For the benefit of our colonial cousins (!), ‘you’re nicked’ means you’ve been caught by a police officer. A phrase common in that 70s classic ‘The Sweeney’ (more funny English phrases – it’s rhyming slang for ‘Flying Squad’, a then special police task force), it came in to play in a very apposite way this week when the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire, Meredydd Hughes, was convicted of doing 90mph in a 60mph limit. And to add to the ‘joy’ of that, he was nicked on the patch of the ‘Traffic Taliban’ Richard Brunstrom, the outspoken, self proclaimed scourge of speeding motorists. So should we all laugh, and bask in the satisfaction of the downfall of the UK’s most senior traffic policeman being hoist by his own petard? Well, actually, no.

This entire saga, amusing though it is, actually illustrates perfectly all that is wrong with the policing of our roads. We have come to rely, for entirely financial reasons, on automated policing, principally speed cameras. Where are the traffic policemen? In all likelihood they’re sat in their cars watching the VASCAR (or whatever the latest equivalent is) to see who goes by them too quickly. Or at best they’re sat on their car bonnet with a speed gun in their hand. That, unless an accident is notified, is as involved as the modern traffic copper gets.

My Dad was a policeman for 30 years. I grew up around policeman, and have travelled countless miles as the passenger of very able, very well-qualified Police drivers. And the one common trait they all had is that they drove to suit the road conditions. Exactly what any other experienced driver does, but with the additional experience a police driver used to have. But we can’t do that any more, even if we happen to be the Chief Constable of South Yorkshire, because cameras take no account of the weather, the driver’s ability, the road conditions, the time of day or a multitude of other factors an experienced copper would take in to account when deciding whether a conviction or a ‘ticking-off’ was appropriate. And even if you’re nicked by a copper with a hand gun, he’s under so much pressure to hit ‘targets’ that even then the conditions surrounding your ‘offence’ are ignored. It’s a sorry state.

But it goes much deeper than that. There are estimated to be over 1 million uninsured cars on the roads. Several times that number are reckoned to be driven by drivers with no license. And a substantial number of vehicles are being driven in unroadworthy condition. How is that going to be tackled when all traffic police do is look for someone doing 3mph over the limit? And what about slow drivers? They can cause havoc and frustration on the roads with complete impunity, because a camera will never prosecute them, and there are no coppers left to stop them and put them right. Even drink-drivers have a much better chance of getting away with it than they did 10 years ago, again because there are no highly visible real deterrents to put them off taking the chance.

Perhaps a good starting point would be for the senior traffic policemen to stop spouting the nonsense they do about speeding, and address the real issues. After all, speed is a minor factor in accidents but, like global warming, has become the politically correct point of view. A recent report concluded that less than 4% of rural accidents are caused by speeding, and yet it seems that is the entire focus of traffic policing in the UK today. How can that be right? Shouldn’t the real issues be addressed, and isn’t it about time this obsession with prosecuting every motorist in the land off the road stopped?

Ban the cameras, and bring back real traffic policeman!

I know, this blog is all about the world of cars, so where does the NHS fit in? It doesn’t, but occasionally you have to write about things that are more important than cars.

My Dad’s 80. He’s fit, active, social and busy. He’s great company and has a zest for life. He’s a keen photographer, loves his computer and the internet, even if I do get at least one call a week that starts “This bloody computer..” and ends with me saying “…I’ll pop round later and sort it out”! In the last couple of months, in addition to his morning mile walk to get his papers, he’s demolished a shed, built a patio, driven up north, been on holiday with us (eating, drinking and swimming every day) and been his generally busy self. But he has lost weight, and the doctors couldn’t work out why. So a variety of tests culminated in a CT scan and a request to visit the hospital this week to be told “You have a massive, invasive colon tumour and there’s nothing we can do”.

