Speeding cannot be stopped - so let's reduce the level of cant instead and focus on proper driving instruction, better roads and a realistic system of speed limits, writes Justin Hynes
I am a sensible, thirtysomething, mostly law-abiding citizen. I may wail and gnash teeth, but I pay my taxes. I don't import drugs, I don't ship arms and I haven't stolen anything for years - not since I swiped a rubber pencil-top figure in the shape of a banana when I was six.
All in all, I'm a pretty upstanding pillar of the community, but I have one weakness that makes me a serial law-breaker. I drive fast. I drive faster than the speed limit. Not sometimes, all the time. And I'm not going to stop.
Already, I can hear the howls of protest from holier-than-thou types. Has he no regard for life and liberty, for the children who can't look after themselves?
To those I say, pshaw! Actually, first I'd say, look into your hearts, search the very bottoms of your souls - or at least the bottom of your glove compartment - and tell me that there isn't an itty-bitty speeding ticket in there somewhere, that there isn't the guilty little secret that on occasion you've nudged your sensible, low-emission, family-friendly MPV over 70 mph on the runway-strip lengths of road that serve as this country's motorway network. Tell me that you haven't accelerated to 45 mph in a 30 mph zone because the lights are orange and you can't be bothered to brake and wait one and a half minutes for the traffic light sequence to work itself out.
You can't. Nobody can. That is because everybody breaks the speed limit. Everybody. There isn't a person in Ireland who can, hand on heart, say they obey the daft speed restrictions imposed on drivers - and if there is, well, the reason we haven't heard from them is because they're doing 35 mph and won't arrive for another week.
As I drove home along the N9 one day this week, I guided the needle on the speedo to 70 mph and sat in the left-hand lane of the motorway counting how many cars passed me in the right-hand lane. They all did. OK, that's a slight exaggeration. But in the 8-kilometre stretch between Naas and Kilcullen, more than 40 cars passed me doing speeds between 70 mph and what looked to be about 100 mph. All of them are law-breakers, all could get penalty points and all would suffer as a result.
There are plenty of reasons why people speed, and I'll get to those in a while. But first I'll give you mine. I like it. Massively politically incorrect, typical man, bloody boy racer, danger to the plain people of Ireland - yadda, yadda, yadda, let me know when you're done with the breast-beating and I'll take my fingers out of my ears.
For a start, I'm not a boy racer with a hopeless faith in my own immortality. I'm an old-stager. I've been behind the wheels of cars for nigh on 20 years. I possess a keen sense of the brevity of my own existence. I also discovered some years ago that driving at excessive speed doesn't impress girls, especially when you're in possession of a healthy crop of spots and a rusty Datsun 120Y coupé. I'm a regular guy, going about regular tasks, only a little quicker than I'm supposed to.
Partly this is because of a fascination with cars, partly it's because I have a chronic timekeeping problem and partly because I view driving as a skill to be mastered. Driving is also fun. It is about control and reactions, and how you extract the maximum from yourself and the car you drive. And you can't do that at 50 mph. Or at least there comes a point when 50 mph is within your capability and you need to go faster, depending on the road you're attempting to negotiate and how late you are.
This is all done with wariness. I'll happily confess that I was a rubbish driver when I was spotty and teenaged and drove beyond my capabilities. Young men do that and die because of it.
Now I realise my own limitations and the limitations of the machinery I'm in control of. I don't drive at 100 mph on country roads, I don't race my little friends in their Starlet Turbos and body-kitted Puntos - I'm not trying to impress anybody. I drive with caution in the right places, I'm aware of braking distances, and by and large I know my car - and before anybody asks, yes, it is a mid-engined sports car. I know it suffers from a little mid-corner oversteer. I know that that oversteer goes haywire in the wet and so I take it easy. I know that driving fast in built-up areas is daft, I know that weaving across lanes on a motorway is thuggish and dangerous and I know that getting behind the wheel of a car with a few bevvies on board is cretinous.
I am not a fool, yet I am being treated like one by a nanny State that wants us to stop smoking, drinking and driving and live docile, sheep-like lives of expressionless homogeneity. Preferably on a bus. Thus it penalises sensible, aware, experienced drivers by introducing measures that will, within months, rack up insurance premiums, cause the loss of previously blemish-free licences, interrupt working practices, and most of all remove from our grasp one of the great pleasures of modern existence - the ability to control your own destiny at the controls of a machine of wonderful liberation.
Partly the need for such draconian action is down to the utter uselessness of driver education. From what I remember of the driving test, I was made to do a three-point turn, reverse round a corner and drive in a manner patently unsuited to the control of a moving vehicle. I got a licence after going through these motions for 15 minutes. First go. Hey presto, you are now qualified to pilot a machine capable of anything up to 200 mph.
What the driving test should involve is a full-day safety driving course at centres that teach youngsters by doing. How to drive on ice, in the wet, how big a distance it takes to brake from 50 mph to a dead stop and how many children you'll have mown down by the time your initial miscalculation is corrected. But hey, this is Ireland, what do you expect. In the space of a week we have gone from an announcement of measures designed to reduce insurance premiums by 31 per cent over the next three years to the introduction of a system that will penalise drivers with a possible insurance hike of 25 per cent for the incurring of a single penalty point offence.
So far, there is no system to pass on information from the proposed National Driver File, but discussions are underway to make this possible so that "safe drivers can be rewarded with lower premiums". Uh-huh and pigs might fly . . . In a climate in which premiums have doubled and tripled in the last 18 months, does anybody seriously expect such usurious institutions to use penalty points as a way of giving something back to the little people?
Meanwhile, where's the support structure for this brave new pointy world? Speed limit indicators on Irish roads are worse than a joke. I haven't a clue what limits are applicable on most Irish roads. For example, I live in a pretty rural spot, about three miles away from the nearest village. On entry to the village, there is a sign that tells you the speed limit is 30 mph. Fine. However, the road from the village to my house is pretty narrow with grass growing in the middle of it in some places, but it's predominantly black, tarmacadamed and has two lanes. Is this a 60 mph national road or not? There is no sign on exiting the village to tell you. If it's 60 mph, it's daft because if there's any obstruction on the road - hedge-cutter, tractor, beasts of burden - you'll be in among them before you can brake. If it's 30 mph, it's daft because it would take a week to get home. So I've applied a 50 mph limit, which gets me in and out of the village quickly and gives me time to react to low-flying cattle.
Another for instance. Why is it that the stretch of M50 from the airport to the Red Cow roundabout carries a 70 mph limit yet the following new linkfrom there to Sandyford is 60 mph? Where's the logic, the continuity, the reasoned thought process?
The only bright spot on the points horizon is that urban-dwellers are unlikely ever to be penalised because you can't go more than 10 mph in cities due to the congestion caused by government inaction and the refusal to bite the expensive bullet of installing meaningful public transport systems. Because of the terrible traffic, because of the cruel and unusual financial penalties being meted out to drivers through double and triple taxation and because of the brutal road network I will continue to drive at speed. For cars are not simply an expression of mobility, of the drudgery of getting from place to place, they are an expression of people's endless need for excitement, for passion, beauty. People desire the ability to speed. It is demanded of car manufacturers by consumers. Speeding cannot be stopped. So why not accept it and build better roads, better cars and better drivers to cope with the speed we want?
Justin Hynes is Formula One correspondent for The Irish Times