Road Deaths and Denial

I’ve got a great idea for a book. It’s a diet book. Maybe I’ll call it the F-plan (or is that already taken?) The regime is simplicity itself, and it is absolutely guaranteed to work. And yet, I’m fairly sure that even if I could find a publisher, it wouldn’t sell a single copy. The entire text of the book is as follows: “Lay off the cakes (and try to go for a run now and again)???

So, perhaps not bestseller material then. But why not? It is after all, absolutely guaranteed to help you lose weight, which is more than can be said for many diets. It won’t sell because we won’t take advice which requires us to do something we don’t want to do. Instead, we go looking for something more complicated sounding but ultimately less demanding. Complexity is essential, because it makes us feel like we’re doing something, and distracts us from the knowledge that we’re not. Complexity replaces effort.

The same impulse is displayed in our attitudes to road traffic accidents. For years now, there has been hand-wringing public debate over what’s to be done. Last week, Sarah Carey and Twenty said much the same thing, albeit in different respective styles: road accidents happen because people are stupid, and are therefore inevitable. Harsh but true. All the talk about solutions is a diversionary tactic, to distract us from this simple fact.

A car is a deadly weapon. It is over a tonne of metal, which is propelled at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour or more. Of course people are going to get killed with these machines everywhere. You need to go through all sorts of hoops to get a license for a gun, but we’re happy to let people take control of this more common deadly weapon with the bare minimum of oversight. The provisional license is a system whereby the state acknowledges that you cannot drive to the standard it requires, and then allows you out onto the roads with your tonne-plus of speeding metal. There is a little fiction we like to collude in, to the effect that provisional drivers must be accompanied by a licensed driver (because driving skill is passed by osmosis from the more qualified driver to the less qualified one) but nobody believes that one, and I’ve never heard of it being enforced with any rigour. The maximum amount of alcohol allowed in the body while driving is still such that we are permitting people to take the roads after a drink. The queue for driving tests is absurdly long. Driving lessons are expensive, and no one has ever suggested subsidising them. Time and time again, people who have endangered, injured, maimed and even killed are given back their licences. The Road Traffic Offences carry only slap-on-the wrist fines.

This is all for our own convenience. If any of these factors was to be changed (for example, were a driving without due care and attention conviction to come with an automatic disqualification) there would be a chorus of disapproval. I suspect the standard line would be “Of course we need to do something about road deaths, I just don’t think this is the way forward” (This is a classic line for people who’ve just discovered that they didn’t care about an issue as much as they had previously believed. It is a close relative of the “throwing money at the problem isn’t the answer” dodge)

Why is this? It is because we don’t care about road deaths. Oh, we care enough to bleat about them, but not enough to do anything that might inconvenience us. The hand-wringing is a diversionary tactic. Like the overweight man with the bookshelf full of diet books, we will do anything to reduce road deaths, so long as we don’t have to actually, like do anything. If we cared, we’d spend the money to shorten waiting lists for tests. We’d spend the money to make lessons better, cheaper and easier to get. We’d require regular top-up lessons. We’d take a far harder line on Road Traffic Offences. There is no right to drive: if you screw up, and show that you cannot be trusted with this dangerous piece of machinery, you should not be able to get off with a fine and a warning to behave in future. You should not be allowed near a car with so much as a sniff of a drink on your breath.

A car, I repeat, is a deadly weapon. If we, as a society, are prepared to make a trade-off between its obvious benefits (because it is not just a deadly weapon), and its dangers, that’s well and good, but it means that we will have to accept that road deaths are inevitable. If not, then we should be prepared for some sacrifices. But affecting to be desperate to fix the problem while avoiding the obvious but unattractive solutions is the attitude of children, not of mature adults. On Monday, the newspapers will tot up the number of road deaths this bank holiday weekend. On Tuesday the debate will begin again. How to solve the problem? Someone, no doubt, will suggest banning a video game.