women. What we are seeing now is the consequences of the fragmentation, 'me first' culture of the 1980s. If the rich libertarians want to be free to commit crime, they have to realise everyone else will want to and in fact there is no difference between dealing drugs, shoplifting, speeding or running down a pedestrian, they are all crimes and are all about disrespect for other people and for society. The break down in law cannot be selective and the rich cannot be exempt and blame the poor for all society's ills.
I can see why Swindon Council has behaved as it has done, but the councillors have foolishly opened a can of worms which I believe will simply exacerbate lawlessness among all sectors of society in the coming months and years.
Friday, 14 March 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, 8 November 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, 31 July 2007
I Don't Love the 1970s
I have to apologise to non-UK readers as this posting views the 1970s from very much a British perspective. In many other countries I am sure the decade was quite a bit better. As I have noted in previous postings the British public lives in the past and having moved on from the 'good old days' of the 1950s, the 1970s seems to be the focus of nostalgia, in my mind, very wrongly. There were things going on across the world that made the 1970s less than rosy for many people. The Vietnam War did not finish until 1975. The Vietnamese had been fighting the Japanese from 1941-5 then the French until 1954, then the Americans 1965-73 before the Chinese then got a look in by invading in 1979. The Vietnamese in turn invaded Cambodia which had been under the control of Pol Pot since 1975. He carried out the murders of about 2 million Cambodians and an attempt to return the country to 'Year Zero'.
Afghanistan was invaded in 1979 by the USSR and Iran went from a royal dictatorship to a fundamentalist one in the same year. The Middle East which had been plagued by fighting from 1914 onwards saw another round of the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1973; the Arab response to this was an oil embargo stronger than that imposed in 1967, then the more effective tool of simply quadrupling oil prices, which led to inflation across the World and the end of what is seen as the post-1945 economic boom. Chile's elected government was overthrown by American backed rebels and the President Allende was assassinated. Peru, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Ecuador all faced guerilla wars and dictatorhips, something which alsco came to Brazil and Argentina. South Africa remained under apartheid; a war which ran for more than a decade started in 1975 in Angola and similarly in Mozambique, in Uganda Idi Amin came to power in 1971 and lasted until 1979 instituting a horrific regime and leading to the ejection of Ugandan Asians; in the Central African Republic a similarly insane and brutal dictatorship under 'Emperor' Bokassa I ran 1972-9. In total 20 African states were under military dictatorship in the 1970s.
Once the USA had finally left Vietnam, maybe the 1970s appear reasonable for Americans, in the narrow window of detente in the Cold War and before AIDS began to bite. Even with inflation and even in the UK, in the 1970s there seemed to be some prosperity. Despite the petrol price increase 1975 saw the peak in car sales. Clothes were loose and jeans flared, partly stimulated by a glut in cotton production. Yet, even in the prosperity of which some of the world's citizens were benefiting from, there were concerns. There was the worry that we were going to run out of oil and yet no-one really commited to any other fuel. The French went ahead with nuclear power as did the British and Americans to a lesser extent. The accident at the USA's Three Mile Island nuclear station in 1979 was a foretaste of what would come from Chernobyl in the USSR in 1986.
So globally the World was in a mess. However, everyone these days seems to look through all of this to disco and glam rock. These were brash hedonistic cultures mixing fashion and music and a sexual freedom, if you were lucky. As with the 1960s when only a fraction of the population of any country, even in the West, let alone elsewhere, actually experienced the hippy movement, so in the 1970s. I suppose fashions such as flares, tanktops and platform shoes did penetrate to the high street, but you were hardly going to experience glam rock or disco culture to any meaningful level at a dingy local disco or nightclub. The UK in the 1970s and it had been since the 1830s onwards was dreary, drab and only functioning once in a while.
The closest reflection of this rather bitter side of the 1970s seems not to come in documentaries, but in the series. 'Life on Mars' which is about a 'time-travelling' policeman from 2006 who ends up stuck in 1973. The ugly bedsit where he lives and the threat from IRA bombs sums up the experience of the bulk of the UK population far more than renditions of 'Dancing Queen' or 'Ride a White Swan'. Not only were the 1970s drab, something that the brash acid colours of interior design could not conceal, but they were boring. As an aside, you can see two clear segments of the 1970s, probably pivoting around 1975 when the glam of the first half of the decade slowed down, worn out by its excesses and shaded into the lower key second half, for which the faeces-brown shade of Austin Allegro (I kid you not, see if you can find an image online of this appalling car) seemed to sum up the last five years of the decade and began to prepare us for the comfiness of 1980s domestic styles.