That’s pretty devastating news to hear, and as a friend commented “I think I’d have been too numb to do anything but go home and top myself”. But I had gone with Dad to see the doctor, and I’ve been brought up (thanks, Mum and Dad) to question what doesn’t seem right or what I don’t understand. And this didn’t seem right, and I didn’t understand it, so I questioned it. How, I asked, can your diagnosis and prognosis be right when, apart from the weight loss, Dad has no symptoms whatsoever? How can this fit, active man be at death’s door? The doctor, after hearing how Dad lives his life and how active he is, finally concurred that he couldn’t equate the man to the diagnosis, so he agreed to have Dad in to stick cameras in every available orifice ‘to have a look’.

I took Dad for his ‘top and tail’ look on Friday. And I can’t praise the nursing staff enough. The nurse who attended to Dad in the preamble to the procedure couldn’t have done more. Frankly, she was doing so much she couldn’t have done any more if she’d stuck a broom up her arse and polished the floors! She made him comfortable, talked him through the procedure, took his information, did tests and acted like the angel she was (and she was called Angela – how appropriate). She was doing a ten hours shift, had been up since five and was studying for a degree in the evenings. Wow. And I bet she was being paid peanuts.

The only irritation in the preamble was a knob with a clipboard doing a survey about the nurses IT use. And I’ll bet the NHS was paying him more than the nurse. For what? To get in the way of a nurse stretched to the limit by an NHS that has so many ‘administrators’ it could run a middle size country, instead of paying for enough medical staff to do the job properly. And that little scenario is typical of all that’s wrong with the NHS. It is now massively funded, but the medical staff are under so much pressure to hit targets and save money they end up cutting corners. And this isn’t the first time I’ve had first-hand experience of this.

Three years ago my Dad had a stroke. Mum and I went with him (I followed the ambulance). The A&E staff saw him, diagnosed a stroke and tried to send him home with Aspirin! It was only when I insisted that 12 hours before he was bright, articulate and lively, and not the incoherent, partially paralysed man they were looking at, did they admit him. And it didn’t end there. He was left to fend for himself on an under-staffed, dirty ward with no inclination to find out exactly what had happened and what needed to be done. It took the severe bashing of the consultant by me (verbal, I hasten to add) for any action. But act they did, and Dad finally recovered.

It shouldn’t be like this. The NHS is well funded but massively mismanaged. Their internal procedure costings are such that they now find it cheaper to outsource things like scans to the private sector, because it costs less. Doesn’t that just prove how badly run it is? If the private sector can offer a service of the highest order at less cost than the NHS, perhaps it’s time to get rid of the NHS. Perhaps it’s beyond redemption.

Dad had been misdiagnosed. Yes, he does have a tumour, but it is much smaller than they thought and is contained. It is operable. That is an infinitely better scenario than the one he was presented with a few days before. But was he misdiagnosed because the staff are under pressure to keep costs down, and not do further tests before delivering a devastating diagnosis? If that is the case the NHS is a complete failure. It needs tearing down and rebuilding as a medical focused institution, not one hell-bent on spending billions on administration, expenses and failed IT upgrades.

Rant over. Back to cars next time.

That learners bible – the Highway Code – has just been revised, and guess what? It’s full of extra rules and ‘guidelines’ for drivers. Why? What’s the point? There are already ample laws to cover all eventualities of careless and dangerous driving, but this government seems hell-bent on issuing more and more dictats to cover every possible conceivable set of circumstances we meet in everyday life. Can’t we be allowed to think for ourselves anymore? Does this never ending Orwellian spiral have to continue?

I know the Government has got unemployment under control (!), because they now either employ everyone who used to be unemployed or give them another benefit to sit at home so they don’t show up on the unemployment stats. But can’t they find anything better for them to do than drumming up more mindless ‘elf ‘n’ safety rules? Perhaps they could get them to give our cities a good clean and polish so they don’t look like a third world ghetto. Or maybe they should go the whole hog and give them all a red flag and pay them to walk in front of every car on the road!

Driving, most of the time, is a boring pursuit. It’s about getting from A to B along pot-holed roads surrounded by equally bored drivers. What we need is a stimulant to keep us awake. Most of us with any experience drive on autopilot most of the time, but click back in when it’s needed. Telling us in the Highway Code that we shouldn’t smoke, shouldn’t talk, shouldn’t change the radio etc., etc., but should concentrate just on driving is a recipe for disaster! We need the distractions. We have to find something to do or we’d go mad.

