The Quest for Speed
I’ve always been fascinated by our motivations for wanting to travel at speed particularly on our roads.
I’m a pedestrian, cyclist and car driver so I see our highways and those who use and abuse them from 3 perspectives I suppose you could say. I also live on a major road where traffic speeds are usually well in excess of the 30mph speed limit. I suppose you could also say that I’m a reluctant motorist, preferring to walk or cycle to local destinations within say a five mile radius of our home and use a train for longer journeys. Unlike some petrol-heads I know I’ve never really enjoyed driving, seeing it as wasting my time when I could be doing something more productive/enjoyable.
So having laid out my background to travel let me raise some, to me, interesting questions. Speeding i.e. driving above the speed limit for a road/motorway. Why do drivers do it? They’re late, they don’t allow enough time for a journey, they like speeding (it’s addictive?), they are showing off/attention seeking, they’ve got a car that will do high speeds (indeed it could well have been sold/leased to them on its speed potential), their job demands in effect cause them to speed or they simply want to dominate the road and it’s a testosterone thing in younger male drivers.
What you notice as a pedestrian/cyclist is that there are two distinct types of drivers; the careful ones and the couldn’t care less ones, with shades of grey in between. One thing you can hardly fail to notice as a cyclist and pedestrian, is that there are certain makes of cars/vehicles which are often driven carelessly and such vehicles are almost always under the ‘control’ of younger males up to say the age of 55, as a rule of thumb. The cars/vehicles in my opinion? High-end German performance cars and white vans. They probably account for say 80% of the careless drivers.
Someone once said to me, with regard to the German cars, just look at those who buy/lease them, or words to that effect. That implies that certain makes attract certain types of driver and I think there’s something to be said for that theory. For some, cars can clearly be status symbols which define achievement in life; the more expensive performance cars being for those who think they’re achievers and by definition they need to be driven as such.
Our roads are dangerous because of bad drivers often deliberately putting themselves and other road users at risk due to their need to show off their performance cars. Of course, they also do it because the chances of being caught are very small indeed. All you need is a bit of luck and technology which flashes up to you the positions of speed cameras. The luck will be associated with police mobile speed cameras but they are very few and far between these days. The reality is that where there aren’t any speed cameras or road humps a driver can usually travel at any speed they like on most roads without a care in the world. Some of us do that day in day out on 30mph, 40mph roads with maybe a speeding fine every couple of years being the ‘acceptable’ downside.
But we also buy performance cars to keep up with the Jones. If our friends have one we should have one too, so we continue to fit in with our family/friendship group. It follows that if that group regularly drives madly so should we, although this will mainly be a male thing with cars I would suggest.
I’ve also heard the phrase, which can be a ‘reason’ for speeding, of ‘keeping up with the traffic’. In other words you should drive at the same pace as other drivers so as not to slow down fellow road users. If everyone is driving at say 40mph on a 30mph road then ‘keeping up with the traffic’ is simply a poor excuse for bad driving surely? The 1 in say a thousand who get caught may well consider themselves a victim based on the fact that 999 did not get caught but that’s akin to a Trumpian defence!
A friend of mine who got a speeding ticket was sent on a speed awareness course where the oft repeated phrase, I’m told, was ‘a speed limit is not a target it’s a maximum’. Yet in reality most drivers use the speed limit as a target, indeed they may even set a speed limiter on their car (if they have such) to say 10% above the given speed limit basing that on police not prosecuting those within 10% of a given speed limit.
Another friend of mine, sadly no longer with us, used to take the view that he’d travel a few mph below the speed limit, say 27mph on a 30mph road and I bet he’d never heard the phrase ‘a speed limit is a maximum not a target’.
So to my mind speeding is a social thing, it’s keeping up, it’s showing off, it may even be an act of defiance. Whatever it is it’s something drivers can get away with the vast majority of the time whilst making our highways more dangerous. Getting caught is just very bad luck and we’ll go back to doing it soon after the sobering (I’m told they are sobering) speed awareness course message has worn off. A speeding tram or train driver is a criminal, a speeding vehicle driver is victimised by those who administer such matters. It all sounds a bit like benefits cheats are scroungers but tax evaders are celebrated does it not?
To me this motoring issue is just one example of our fall from being mostly a law-abiding society to a mostly not law-abiding one, which I pin back to the demise of the post-war consensus in the 1970’s. Since then we’ve become a ‘me first’ society where the individual is more important than society as a whole. Of course, politicians pander to such a view and in doing so we creep further away from the common good approach to one where it’s every man and woman for themselves.
I agree with your analysis Tony. In addition I wonder if attitudes to speed limits are also shaped by our 70mph motorway limit which is arguably low in good conditions, though there is so much congestion these days it's a bit academic. I fear that the adoption of 20mph urban limits, justified in some current 30 zones but not others, will cause much more widespread ignoring of limits.
ReplyDeleteI note a couple of other points. Firstly, limits in Wales are ignored rather less because of the reputation of the Heddlu. (Deserved: I've been nicked twice in over 50 years of motoring, both times in Wales, despite at least 90% of my motoring having been in England). But even the Heddlu are devoting less resource to policing speed limits. Secondly I wondered if German autobahns, with their sections with no speed limit whatsoever, are safer or riskier than our motorways. From a shallow dive into the stats the answer is that overall German roads are safer than ours but the limit free autobahns have a higher death rate than our motorways. Which I guess means that all roads should have an appropriate speed limit. And, if you are right about German cars appealing to British 'racers', that Germans drive German cars better than Brits do.
Autocar published an article in 2016 about the 10 models most likely to be driven over speed limits. 7 of them were Beemers, Audis and Mercs (in that order). Though I'm a bit sceptical as this is from insurance black box data and guess who has those fitted to cars? Drivers who are more likely to speed...