Daniel Clay Goes Speeding
By Daniel_Clay | Thursday, June 17, 2010, 08:14
Hello HedgeEnders. Speed kills, they say, and they’re undoubtedly right, but do you ever get the feeling our traffic police are out to get the easy targets rather than those likely to cause death by dangerous driving?
This thought popped into my head – not for the first time – earlier this week when my wife and I were driving back from a weekend in Cornwall. We knew the road we were on so were aware there was a speed camera up ahead: It’s placed at the foot of a steep hill as the speed-limit drops from forty to thirty just outside a quaint Dorset village, and, at the other end of the village, there’s another speed-camera trained on the traffic coming down another steep hill in the opposite direction.
These two speed cameras are fully understandable: The pavements through the village are narrow and the houses aren’t set back that far from the road, plus, with steep hills either side, it’s really hard to keep to the speed limit, so there’s a strong need for some incentive to keep your foot on the brake and your eye on your speedo as you pass through.
Was there any need for a mobile speed trap a couple of hundred yards from the first speed-camera though? It was four o’clock in the afternoon on a Monday, so traffic was slow-moving and heavy – as it always is through this village – so there was no way anyone could have driven at much more than a few miles over the speed limit; even breaking it by a sustained five miles an hour would have been hard. What do a lot of people do around a speed-camera, though? Drop down to the low twenties to make sure they don’t get flashed by mistake, then make an effort to pick up their speed – not always excessively, usually just to get back to the speed-limit or put some space between them and the idiot now driving up their backside – as soon as they’re past it.
So, to my mind, this mobile trap was there to catch people who momentarily speeded up too much; people who weren’t driving recklessly or endangering lives, just everyday motorists making a small error of judgement at the foot of a very steep hill.
No one was pulled over as I went through, but a lot of drivers applied their brakes sharply in two separate movements, once for the speed camera, again for the mobile trap, which didn’t make that stretch of road the safest I’ve ever driven along, just one geared up for a few rear-end shunts: It also meant I was paying more attention to my speedo than the road, so I’d have probably not noticed a child or pet running out in front of my car, which, surely, defeats the whole object of watching your speed?
Where the speed trap and police presence was really needed was on the roads outside the village, where idiots often take huge risks overtaking lorries and caravans on twisting single-carriageways, not on a petrol-station forecourt virtually within sight of two fixed cameras.
This isn’t the first time I’ve felt the police were out to trick instead of protect: A few years back my wife got three fixed penalty points for going at sixty-five miles an hour on what we thought was a dual-carriageway, only to be reminded the national speed limit is sixty on any stretch of dual-carriageway that doesn’t have a fixed-barrier down the central reservation: there had been no attempt to make the sixty speed limit clear, and there was no attempt to mitigate the fact my wife was driving five miles within the speed limit she thought applied. They just slapped the points on and took the money. Oh, and threatened court action if she dared to appeal.
I had a similar experience to this in Horton Heath last July. I’d had one of those horrible nights where you’re driving and everyone else is drunk. You know, a night you want to be over by seven-thirty at the latest but somehow drags on towards midnight with everyone around you getting more and more drunk. Even worse, my wife volunteered me to drop people off when all I wanted to do was get home and start mainlining Stella to make up for the fact I still knew it was Friday: “It’s that way no this way oh just over there,” the drunk people in the back of the car helpfully slurred each time we reached a junction while my wife sniggered and said what a lovely evening she’d had. Over and over again. Finally, though, I’d got rid of everyone (except my wife (I did open the passenger door at the last drop-off, but, sadly, she wasn’t fooled)). And so I started the long drive back to the Stella I had stacked in the fridge.
It was well gone midnight by this time and the roads were pretty empty. Even so, I’m not really a reckless driver, so I drove through Fair Oak at the speed limit and headed back towards Hedge End through Horton Heath at just over the speed-limit, then dropped right down to twenty quite close to The Lapstone because three drunks were staggering along the path and spilling over into the road. Once I’d passed them I picked it back up to the speed limit and then, because the road was long and straight and totally empty, speeded up to what I thought was eight or ten miles faster than the speed-limit: I was probably doing forty-five to fifty, which, for that time on a bright clear night, on an empty road as straight as a motorway, didn’t really feel that fast at all. And, being honest, it wasn’t: When the madman in the hi-vis jacket leapt out in front of my car (from behind the hedgerow he’d been lurking behind) I was able to slow down in plenty of time – I didn’t even have to slam on the brakes.
Irrespective of the empty road, the driving conditions, or the fact I’d been driving for twenty-plus years without ever being stopped for speeding before, that was me done for, though. The madman in the hi-vis jacket was a policeman with a speed-gun, the speed-limit along that road had recently been changed from forty to thirty, and I’d been clocked doing forty-eight in a thirty, which, I admit, sounds terrible: Not quite as terrible as the scream of engines we could hear along Bubb Lane as the boy-racers raced around and around the retail car-parks, but bad enough all the same. I got a sixty quid fine and six-points on my licence. I’m just glad I hadn’t had more than one pint of lager the whole night, or I’d probably be typing this out from a cell.
What gets me, though – and this really, really does get me – is that there’s a scheme where you can avoid a fine and reduce the points on your license by attending a safety awareness driving course. So, when I took my license and credit card into the police station, I asked about this. The woman behind the counter looked at me, looked at what I’d been caught doing, and shook her head: “You can’t go on the safety awareness course. You were driving too fast.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You were driving too fast to qualify for the safety driving course. When you’re caught speeding more than a certain amount over the limit, you have to pay the full fine and take the full penalty.”
“But if I was driving that fast, aren’t I in more need of a safety awareness course than someone who was only just breaking the limit? I mean, even if I have to pay the whole fine and take all the points, don’t I need sorting out more than anyone else?”
The woman shrugged and sighed. And that’s what I do now when I go through a police speed-trap, because, although I’m well aware speed kills, I’m also aware our police often seem happier catching relatively responsible drivers from petrol-station forecourts than policing the country-lanes and motorways where truly irresponsible driving usually takes place.
PS: Did anyone notice the Google ads popping up at the foot of my article on the Cumbrian shooting massacre last week?
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Discover The Ultimate Self-Defense System That Beats Black Belts!
So, after an article about the recent murder of innocent people by a crazed gunman, we get one advert for a weapon and two for martial arts. Nice world we live in, isn’t it? And don’t Google just ooze class? Let’s have a little experiment this week and see what ads they place under this: The people who run Google are morons. Don’t click through to any ads placed under this.
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