It’s not ‘anti-car’ to enforce the rules against dangerous driving
3 min read
In the time it took to write this piece, around eight people will have been killed or seriously injured on roads in Britain. That’s roughly one casualty every 18 minutes, or almost 30,000 people every year. For any other type of crime, this level of death and destruction would be considered a national scandal.
Yet for some reason road crime doesn’t get the press or policy attention it deserves. I hope that is about to change, as the Labour government prepares to introduce the first road safety strategy in a decade.
Road policy doesn’t seem sexy, but day to day it affects people’s lives. When I go door-knocking on the weekends, asking residents what I can do to help, the most common answer is “please can we have a speed camera and speed bumps?”. Nothing enrages people more than cars or motorbikes racing down the street in a cloud of fumes and raging noise, nearly knocking down their child or spouse. When Labour pledged to ‘take back our streets’ during the election, it appealed to people who want to feel in control and at peace in their own neighbourhood.
That’s why the narrative around proactive roads policy being a ‘war on cars’ is so wrong-headed. It ignores the countless families I have met whose loved ones have been killed by drivers on their phone, or on cocaine, or driving at 90mph in a 30mph zone. It ignores the grinding feeling of frustration caused by relentless antisocial driving that is never penalised. This feeling speaks to wider declining trust in the rule of law actually being enforced in Britain. A recent poll from YouGov found that only 12 per cent of people thought it was ‘very likely’ that someone who had committed dangerous driving would be caught, found guilty or sent to court.
It’s true that some road innovations do sometimes provoke strong reactions, but these voices are amplified out of all proportion. And they are on the wrong side of history. When seatbelts were first made compulsory, some MPs said it was an outrageous restriction of personal liberty. When speed cameras began appearing on our roads, some vigilantes put tyres round their ‘necks’ and set fire to them. Both are now embedded in everyday life and have saved millions of lives across the world. Even saying the words ‘20 miles an hour’ can trigger a tirade of anger from some, but the cold hard fact is that the introduction of these limits in London led to a 34 per cent reduction in death and serious injury.
My own corner of the road safety world is focused on number plates – in particular ‘ghost’ plates, which can be bought for £30 online and are reflective and therefore cannot be read by speed and police cameras. They are literally a car racers’ or criminals’ dream and yet they are being freely bought and sold in Britain with almost no consequence.
If the government cracks down on these ghost plates in the upcoming road safety strategy, it would make ordinary people in West Brom, who are terrorised by car racers, very happy. While they are at it, they can tackle cloned plates, take licences from repeat dangerous driving offenders and beef up the rules around safety functions on modern cars.
Our roads are the arteries of our nation, and what happens on big motorways and small residential streets should not be underplayed. People want to be able to drive their kids to school or get to work safely. They want to be able to cycle or walk to the park at weekends without fearing for their lives. Not every roads policy need be dismissed as the ‘war on drivers.’
Quite the opposite – there is widespread support for common sense and effective action to end the road safety crisis, before it gets even worse. I’m hopeful the government will see that and seize the moment.
