DUE CARE and ATTENTION

It amazes me that a driver who kills or injures is allowed to go on holding a licence. Anyone who inflicts such damage by dangerous or careless driving or while under the influence of drink or drugs should be permanently removed from the road as well as given a term of imprisonment commensurate with a manslaughter tariff. How can there be a second chance? Few will give murderers or rapists another shot at it. Those found wanting in their professional capacities are usually drummed out of that profession. And who of us would stay with an accountant done for fraud or a GP shown to be negligent?

Yet we have a culture in which the rights of the driver are held so sacred that the loss of a licence is considered a cruel and inhuman punishment for someone responsible for the loss of a life. The driver will plead that his livelihood depends on being free to drive. All the more reason always to drive as carefully as possible. That a road vehicle is only capable of killing, at most, a handful of people at a time is no reason to impose fewer constraints on its driver than, say, on an airline pilot whose error could kill hundreds in one fell swoop.

As Anne Karpf put it: “Courts and law-makers seem to believe that killing, when conducted through the intervening instrument of a car, when the murder weapon isn’t held in the hand, only controlled by it, is an altogether different affair … as though the car drives the driver, rather than the other way round. Car accidents are crimes almost without agency, without stigma, without a criminal”.

Needless to say, the road lobby took immediate issue with Ms Karpf’s wise words. “A driver … who kills through dangerous driving is looking at five years plus”, countered William Redgrave, “even if they have a spotless record and are destroyed by guilt and remorse. Those sentenced for careless driving are guilty only of a lack of due care and attention – which few of us could say we have never shown behind the wheel. When drivers who kill avoid prison, it is because the evidence shows that their driving was not particularly bad”.

I cannot understand why a driver who kills deserves leniency because that driving was “careless” rather than “dangerous”. For the family and friends of the victim, the loss is no less. And what court would accept that a piece of driving was simultaneously lethal and “not particularly bad”? This is just the kind of Through the Looking Glass reasoning that leads the motoring lobby to ignore the misery its members cause while it counts angels dancing on pinheads.

What is more, if Mr Redgrave is really volunteering that he sometimes drives without due care and attention, he ought to examine his conscience as to whether he is fit to run a car at all. Like most of his fellow drivers – some women, almost all men – Mr Redgrave lightly wears the awesome power of his car and the damage he can inflict if his concentration should fail him for a fleeting moment. Perhaps when – as he surely will – he knocks down a pedestrian, he will feel that it was just an accident, that it was bad luck, that he has had a good run and it’s bound to happen to you some time. He won’t of course be thinking about the real victim.

Once behind the wheel, many normal people lose contact with their brains. The popular press had a mini field day in February 2006 with the chanteuse Britney Spears when she was photographed driving with her baby laid across her thighs. Naturally, no journalist has ever taken a chance while in charge of a vehicle. The month before this outburst of meretricious outrage, I was eating a sandwich lunch while sitting on a bench on the pavement of the Fulham Road in London. The traffic was typically heavy, all stop-start, and the road surface was to a degree affected by winter conditions.

Having noticed a driver who had an open magazine across his steering wheel, I then systematically clocked succeeding drivers while I ate, perhaps a hundred of them on my side of the street. The great majority, for one reason or another, steered with one hand. Around one in ten was speaking into a mobile phone, blatantly breaking the law. If this breach was as common as I saw in a single file of traffic, what proportion of drivers does, routinely or from time to time, use a mobile while driving? One man was either texting or playing a game on his mobile. Several were eating, a pie or ciabatta held in the non-driving hand. One taxi driver had his arms folded and wasn’t steering at all. A woman was rummaging in a bag at her feet. Another woman was conducting a conversation through the passenger window with someone on the pavement, taking the odd glance at the road ahead. Several were consulting maps, A-Zs or other printed matter.

As a snapshot of driving modes, it was quite educational. I’m sure these drivers would protest that they know the route and their own limitations, they are always in control of their car, cab, truck or bus (on my evidence, bus drivers are the most diligent). But none of them can be sure that someone is not about to step in front of them or a vehicle coming forwards is not going to veer into their path. In such circumstances, each driver’s own reaction is compromised. Very many of them are going to have to make a two-handed grab for the wheel. The few seconds’ difference that this lack of preparedness makes could be the difference between a near miss and a collision, between yelling abuse and suffering or inflicting injury, even death.

People routinely take control of a vehicle lightly, assuming that to drive is second nature and that their ability to monitor this second nature is not altered by tiredness, preoccupation, distraction or the passing years. My father, a terrible driver, felt keenly the loss when his doctor said he should stop. I was glad for the rest of us. He met his end as a pedestrian, felled by a car. The driver was fined £120.

Driving is an adult responsibility, not a game of dare and not being caught. Jeremy Clarkson, a delinquent masquerading as a grown-up (I call him Juvenile Larksome), is the driver’s cheerleader. What an example he sets. With commendable lack of schadenfreude (seeing that he writes for the rival Sunday Times), The Observer reported that Larksome ran a pick-up truck into a 30 year-old horse chestnut in the church car park of a Somerset village as a test for his über-laddish series Top Gear. The BBC paid £250 compensation to the parish council. As Larksome had it in his column, “I was summoned to the office of a BBC bigwig where I spent half an hour looking at my shoes, saying I dunno, sir and it was only a tree … I wasn’t really sorry and I’m still not sorry. I only agreed to say I was because then the situation would die down and we could go to another village and crash into something else”. Maybe his co-presenter’s accident in summer 2006 will encourage him to grow up.

A quarter of a century ago, when the BBC was a tougher cookie in every respect, I was sacked from my job as a producer for talking to the press without prior written consent. So I have some personal resentment that JC acts the playground show-off, thumbing his nose at everyone including his employer. Most of all, though, I don’t understand why his driving licence is not taken away. By his own admission, he drives at the very best without due care and attention.

But of course motorists and professional drivers alike believe – indeed, know – that they are in control of the situation in which they find themselves moment by moment. So they cut legal corners all the time because they are experienced and the rules are made for others, not for them. Speed restrictions only apply to drivers unfamiliar with the route; anyway, they were imposed purely because the arseholes who live on this route lobbied their spineless local council or because some bureaucrat who’s never seen this road thought it was a good idea. Parking restrictions are the result of lefty-cum-EU prejudice against the free market so that you can’t go where you want to go and leave your car. Traffic wardens: well, we all know that in a former life they were the guards driving the Jews into the gas ovens. They’re worse than pædophiles. They have a grudge against cars. Bastards ...

“Well”, the thoughtful driver says, “I know that the volume of traffic is already too heavy for the road network we have and that global warming is putting us all at risk but what can I do? I still have to use the car to go to the supermarket, to collect the kids from school and to drive to work”. But every driver, if she is honest, will admit that the worst aspect of being on the road is … yes … other drivers. It is indeed the other fool who cuts you up, takes your parking space, prevents you overtaking by driving too slowly, causes the accident. It is the rest of the traffic that gets in your way.

So drivers must drive less. “Is your journey really necessary?” as the wartime poster enquired. There needs to be a cultural change, whereby car-owners treat their vehicles and the roads on which they drive with consideration and stop seeing themselves as independent spirits brought to earth by bureaucrats and kill-joys. No one who lives on a getting-busier-all-the-time road (who doesn’t?) thinks of other drivers as martyrs. It is for themselves that they weep ...

Read more of this essay in the chapter 'Bang to Rights', part of the free download of Common Sense by W.Stephen Gilbert which can be found at the website reached through the sidebar link above:

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