If you were the CEO of a large, million-employing company, I’m pretty sure you would like to keep both your customers and employees happy. You’d make sure the working conditions were clean and satisfactory, that your services and products did exactly what they said on the tin, and that you put your money where your mouth was at all times.
It is unlikely that you’d attach big spikes to everyone’s chairs and put up posters about keeping a good posture. Neither would you give everyone 30 kilogram steel boots and magnetise the floors.
Mr. Blair of UK plc, on the other hand, thinks otherwise. You see, Mr. Blair and his associates The Cabinet.org, run a road network and transport systems company - among other things - and they like to do things the other way round. You see, their customers, which make up a huge majority of their local area, depend on them as their only source of this kind of service. Due to this monopoly, Mr. Blair likes to make things quite tough, just to keep everyone on their toes and thoroughly aware of company policy.
Like most motorists, I have realised just about every little piece of money that goes on the roads is simply to reinforce a daft and unpopular message. I challenge you to think of a single scrap of legislation in your area that makes it easier, quicker or safer to drive. Got one? Then you’re probably reading this in another country.
Honestly, no other country in the world would dream of lining the roads with frequent surface inconsistencies designed to jolt cars and drivers into driving significantly below the posted speed limit, and yet here, speed humps (or is it safety humps now?), do just that, damaging suspension, slowing down emergency service vehicles, giving joyriders something to wheelie off and threatening the lives of ambulance patients. And can you honestly say we need every yellow line on the road?
It gets worse in the town planning department. Some bright sparks think that that carcinogen-belching, safety-feature-devoid antiquated sweatbox that travels fixed routes known as a ‘bus’ is vastly superior to a car. Actually, they have realised these shortcomings already, but are trying to convince us that it is for other reasons. Now there are turnings perfectly acceptable and convenient to motorists that only buses can make, meaning that the motorist always has to take the long route. There are now bus lanes containing about one bus every half hour, and yet, whilst cars used to travel quite efficiently down these routes, not any more, as they’re down to one lane to make way for Prescott’s sacred cow.
It’s ludicrous. Near where I live, in York, is a crossroads completely marmalised by traffic islands. It used to be the case that you could turn off this main road into a nearby housing estate for example, say, if you lived there. It wasn’t a short cut, as the only useful road out of the other end took you back where you came from. Not any more. Only buses and bicycles can cross the jarring, 10 foot wide cattle-grid rumble-strip into that road. Sorry – if you live there and want to go into town, you’ll have to go the (very) long way. And here’s the clincher – it’s not on a bus route. That’s right – residents can’t drive down their own street properly as it hampers the progress of an invisible bus.
Slow down for Horses and Courses
Get out of town and it’s not much better. Because statistics now show that a select few bikers have been killing themselves whilst out for a blast on the nation’s glorious, hedged-in mountain A-Roads, the limit has been dropped from sixty or seventy miles per hour to fifty, as though it will make a difference on whether you die at a 160 degree hairpin.
Speed cameras you say? Not in a blackspot – the only people it will catch will probably be dead, and not much use when it comes to raising cash. No, get them on the wide open, pedestrian-free straights. The thought of speed limit reinforcement signs, danger warnings and ‘slow down’ signs to discourage them just doesn’t work as well as a big grey instamatic on a pole painted like the nearby trees.
So will the younger generation realise all this madness is to the general detriment and put the system to rights? I doubt it. Let’s look at the motoring national curriculum: At infant primary level, a child is taught songs about cars polluting the atmosphere and horrible men called ‘motorists’, who set out to run children over. They sing songs about traffic jams and bicycles, about broken-down cars and lots of merry, chattering people on buses.
By junior primary level, their TV networks will be broadcasting public safety films about how happy, smiley speed cameras keep them safe, and other little films about nasty people in cars running children over as they innocently cross the road between parked cars. The child is killed, of course, because the driver is going too fast.
When they get to secondary school there’s not much to add, really, as they’re all au fait with the rules of the road through the use of those wonderful bicycles. Bikes can transport up to three people plus luggage. They are not only exempt from road tax, but also from one-way roads, red lights and mounting pavements too. In the event of an accident, of course, the cyclist is also exempt from the blame, as it was the presence of a motorist that started the whole thing in the first place. They’re brilliantly simple – no test or exam is necessary, no safety clothing compulsory and even signalling is optional. Riding a bike also means you never have to learn how to cross the road properly.
In Italy, they have a national holiday to celebrate Enzo Ferrari’s birthday, and even the Pope attends the party. Here, we have ‘reclaim the streets’ and ‘in town without my car’ days, where a few people inconvenience everyone by setting up benches in the high street. So far as I see it, the only change that can be accomplished here is in the hands of the oppressed and depressed British motorist, or more so any bureaucrat with an ounce of common sense - which may be the rarest commodity of all.
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