Let's make speed cameras as unacceptable as drink driving
Is there anything more tedious than a new, modern, mass market car? The acres of plastic. The acrid smell once it's been in the sun. The moronic electronic aids (you now can get standard cars that warn you if you're straying over the white line.) What's next? Trouser zips that warn you you're pissing on your foot?
I blame the needless improvements in car design for contributing to road accidents.
Formerly, cars were basic, noisy and handled badly. if you were driving like a twat, the car would let you know; e.g.:
- Fail to warm the car up properly and you'd flood the engine and not even get started.
- Fail to match engine speed to road speed and you'd make a hash of the gear change.
- Fail to observe the road and you'd have an accident, as brakes were weak and last minute braking, with crappy drum brakes, no ABS and bakelite tyres with no grip all meant you were cooked.
- Barrel into a bend with the wrong revs, wrong positioning or wrong steering inputs and you'd have a huge moment or go off into the scenery. As the grip was so bad, and as the suspensions were so primitive and as there were no anti-skid or traction control systems, it was a clear case of rubbish in, rubbish out.
- Fear - roof channels, lack of sound proofing or ICE, coupled with crude brakes and suspensions, meant that, eg, 60mph was scary, and 100mph was close to suicidal. Modern cars are designed to insulate the driver from the mechanical fury and knife edge risks of their driver inputs. Modern drivers drive along in a bubble.
- Different times - no one thought to use cars as instruments of aggression or road rage.
Nowadays, we're so far from the land and farm machinery, people have no instinctive mechanical aptitude or empathy. Modern drivers are far, far worse than older drivers. Suburban muppets brought up on playstation, full of arrogance and rage, high on drugs, unaware of how modern car design daily is saving their worthless necks from the dopiness of their own driving inputs.
The best book on practical car driving you'll ever read is this one - get it for yourself and for those you care about.
This book "shows us that road safety isn't about regulations or mindless drills – it's about the state of mind of our road users. ...
hopes to put driver skill back where it belongs – at the heart of road
safety. He shows us that road safety is mainly about a state of mind."
It's a jungle out there; a clusterf*ck of ill-mannered and inattentive drivers in SUVs and "sports" cars that drive themselves, jabbering
into mobiles, high on drugs, with no licences, with no interest in
driving or cars (unless as a way to flash their cash), monitored by
inane, money-grabbing big-brother Nazis of whom Paul Smith, founder of
the Safe Speed road safety campaign, said are 'institutionally unable
to understand the process of safe driving'.
Get the book!
Also, if you care at all about individual freedom, visit www.safespeed.org and give their position a chance. It's difficult, I know, if you've already been taken in by your government's Orwellian ranting about speed.
Here's the deal:
Our roads are full of people who can't drive. The driving test I did, you did, is far too easy. I've been driving for years, and I haven't been re-tested. This is unacceptable.
There is this whining culture that a driving licence is a "right". It isn't - it's a privilege, and one that should be difficult to acquire, and that should regularly be re-tested for.
If this means you have to cycle or take the bus to work, then that's your damned problem. You don't have a right to drive!
Lowest common denominator enforcement - the result of our roads being jammed full of clowns is that traffic enforcement is pitched at the level of the biggest idiot out there. Instead of getting the idiots off the roads, good and average drivers are being treated like idiots.
In Ireland, instead of banning the idiots (400,000 unlicensed drivers drive legally on Irish roads), the Irish govt. bullshits us, in a bizarre fixation redolent of 1950s Catholicism's obsession with sex, about "speeding".
If they were serious about your safety, they'd ensure it wasn't legal for you and your loved ones to be surrounded by untested and unlicensed incompetents on public roads.
They're not serious of course; all that motivates them is summed up in the above photo. If you make driving tests too difficult; if you drive half a million so-called drivers off the roads, well do the maths - road tax, VRT, toll tax, speeding fines. A bit of carnage is a fair price to pay to ensure the money keeps rolling in.