The 1970s were boring as the UK only had 3 television channels. These went off during the middle of the day and rarely stayed on as late as midnight. The viewing figures for popular shows topped 20 millon (i.e. about a third of the entire population) indicating how little there was to do. On Sundays no shops were open bar newsagents that closed at 12.30 and pubs which closed 15.00-19.00 and then again at 22.30. The prime entertainment on Sunday afternoon was to walk around towns of closed shops looking in estate agents' windows before coming home for a dreary serial, religious programmes and if you were lucky a nature programme. People turned up their colour televisions (not a universal luxury, many still watched in black & white) so red that blood looked like strawberry jam when it came out of a seal on one of these nature programmes. There were no home computers, music was on records or cassettes, both prone to damage. Music is a matter of choice, so if you like disco or funk or '70s soul or ska or punk or progressive rock or folk, all popular in the 1970s, fine, but in fact much of the music that the bulk of the population in the UK heard was very naff child stars like The Osmonds or Our Kid or singers like Dana and Gilbert O'Sullivan singing sickly sentimental stuff. Though children were given a freer rein to go to the park and run around and vandalise, they were no safer than they were today. The television schedule was filled with warnings to children about how they could be run over (graphically illustrated by a hammer smashing a peach), electrocuted on electricity pylons, drown in canals, drown in manure even, get run over by tractors, be abducted by strangers and so on.
Life in the 1970s was unhealthy. Now smoking is banned even in pubs in the UK. In the 1970s it happened everywhere: in cinemas, shops, on public transport (including underground trains until the Kings Cross station fire of 1987 which killed 31 people) even in the workplace. Everywhere you went in the 1970s stunk of tobacco smoke; cigarette advertising was everywhere. Dog faeces were not picked up in the way owners have to these days and walking down a suburban street was a real hazard; you were lucky if the dog had had a typical canine diet of the time and had white faeces, these were hard and did not squidge when trodden on - these days they eat better. In the shops nothing was sugar-free or contained bran, there was minimal indication of what it actually contained. Bread was snow white and chewy as rubber; cereals were jam packed with sugar and advertising to children was unregulated, no wonder tooth decay in children was so high. The quality of food and drink was appalling from disgusting UK made sherry to whipped up desserts full or artificial colours you had to put up with food that these days would turn your stomach. Driving was equally a danger. Wearing seatbelts was not compulsory and you could drive at 90mph (144kph) on motorways until 1974 in an era when no car had a crumple zone, ABS or airbags.
I have not mentioned the industrial action in the UK. The attempts by the Conservative government (1970-74) and the Labour government (1974-79) to reduce inflation by limiting pay claims led to rising industrial action. The most notable outcomes were in 1974 with the three-day week and in the so-called 'Winter of Discontent' of 1978/9. 1973 had already seen the reduction of motorway speed limits to 50mph (80kph) to conserve fuel and electricity was only made available for 3 days during the 5-day working week. This bumped up unemployment and left household subsisting on cold food and candles for many nights from January to March of that year and limits on industrial use of electricity for even longer. In December 1978 similar issues over pay arose leading to strikes by lorry drivers and local authority staff meaning that refuse was not collected and people were not buried. The cessation of many deliveries meant panic buying of things like sugar and flour, hiking inflation even more; also many petrol stations closed as they ran out of stocks. Railway workers, nurses also went on strike and the Army had to step in to provide emergency cover. The government did not use the powers under Acts passed in 1964, 1973 and 1976 which would have allowed it counter the strike. Though in 1948-9 the Labour government under Clement Attlee had been happy to declare states of emergency and Conservative Edward Heath did on a number of occasions 1972-4, the Labour prime minister in 1978-9, James Callaghan felt inhibited from doing so. The unrest ended in February 1979 but had wrecked Labour's chances of winning the forthcoming election, a 5% lead in the polls had turned into a 20% lag by February and the election in May 1979 brought the Conservatives to power until 1997. [For more on why I consequently don't love the 1980s, see a future posting].
