115. Speeding?

March 17^th 1964 was an important day in my life.  In fact, that day was possibly the most important day in my life up to that point.  

There have been more important and certainly two or three more memorable days since then, but March 17^th 1964 was of vital importance to me because that was the day I passed my driving test – first time and at the relatively early age of 17 years and 38 days.

A recent study has concluded that the safest drivers on the road are those who failed their test twice but passed at the third attempt.  It is thought that these drivers don’t have the cocky self-assurance of first-time passers; they realise that they are liable to make mistakes and consequently drive more safely than people like me who passed the first time.

However, I have never had an accident, although I did have a slight bump a few years ago, but that didn’t involve another vehicle.  
I reversed in a pub car park and hit a small wooden post hidden from sight in a clump of long grass.  The fact that there was a car body repair workshop right next door to the pub was not something that I thought much about at the time but as I have become older, more cynical and much less trusting, I have come to think that the apposition of a hidden post and a body repair shop was more than just coincidence.

How do you feel about speed cameras?  I think they are essential.  Speed limits in certain places are vital.  There is little point in having a speed limit if it is never enforced.  Imagine what the outcome could be if vehicles were allowed to travel at 70 along Oxford Street in London. But speeding in central London does happen.

One day in 1968, I was a passenger in a car (no seat belts in those days) that reached 100 mph on Park Lane in London.  In those days, Park Lane - from Hyde Park Corner to Marble Arch - was an almost straight, two-lane road, just over three quarters of a mile long and with no impediments such as traffic lights.  One morning, a friend of mine who drove a Lotus, picked me up after midnight (he’d been at a party) to give me a lift to Lowestoft where we had been at school together.

“I want to make a small detour first,” he said, as he set off into central London.  As we approached Hyde Park Corner at about 2 a.m. he told me that the thing to try was a “ton down Park Lane."  I helped him by shouting out the speed as he accelerated and we reached 105 before he applied the brakes.  Madness!

For nearly 50 years my driving licence was unblemished by penalty points - but then I moved out of London!  In December 2011 it all changed.  As I drove into the village of Lilley in Hertfordshire on a Saturday morning, a concealed speed camera hidden in an unmarked van caught me.  I was doing 35 miles an hour.  Twenty minutes later, as Caroline and I left the village, I was caught on the same camera and again I was doing 35 miles an hour.  After 46 years and 9 months, six points in 20 minutes!

Six months later I was driving on Avebury Boulevard in Milton Keynes and I was speeding once more.  Here is the official police photograph:

 

I thought about doing a “Chris Huhne” and say that Caroline had been driving until I saw the photo.  It’s definitely me and it looks as though I am concentrating really hard. 

The Notice of Intended Prosecution said that I was doing 36 mph.  That number doesn’t show on the photo but that photograph was the evidence that would have been produced by the police had I contested the case.  I don’t know what the “35” on the image signifies.  If the actual speed doesn’t appear on the photo, I can’t see what’s to stop them photographing every car and issuing notices to the owners because hidden cameras are nothing to do with road safety.  They are to make money.

I was speeding.  Points and a fine is the penalty for that offence and so you probably have no sympathy for me but Milton Keynes has been meticulously planned in order to keep vehicles and pedestrians apart.  There are pedestrian tunnels and crossing lights everywhere.  

Milton Keynes, in my experience, is unique in that the speed limit changes abruptly as you approach the town centre from 70 to 30 in some places.  There is no intermediary 40 miles an hour zone in those areas. 

Avebury Boulevard is a dual carriageway and it is never particularly busy.  In three years of regularly driving along that wide, straight road, I have never seen a pedestrian crossing it. 

There are no fixed cameras in their distinctive yellow boxes on Avebury Boulevard.  On the day I was “caught”, the weather was sunny; the road was dry and I think I was the only car on that section of road at that time.  Again, it was a hidden camera in an unmarked van that caught me. 

I had accumulated nine penalty points in just six months.  Three more and I would lose my licence.  Speeding offences are not like parking offences.  

Speeding offences are comparable with drink/driving in that you cannot argue.  You are either speeding or you are not; you are either over the limit or not.  There seem to be no grey areas.  

I was interested last year in the case of the Minister of Education in the Cayman Islands who was “done” for driving over the limit.  He hit a concrete post but despite the high breathalyser reading, he insisted on his day in court.  I was intrigued to see what his defence would be but I never found out because on the morning of the court case, he changed his mind and admitted his guilt.

In June last year, I was driving to Yorkshire to collect my grandchildren.  I told them I would collect them from school at 3.15.  The journey was going well until I became stuck behind a lorry with a trailer bearing a huge metal cylindrical tank.  It was so wide that it stretched right across both the two lanes of the A1.  For half an hour I crawled along at 20 mph immediately following this behemoth and its escorting police vehicles.

At last, the road widened to three lanes and I was the first to pass it.  Ahead of me was ten miles of an empty, three-lane highway.  A week later I received notification that I had been photographed doing 80 when the limit was 70.

I didn’t lose my licence though, because I paid £90 on top of my fine to attend a “speed awareness” course.  This turned out to be a three-hour exercise in listening to the bleedin' obvious: the faster you go, the more likely you are to have an accident.  The only thing I learnt was that there are 212 fixed cameras in the Thames Valley region but only three of them are working at any one time.

It seemed to me that every person on that course resented being there.  Everyone who expressed an opinion said that they had been driving perfectly safely and the speed limit at the point where they had been caught was arbitrary, completely unnecessary and ridiculously low.  That is certainly how I felt.

To be fined for doing 80 miles an hour on an empty, wide, three-lane highway in a modern and well-maintained, high-spec, executive saloon is ridiculous and so, by the way, is the motorway speed limit of 70.

Points stay on your licence for four years and so the six points I was awarded in December 2011 have been removed now.  That is just as well because a week ago on Boxing Day at 8:20 in the morning as I drove down a steep hill into Huddersfield on a clear empty road, I was conscious of a 30 mph sign.  No sooner had I passed it, than I saw a flash in my rear-view mirror.  They got me again.

When we arrived home after spending Christmas in Yorkshire, there was a letter on the doormat.  It was from Thames Valley Police informing me that they had photographic evidence that I had been doing 35 mph on Watling Street, Fenny Stratford on December 17^th.  Twice in nine days!

So, I’m back to nine points now and it’s seven months until the three points from the Avebury Boulevard incident in June 2012 are removed. 
With Caroline at work, I am alone at home for ten hours every day.  I live three miles from the nearest shop and the nearest bus stop is more than a mile and a half away from my house.  If I lose my licence, as looks increasingly possible, things will become difficult.

Despite the apparent drawback of passing my test first time and despite having driven well over half a million miles in my lifetime and NEVER having had an accident, I am deemed to be a potential danger.

Bloody ridiculous!