Now I’m not advocating smoking as a sensible pastime, but throughout my adult life I have been known to indulge in the wicked weed from time to time. And as a sometime smoker I know how short-tempered I got if deprived of a cigarette for any length of time. Do we really want the roads full of nicotine-deprived drivers? And what about the radio? Most of the time I listen to Radio 2 (I know – old fogey!), which throughout the day, and up to when Chris Evans ends, is good company. But what happens at 7pm? It goes back to the ‘Light Programme’ which means, if I can’t play with the radio, I have to drive like a loony to get to where I’m going. And as for talking on the phone, don’t these rule makers have friends or business to do? Talking on the phone in the car (hands-free) has kept my concentration up since I first had a car phone 20 years ago (and that was when phones cost as much as a small house in Rochdale – instead of being given away with a box of cereal and doing everything well except making phone calls in my kitchen!). And I have to admit that beating the children up for mucking about in the back seat kept me awake for years (I know, two Labour hanging offences in one!).

Please, stop with all these petty rules and laws. Driving is a big enough pain in the arse without a never-ending stream of new ways to punish motorists.

We’ve all seen the headlines in the papers in the last few days about the guy doing 172mph in a ‘borrowed’ Porsche, and I’m sure the court had all the relevant information to conclude a sentence of 10 weeks and a 3 year ban was appropriate. But I have to say, there does seem to be an awful lot of self-righteous rubbish spewed out as comment in this case.

“Your driving was criminally self-indulgent and utterly thoughtless of the danger you might be creating for the innocent”
said Judge David Morton Jack.

“Through his own selfishness, in what appears to be a lust for speed, he has completely disregarded the safety of others on the road. It is fortunate the police were there to take action before he ended up killing himself or someone else.” said a Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents spokesman.

All the comments on this case seem to be in the same vein, but is the comment right? In my opinion it is very wide of the mark. It is not speed per se that is dangerous, it is inappropriate speed.

When I was learning to drive I, along with everyone else, had to learn to drive in a specific way to pass my driving test. Those ‘rules’ change, as I discovered when my own children learnt to drive, but they are a frighteningly small part of really being able to drive, and many of the ’skills’ we master as learners have to be quickly undone when we get in the real world. My father was a police Inspector, and an Advanced Driver. He was very unhappy at the skill sets I learnt to pass the driving test, and ensured that I was able to drive to his standards before I was let within a mile of his car. And that has stood me in very good stead. One of the most important lessons he taught me was that speed itself is not dangerous, it is inappropriate speed that is dangerous. Inappropriate for the car; inappropriate for the weather; inappropriate for the volume of traffic. But speed is not a danger in itself.

I am not familiar with the A420 in Oxford where this speeding offence was committed, but after using the excellent Google Maps to have a look it does seem a daft place to do 170mph. It is an ‘A’ road, not a motorway, with all the additional inherent dangers of side roads, roundabouts and smaller junctions. So maybe the judge was right, but that doesn’t change the fact that there is always the same outcry with any big speeding offence, and the same claim that it is equivalent to at least rape and murder in its gravity! What utter nonsense. Is 170mph in a competent car on an open stretch of clear motorway in good weather dangerous? No, it’s not. Ask the Germans. They have the sense to allow appropriate speeds, but punish inappropriate speeds severely. And the authorities take in to account all the relevant factors I’ve already mentioned. So you could get done for 90mph one day on a stretch of the Autobahn, and have no problem at twice that the next day. It’s all about how appropriate the speed is. But we can’t do that in the UK, because high speeds seem to come with a collective raising of arms in horror. And of course 99% of our ’speeding offences’ are processed by a Gatso and not an intelligent human.

