No particular place to go
I had mixed feelings this week having read the media story about the UK petition calling for those over 70 to be given compulsory driving tests. It was started by a bereaved gentleman whose wife was mowed down whilst they walking along a pavement by an 83 year old pensioner whom, it appears, somehow mistook his accelerator pedal for his brake one, causing his car to mount the kerb.
Apparently over 250,000 people have now signed said petition, Harriet Harman – the originator’s local MP – has backed the campaign and there have been interesting media follow-ups, including a lively Radio Five Live phone-in and several television pieces upon both ‘oldies’ who still drive perfectly well and families who have been permanently affected by the loss of loved ones have been killed or injured by ‘senior citizens of advanced age’ making mistakes at the motorised wheel.
I reckon my relationship with motoring ranks about six out of ten. Although what I know about the internal combustion engine could be written out on the back of my thumbnail, like I suspect most others I find getting about in a car is a significant boon to my life and relationships.
One might go so far as to suggest say that mass ownership of motor vehicles since the beginning of the 20th Century has been one of the bigger advances in human civilisation.
Certainly in comparison to the alternatives – I well remember, as I joined a group of WW1 battlefield tourists for the very first time, how our leader/guide ‘took us back to the era in question’ as we thundered across northern France in a luxury coach towards the region of the Somme by asking us to appreciate that, even in 1914, the fastest that the combatants could move from A to B – and indeed the furthest that they could see with the naked eye (assisted or not by binoculars or telescopes) – was by sitting on the back of a horse.
One of the problems of motorised travel is of course the ever-increasing global population. In an ideal world, obviously, every time I have to go and visit my elderly relatives living upon the south coast I would set off in a car that is never going to break down upon a route completely devoid of other motorists. How fab would that be! However, the fact is, we don’t live in an ideal world and there are far too many people and far too many motor vehicles and – at any time of day or night – far too many of them are clogging up the roads that I wish to travel upon.
As a road-user I do gain a certain degree of enjoyment in the journey itself – and cue here the Robert Louis Stevenson quote from Virginibus Puerisque (1881) ‘Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour’: it gives me the opportunity to listen to some music or radio programme, to think, to rehearse my killer lines for family arguments to come and – at least in the days before mobile phones and in-car ‘phone friendly’ audio systems – the chance to be temporarily out of contact with everyone and just relax.
The reason that my ‘motoring’ score tails off, however, is that the last thing I could be described as is a petrol head.
The joys of spinning along the open road in an open-topped classic car with the wind in my hair (or should that be ‘whistling across my balding pate’?), or setting off on a sunny Sunday morning in a group of thirty to forty motorbike enthusiasts for a road trip to Brighton, or even ‘booking a day’ at Donnington Park, Brands Hatch or any of the tens of other UK circuits where you can either hire a super car or else drive your own beloved banger round and round to your heart’s content, escape me completely.
The thing about motoring in the UK, and I suspect most other civilised countries, is that governmental policy is necessarily a matter of budgets and a balance of priorities.
According to the latest publication of Reported Road Casualties Great Britain, the official statistical publication of the Department for Transport, the provisional casualty figures for 2016 were killed 1,810; seriously injured 25,160; and slightly injured 157,400. You can bet your bottom dollar that the authorities regard these as, thinking in the round, just about acceptable in the scheme of things.
Why? Because, of course, if reducing threats to life and limb was all that mattered, you could reduce those figures significantly by introducing a national speed limit of 20mph. Mind you, in the process of doing that, you’d bring British business and exports to rack and ruin; mightily piss off the 45 million private motorists who inhabit our shores [data provided by DLVA Swansea in January 2014 in response to a Freedom of Information request]; and probably permanently destroy the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s chances of ever balancing the books.
In the meantime there are all the attendant problems of ‘managing’ what we have. The constant need to consider the forward planning problems associated with an ever-growing population in terms of new roads, new bypasses and new conurbations; to try and maintain what we have – only last month there was a bit of a media hoo-hah about the increasing number of pot-holes upon our roads and the decreasing budgets available to local councils to do anything about them; to deal with the issues of drink-driving, driving under the influence of drugs, uninsured drivers, unlicensed drivers, poor-sighted drivers, elderly drivers who shouldn’t be on the road at all, over-cautious drivers, bloody awful drivers, road rage prone drivers, inattentive drivers (whether due to rubber-necking car crash incidents, making phone calls, texting, sexting, reading newspapers or simple absent-mindedness).
And the rest.
I’m pretty confident that successive UK governments down the ages have consistently taken the view that the ‘in the round’ issues affecting motoring in Britain – as with just about everything from Defence to the Economy, the NHS, the social welfare system and indeed anything else you might care to mention – are actually completely unresolvable.
In other words, they have all accepted that – without the kind of extreme radical thinking that would inevitably be required but which (for one reason or another, many of them completely opposite or contradictory) would be wholly unacceptable to the vast bulk of the voting electorate – all that any Government can do is to appear concerned, apparently willing to act at a moment’s notice and somehow ‘on top of things with a plan’ but (in practice) can do no more than simply engage in an exercise in re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Oh, and all the while conducting a short-term battle with Her Majesty’s Official Opposition, with the latter claiming that not enough is being done and budgets are being cut … and the former punching back with their favourite data supposedly demonstrating that they’re currently investing billions of pounds more than ever in all the problem areas, certainly something that Labour didn’t do when it was in power for thirteen years.
Speaking personally, of course, now facing the prospect of entering my last five years of motoring [that is, if the plan to subject all motorists aged 70 and over to annual tests passes into law at some point], the first thing I’m going to do this morning – well, after having my breakfast – is get back on the AutoTrader website. Hitherto I have been periodically meandering around said organ, vaguely contemplating in the next month or two ‘trading down’ from my current vast 4 x 4 vehicle to something second hand, smaller, more sensible and certainly less costly.
Now, instead, I’m going to get on the case with a new zeal. If I’m going to be forcibly denied the opportunity to go driving myself in less than four and a half years’ time, I’m going to find myself a low-mileage second hand Porsche Carrera in either black or gun-metal grey and burn up those motorways, man(!) …
[Er … that is, provided I don’t at some point get another bloody speeding ticket plus a three points endorsement and thereby lose my licence for six months, like I did the last time I hit 12 points.]