Unrest was not limited to the industrial scene, though it was not until the early 1980s that the UK saw race riots on a scale not witnessed since the 1950s, the 1970s set out the groundwork with the rise of the National Front (NF) and thousands of incidents of racism (seemingly condoned by television comedies which often raised 'humour' from racial differences, especially the series 'Curry and Chips' [shown in 1969 and cancelled fortunately after only 6 episodes] and 'Love Thy Neighbour' [which shockingly ran 1972-6; 8 series]) affected people across the UK, not least the refugees escaping Idi Amin's horrific regime.
So next time suggests you attend a '70s party and dress up in glam or disco fashions, remember that that style was as much a fantasy for the people of the time as it is for you. Whilst the 2000s are not that wonderful, I am certainly totally unwilling to trade them to experience the 1970s.
Afghanistan was invaded in 1979 by the USSR and Iran went from a royal dictatorship to a fundamentalist one in the same year. The Middle East which had been plagued by fighting from 1914 onwards saw another round of the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1973; the Arab response to this was an oil embargo stronger than that imposed in 1967, then the more effective tool of simply quadrupling oil prices, which led to inflation across the World and the end of what is seen as the post-1945 economic boom. Chile's elected government was overthrown by American backed rebels and the President Allende was assassinated. Peru, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Ecuador all faced guerilla wars and dictatorhips, something which alsco came to Brazil and Argentina. South Africa remained under apartheid; a war which ran for more than a decade started in 1975 in Angola and similarly in Mozambique, in Uganda Idi Amin came to power in 1971 and lasted until 1979 instituting a horrific regime and leading to the ejection of Ugandan Asians; in the Central African Republic a similarly insane and brutal dictatorship under 'Emperor' Bokassa I ran 1972-9. In total 20 African states were under military dictatorship in the 1970s.
Once the USA had finally left Vietnam, maybe the 1970s appear reasonable for Americans, in the narrow window of detente in the Cold War and before AIDS began to bite. Even with inflation and even in the UK, in the 1970s there seemed to be some prosperity. Despite the petrol price increase 1975 saw the peak in car sales. Clothes were loose and jeans flared, partly stimulated by a glut in cotton production. Yet, even in the prosperity of which some of the world's citizens were benefiting from, there were concerns. There was the worry that we were going to run out of oil and yet no-one really commited to any other fuel. The French went ahead with nuclear power as did the British and Americans to a lesser extent. The accident at the USA's Three Mile Island nuclear station in 1979 was a foretaste of what would come from Chernobyl in the USSR in 1986.
So globally the World was in a mess. However, everyone these days seems to look through all of this to disco and glam rock. These were brash hedonistic cultures mixing fashion and music and a sexual freedom, if you were lucky. As with the 1960s when only a fraction of the population of any country, even in the West, let alone elsewhere, actually experienced the hippy movement, so in the 1970s. I suppose fashions such as flares, tanktops and platform shoes did penetrate to the high street, but you were hardly going to experience glam rock or disco culture to any meaningful level at a dingy local disco or nightclub. The UK in the 1970s and it had been since the 1830s onwards was dreary, drab and only functioning once in a while.
The closest reflection of this rather bitter side of the 1970s seems not to come in documentaries, but in the series. 'Life on Mars' which is about a 'time-travelling' policeman from 2006 who ends up stuck in 1973. The ugly bedsit where he lives and the threat from IRA bombs sums up the experience of the bulk of the UK population far more than renditions of 'Dancing Queen' or 'Ride a White Swan'. Not only were the 1970s drab, something that the brash acid colours of interior design could not conceal, but they were boring. As an aside, you can see two clear segments of the 1970s, probably pivoting around 1975 when the glam of the first half of the decade slowed down, worn out by its excesses and shaded into the lower key second half, for which the faeces-brown shade of Austin Allegro (I kid you not, see if you can find an image online of this appalling car) seemed to sum up the last five years of the decade and began to prepare us for the comfiness of 1980s domestic styles.