Inappropriate speeds have as much relevance at low speeds as they do at high ones. Most of our High Streets have a 30mph limit on them. How appropriate would it be to do 30mph down a busy Higfh Street on a Saturday afternoon? I would suggest it would be far more dangerous than 170mph on a clear motorway, but with our almost complete reliance on Gatsos since the Police Force were replaced by form-filling, invisible bobbies, it would go unpunished. We need perspective in our policing of the roads, which will never come with the reliance on machines and their inability to make anything other than black and white decisions. Put real traffic coppers back on the roads, and let them make the sensible decisions their experience allows. And stop pretending that automated law enforcement on our roads is anything other than revenue raising.

Speed doesn’t kill. Inappropriate speed does.

The ‘Green’ bandwagon continues to roll on. When will people wake up to the reality that this is just an easy way for governments throughout the world to impose ever more punitive taxes in the name of ‘Saving the Planet’? We aren’t responsible for global warming – it’s a totally natural, cyclical, phenomenon – but, despite massive evidence to the contrary, the media continues to spout the green line. I can’t believe that this is for any other reason than it makes good copy – nothing like a scare story to sell papers, and what’s better than ‘We’re all Doomed’ (thank you, Private Frazer)!

It seems that Bio-Diesel – that ‘Fuel of the Future’ – is now responsible for the recent rise in bread prices! Why? Because it is more profitable to grow crops for fuel than food. Now there’s a great idea. We’ll all starve, but we’ll save the planet!

I have to confess that I am not remotely left wing (is anybody any more? – we just have ‘centre’ parties in the UK), and I am vehemently opposed to punitive taxation on the ‘Rich’ (the latest loony idea from the Lib-Dems is to bash any household earning over £70k a year – an income level that would only allow you to buy rabbit hutch in London) but surely promoting policies that actually harm the poorer members of society in the name of ‘Saving the Planet’ is barmy! As well as the bio-diesel issue we have a proposal to massively increase stamp duty on houses that aren’t green. And who’s going to suffer from that? Not the rich, that’s for sure. It’s going to be all those people living on low incomes, who’ve struggled to buy their Victorian terraced council house, which whatever they do will never pass the ‘Green Police’ tests. Wong, wrong, wrong.

That former bastion of personal liberty, the Tory party, has also jumped on this bandwagon with a vengeance. Instead of focusing on making the Police Force work, cutting out the waste in public spending, addressing the mad tax system we have, tackling the huge abuse of the benefits system and generally making policy to help people control their own lives, without the massive nanny state imposed on us since 1997, they’ve now decided that their best way forward is to ban Plasma TVs because they wreck the planet! Get real! This is policy by public opinion. In fact, it’s not even that clever – it’s actually policy by media coverage. What mad planet do they live on where they think ordinary people are going to vote for them if they throw their weight behind ever more loony green policies? Welcome to a country with no government opposition.

Even BMW is playing the game, making big play of their new Hybrid version of the upcoming X6. This looks a very interesting car, but haven’t they looked at the actual environmental impact of hybrid cars? Probably, but the ‘green’ brownie points are more important so, until the media get real on this issue, it’s going to be a self-perpetuating cycle of green products.

Please – get real, before we all drown in a sea of tree-huggers, and go bust from massive green taxes.

Now it’s fair to say that we don’t actually source and finance the Toyota Prius in huge numbers, but surprisingly we do have one or two clients who “Drive a Prius”! Why the quotation marks? Well, it would seem that the Prius has been bought just so that statement can be made. No mention of course of the Cayenne Turbo or the Arnage T sat in the garage, but for some strange reason being able to say “I drive a Prius” imbues the owner with ‘Green’ credentials.

I suppose actions like these are symptomatic of the whole Global Warming debate that fills our media. People feel pressured in to making statements like this to ‘Save the Planet’. But honestly – it’s all gobbledygook!

