So I took a speed awareness course...

How many deaths on the road are too many?

Yes - I took a speed awareness course, so you don’t have to. It was interesting and I learned many useful things. I didn’t know about the street light rule, for example. Apparently, anywhere that has a row of street lights is classed as a built-up area. Then again, I don’t think I’ve ever been on a road with a row of street lights that wasn’t a built-up area. Presumably there are some, though I can’t quite think why a country road would have a row of street lights – but look, I’m not arguing. A speed awareness course is not the place to be a smart Alec.

I was surprised to learn too that if you drive at 31mph instead of 30mph then you’ll hit the car in front at 8mph. Though I’m not entirely sure what that means either. It’s something to do with braking distance and how you overshoot it by a car’s length just by going 1 mph above the street light limit. I already knew about stopping distances and the increase in mortality. Hit someone at 40mph and they’re definitely dead; hit them at 30 and they’re only half as likely to die - though their lives might not be very pleasant.

I liked the manner of the instructor. Not too judgemental. Understood that drivers don’t speed because they're bad people. Lots of useful acronyms, like COAST: Concentrate, Observe, Anticipate, Space and Time. I was surprised at how few people on the course seemed to use speed limiters, but perhaps they were mostly driving older cars. It is an astonishing fact (not mentioned in this course) that you are 30-40% less likely to be seriously injured if your car is less than 10 years old.

There has been a quite remarkable improvement in road fatalities in the last thirty years: down from 25 per 100,000 to 10 or 12 per 100,000. This wasn’t mentioned at all, in fact I believe the instructor said that cars were just as dangerous today as in the early 1990s because they are a lot heavier. Perhaps he meant that their momentum is greater - mass times velocity – so they hit with greater force. But the fact remains that cars are immensely safer today for all concerned, passenger and pedestrian, thanks to technology like advanced braking, traction control, airbags, crumple zones and other weighty additions.

In the 1960s, there were a quarter as many cars on the roads as there are today, but five times the fatalities: 8,000 against 1,600 today. The course says that this death toll remains unacceptable which of course it is. But consider this: in 2022, the 40 million vehicles on British roads travelled over 300 billion, yes billion, miles. That is a hell of a lot of momentum driven by very fallible human beings fiddling with phones, sat navs, children…

Fatalities can always go lower of course, especially with smart cars spotting threats before the driver does. Though there are some drawbacks I didn’t mention to the instructor because I wanted him to like me. In my experience, the problem with speed limiters, as with cruise control, is that you pay less attention, to what’s going on around you. You are liable to go into a kind of autopilot, which slows reaction time. I don’t know if there’s been any research into this, but anecdotally, it is an issue. I’m certain that my reaction time is fractionally slower on motorways when I’m on cruise control – and I’ve stopped using it above 50mph.

The speed awareness coach enthused about the forthcoming 20mph limit in towns. This was the only time that I felt the course strayed into propaganda. It is by no means certain that there are fewer accidents in urban areas with 20mph speed limits. Research by Edinburgh and Queen’s University Belfast suggests that there is “little impact on safety” compared with urban areas sticking with 30mph.

20mph can reduce traffic flow, however. My own experience is certainly that in very congested areas, you actually go faster in a 20mph zone. I noticed this driving in central London (not something I do by choice) from areas that had introduced them from council zones that hadn’t. It really does increase the average speed of traffic in towns by a couple of miles per hour. However this doesn’t apply on roads where the traffic is light – which it is most suburban main roads and bus routes.

Central London is not Britain in microcosm. You get the impression that the determination to lower all speeds to 20mph is more about punishing motorists than about road safety. If we want to seriously reduce deaths and serious injuries in towns the limit would have to be reduced to 15mph and be enforced. I don’t think that’s going to happen, nor should it. There is always an uncomfortable trade off between velocity and human injury. Put simply, moving means mortality.

Even bicycles cause death on the roads, though very few – about four people a year die from being hit by a bike and a couple of hundred are seriously injured. However, death FROM cycling, as opposed to death BY cycling is rising, not surprising since there are far more bikes on the roads and more people ignoring stop signs and one way systems and even roads. And before you say it: I’m one of them. Cycling overall leads to a hundred or so deaths a year, and banning cyclists would reduce fatalities on our roads by by 6%. Not that anyone would be daft enough to suggest it. We accept that 100 people will die so that we can enjoy the freedom of environmental transport.

Another way of reducing death on the roads would be to ban men from driving -- especially young men. 75% of fatalities in 2022 were male according to RoSPA. But this too would be an unacceptable infringement of civil liberty and would also fall foul of the 2010 Equality Act.

This is all getting silly, of course. But I get uncomfortable when I hear police forces like West Yorkshire Police saying that the objective is “zero” road deaths and “zero tolerance” of speeding. Elimination of fatalities in a country with 40 million vehicles would be impossible, and attempting it is folly. Yet, apparently, in pursuit of this chimaera, some police are enforcing speed limits literally. Eh, you what?

It may come as a surprise to you, but most police forces do not prosecute motorists provided the vehicle is going less than 10% plus 2mph above the limit. In other words, if you go 57 in a 50mph limit you shouldn’t get a ticket. Until 2022, this was 10% plus 3mph, which explains why a lot of drivers suddenly got speeding tickets last year.

Trouble is, this is not uniform. Different police forces are imposing different guidelines and some are abandoning them altogether. But there is a very good reason for giving some latitude to drivers because very few cars have accurate speedometers. Lorries seem to break the speed limit with impunity, as anyone trying to go 50mph in a restricted zone can testify. This is because their highly-tuned tachographs tell them the exact speed at which they are travelling. The bog standard speedometer in your car is very poorly calibrated. You actually have no idea whether you are going at 50 or 55 in most cars because many odometers in family cars under report your actual velocity by up to 5mph.

You’d think this would make it easy to contest speeding fines in court, and it is possibly to overturn some of them if you have a very expensive lawyer. It all depends on the degree to which speed limits are enforced. Because, again, most police forces do not enforce the legal speed limit. This is most obvious on motorways. In many areas you can go up to 90 without being collared, and it used to be that you’d rarely be done anywhere in the UK for going at 80mph. Yet the legal limit is 70, and some forces are beginning to enforce it. Ask why (I have) and they simply say that anything above 70 is breaking the law which technically has always been the case.

If that is the case, then even police cars routinely break the law as do countless business travellers, the length and breadth of Britain. But that’s not something it is wise to say in a speed awareness course. Just answer the questions and sound contrite. They’re only doing their job after all.