The 1970s were boring as the UK only had 3 television channels. These went off during the middle of the day and rarely stayed on as late as midnight. The viewing figures for popular shows topped 20 millon (i.e. about a third of the entire population) indicating how little there was to do. On Sundays no shops were open bar newsagents that closed at 12.30 and pubs which closed 15.00-19.00 and then again at 22.30. The prime entertainment on Sunday afternoon was to walk around towns of closed shops looking in estate agents' windows before coming home for a dreary serial, religious programmes and if you were lucky a nature programme. People turned up their colour televisions (not a universal luxury, many still watched in black & white) so red that blood looked like strawberry jam when it came out of a seal on one of these nature programmes. There were no home computers, music was on records or cassettes, both prone to damage. Music is a matter of choice, so if you like disco or funk or '70s soul or ska or punk or progressive rock or folk, all popular in the 1970s, fine, but in fact much of the music that the bulk of the population in the UK heard was very naff child stars like The Osmonds or Our Kid or singers like Dana and Gilbert O'Sullivan singing sickly sentimental stuff. Though children were given a freer rein to go to the park and run around and vandalise, they were no safer than they were today. The television schedule was filled with warnings to children about how they could be run over (graphically illustrated by a hammer smashing a peach), electrocuted on electricity pylons, drown in canals, drown in manure even, get run over by tractors, be abducted by strangers and so on.
Life in the 1970s was unhealthy. Now smoking is banned even in pubs in the UK. In the 1970s it happened everywhere: in cinemas, shops, on public transport (including underground trains until the Kings Cross station fire of 1987 which killed 31 people) even in the workplace. Everywhere you went in the 1970s stunk of tobacco smoke; cigarette advertising was everywhere. Dog faeces were not picked up in the way owners have to these days and walking down a suburban street was a real hazard; you were lucky if the dog had had a typical canine diet of the time and had white faeces, these were hard and did not squidge when trodden on - these days they eat better. In the shops nothing was sugar-free or contained bran, there was minimal indication of what it actually contained. Bread was snow white and chewy as rubber; cereals were jam packed with sugar and advertising to children was unregulated, no wonder tooth decay in children was so high. The quality of food and drink was appalling from disgusting UK made sherry to whipped up desserts full or artificial colours you had to put up with food that these days would turn your stomach. Driving was equally a danger. Wearing seatbelts was not compulsory and you could drive at 90mph (144kph) on motorways until 1974 in an era when no car had a crumple zone, ABS or airbags.
I have not mentioned the industrial action in the UK. The attempts by the Conservative government (1970-74) and the Labour government (1974-79) to reduce inflation by limiting pay claims led to rising industrial action. The most notable outcomes were in 1974 with the three-day week and in the so-called 'Winter of Discontent' of 1978/9. 1973 had already seen the reduction of motorway speed limits to 50mph (80kph) to conserve fuel and electricity was only made available for 3 days during the 5-day working week. This bumped up unemployment and left household subsisting on cold food and candles for many nights from January to March of that year and limits on industrial use of electricity for even longer. In December 1978 similar issues over pay arose leading to strikes by lorry drivers and local authority staff meaning that refuse was not collected and people were not buried. The cessation of many deliveries meant panic buying of things like sugar and flour, hiking inflation even more; also many petrol stations closed as they ran out of stocks. Railway workers, nurses also went on strike and the Army had to step in to provide emergency cover. The government did not use the powers under Acts passed in 1964, 1973 and 1976 which would have allowed it counter the strike. Though in 1948-9 the Labour government under Clement Attlee had been happy to declare states of emergency and Conservative Edward Heath did on a number of occasions 1972-4, the Labour prime minister in 1978-9, James Callaghan felt inhibited from doing so. The unrest ended in February 1979 but had wrecked Labour's chances of winning the forthcoming election, a 5% lead in the polls had turned into a 20% lag by February and the election in May 1979 brought the Conservatives to power until 1997. [For more on why I consequently don't love the 1980s, see a future posting].
Unrest was not limited to the industrial scene, though it was not until the early 1980s that the UK saw race riots on a scale not witnessed since the 1950s, the 1970s set out the groundwork with the rise of the National Front (NF) and thousands of incidents of racism (seemingly condoned by television comedies which often raised 'humour' from racial differences, especially the series 'Curry and Chips' [shown in 1969 and cancelled fortunately after only 6 episodes] and 'Love Thy Neighbour' [which shockingly ran 1972-6; 8 series]) affected people across the UK, not least the refugees escaping Idi Amin's horrific regime.
So next time suggests you attend a '70s party and dress up in glam or disco fashions, remember that that style was as much a fantasy for the people of the time as it is for you. Whilst the 2000s are not that wonderful, I am certainly totally unwilling to trade them to experience the 1970s.
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