Let’s take a look at the two parts of this particular issue. First: Global Warming. Now I have to admit that this is something I have a real bee in my bonnet about (not a good thing when driving is part of your everyday life!). Doesn’t anybody look at the facts anymore? We are being told all the time that we are responsible for 20% of the harmful greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, and our wasteful, thoughtless lives are ruining the planet. Rubbish! The fact is that water vapour alone accounts for 96% of all greenhouse gasses, but that is conveniently ignored by the lobbyists. Why? Because a statement that we are responsible for ‘nearly 0.5% of all greenhouse gasses’ will have no impact. Why exclude water vapour you ask them? Because it’s naturally occurring, they say. Doh! What difference does that make? None! The other great myth is that CO2 is causing global warming when in fact global warming is causing the rise in CO2. The green faction seem to have got their chicken and egg the wrong way round! Not only that, but climate change is a natural phenomenon that has been going on since the planet began. Global warming is just the latest bandwagon, and the only joy it has brought is to professional protesters and politicians. It’s become the de facto way to justify any punitive tax in the name of ‘Saving the Planet’. I could run on and on for hours on this subject because it drives me crazy, but I’ll come back to it another time!

The second great myth is the Prius being environmentally friendly. More drivel! The simple fact is that once you factor in the impact of build cost and eventual disposal, you’d be more green friendly driving a Rolls Royce Phantom! Again, take a look at the facts. The Prius batteries are made from nickel. The nickel is smelted in Ontario, Canada. Such is the environmental impact of this smelting that acid rain now falls around the plant, destroying all vegetation for miles, to the point that NASA use the area for testing moon buggies! The smelted metal is then shipped to South Wales where it is refined. From there it goes to China to produce a chemically created foam to make the batteries more reactive, and from there it goes to Japan to make the batteries. Phew! But it doesn’t end there. The batteries only have a life of 100,000 miles, when they need to be replaced and safely disposed of. But will they be, or will they be dumped in scrap yards to leak toxic waste in to the ground? Who knows. But when you add it all together, and factor in that a Prius is not even as economical to run as a decent diesel-engined car, you see where the gobbledygook is?

Innovation Cars’ top Green Tip: “Dump the Prius – Buy a Rolls Royce Phantom – Save the Planet”!

There seems to be more and more in the press about older drivers and their safety. Australia is currently debating whether older drivers should be restricted to a small geographic area (expected to be 6 miles), whilst more and more US states (California is about to go this route) are making re-tests compulsory for the over 75s. Good or bad? It’s a hard call.

For many older drivers their car is their lifeline. Take away the independence driving allows and, for many, you take away their lives. Is that what we want? With an ageing population in the west, this is a rocky road to go. I think it should be more about putting safeguards in place than undermining the elderly driver. Re-tests are one (expensive) option, but surely some simple cognitive tests by a GP are the way to go?

My own Mum & Dad are a good example of the ageing driver. Dad is 80 and Mum is 75. Yes, they’re getting on, but they still lead full and active lives. They enjoy socialising, holidays, meals out – all the things they had little time to enjoy when they were younger and working hard. What quality of life would they have left if they lost the freedom to drive and their independence? They know their limitations. Mum has always been a rotten driver (!) and only drives on familiar routes in daylight. But she was the same at 40. Dad used to be a Police driver, and very good he was, but he knows he’s not as capable these days. He’s sensible; he avoids night driving on unfamiliar roads; has a satnav so he doesn’t have the pressure of getting lost; drives more slowly than once he did. But he still loves cars (he’s just bought a new car at 80 for goodness sake!), and enjoys driving (most of the time). They live in the south of England but come originally from Lancashire. Mum persuaded Dad they should take 2 days to drive up north. They tried it. It was a failure! All Dad wanted to do was keep driving. Instead they were kicking their heels in a hotel half-way there, and itching to get up and get on. They now do the trip from Billericay in Essex to Nelson in Lancashire in around 4 hours (I’d be pleased with that, and I drive a Cayenne!). But the fact is they address their limitations and act accordingly, and I believe most elderly drivers are the same.

My better-half’s Uncle Siddy founded Saga, which became the huge success it is simply because he treated older people with respect, giving them the dignity their years and experience deserve, and not patronising them or preaching to them (and of course products they wanted at a decent price!). We need to trust our elderly drivers to be sensible, and accept that they have a lifetime of experience to make judgements. Yes, medical tests are a good idea, but don’t destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands of older drivers by taking away their freedom. We should care for their safety, and the safety of others on the roads, but not at the expense of their quality of life. We’ll all be old one day.