THE PLEASURES of January are scant. It's a matter of finding interest and amusement where you can in this long dreary month of bills and pay cuts and heightened recession anxiety, and so the other day I got tremendous satisfaction from seeing a car being stopped by a guard at the top of a bus lane in the middle of the morning rush hour, writes ORNA MULCAHY
The rest of us had crawled along in the single lane alongside, edging towards the traffic lights at the kind of pace that allows you to read the newspaper and put on lipstick at the same time, but there are always the ones who think they are just too busy and important to wait in line. Put them alongside an empty bus lane and their inner master of the universe comes bursting out.
Traffic jams are for wimps. They simply rev up and nip out from behind, speeding past the drones, and then oh so brazenly nosing their way back in at the top of the queue, sending ripples of resentment, if not sheer naked loathing through the law-abiding lot in the cars behind. There is very little consolation from blocking someone if you are at the top of the queue, because they will simply move on up, or hold back until some sucker lets them through. A friend with a motorbike has a solution. He putters along in the bus lane and when a car breaks in and tries to overtake, he moves into its path and goes at exactly the same pace as the cars alongside in the traffic, which gives him a real kick.
What joy it was to see the big guard sauntering down the middle of the bus lane towards the car that was now blocked by his patrol car complete with flashing lights. At last, something being done to stop the chancers! There was only one problem. It was a very small car that he’d stopped, with a young girl inside and she looked frightened. Easy prey in other words. Okay, there’s no reason why she should be above the law, but it’s just that she didn’t fit the profile of the traffic delinquent at this particular bottleneck.
Why oh why could it not have been a Porsche Cayenne, with a big fella inside with a ski tan on his brazen face? Nine times out of 10 the cars that breeze by in the bus lane are not little bangers but big expensive ones, mostly driven by men, but occasionally also by well-groomed women who, I like to think, have everything in life except breeding.
Men in big cars glide along in their own leather-clad bubble, generally talking on the phone while slaloming in and out of traffic lanes to gain an advantage, however small – five places up the queue here, three places there, and so all the way to the office where they must arrive all pumped up and ready to annihilate the opposition.
This is the same kind of driver who, when exiting their car park later that day, will shoot out into the traffic, demanding that a gap open up for them, rather than waiting patiently for someone to allow them join the queue. And when you have let this thug out in front of you, where they forever demand to be, does he indicate to say thanks? Usually not, being far too busy for that kind of truck-driver etiquette.
However, he will flash his lights at you on the motorway when you are tootling along observing the speed limit. Again I say “he” because it is mostly men who behave like this on motorways, and what I want to know is why are they allowed away with it? It’s arrogant and ignorant and it’s also against the law because what they are doing is telling you to get out of their way so that they can then break the speed limit.
Merc and Range Rover drivers are very bad in this regard, but Passat owners are nearly as aggressive and yellow-reg Northern drivers are also offenders. It seems to matter nothing to them that they are breaking the law, because people break it all the time. When everyone else is doing it, and where there are no speed cameras, the chances of getting caught are very slim.
So it is with driving in bus lanes. It’s an unlucky day that one might find a guard lying in wait, and so there is no great danger to breaking the law again and again. And if you let yourself get away with that thought, then what will you be up to next?
The amateur psychologist in me imagines these traffic delinquents in their place of work, forever pushing the boundaries, ignoring the rules and regulations that keep business honest and correct. Is it too much of a leap to suggest that those who break the rules in small ways every day on the roads might be more inclined to break the rules in big ways, if they can get away with it and there is no one watching?
When the banking inquiry gets going, it will no doubt involve a lot of men who took risks and cut corners because everyone else was doing it, and because, like the traffic police, it was rare to come up against a regulator standing in their path.