Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
does highlight how daft these limits sometimes feel in a modern car. Not often, perhaps,
and with decreasing frequency, but now and again - for example on certain wide, straight-
ish, flatish Highland roads, especially if they're fenced or the country on either side is
clear enough for the driver to spot any wildlife approaching the road - 60 feels idiotically
slow.
On the other hand, sometimes 60 feels far too fast even when in theory it's what
you're allowed to do. Like a lot of drivers I have my own set of speed limits on roads
I know well; often they're a bit faster than the legal ones, but sometimes they're a lot
slower. One route I take regularly passes through three villages with no posted speed lim-
its but I treat them like 30 or 40 zones according to the conditions, and I suspect that all
other drivers who aren't complete nutters do the same thing.
Ultimately cars are useful but dangerous things and we have to decide where we draw
the line between allowing them to remain useful and attenuating the threat they pose.
Having no speed limits would be one slightly insane solution (you'd just have to charge
people with dangerous driving if they caused death, injury or damage, though of course
by then it's too late for whoever was killed or injured), but, then, if you're really,
really
serious about reducing those killed and injured on the roads, why not set the national
speed limit at three miles per hour? No, seriously. Then if somebody found themselves
in the path of a car or a truck or a bus they could just stroll out of the way. You might
manage a whole year with no road deaths whatsoever. Obviously the economy would col-
lapse and we'd all effectively become hermits, but then maybe it would lead to the revival
of the railways, with branch lines everywhere. Mind you; trains crash too. Maybe they
should have a walking-pace speed limit as well … And let's not even start on aeroplanes.
I suppose balloons and dirigibles - so long as they're helium filled - might be okay.
The three-mile-an-hour national speed limit is arguably an even madder idea than no
speed limits at all, but it has a certain logic to it and it forces us to confront the question:
how much do we value human lives? What exactly are we prepared to give up to save
some?
However, let's not forget that this is all within the context of a society that doesn't get
all
that
bothered over the fact that in excess of one hundred and ten thousand Brits die
every year from smoking tobacco, or the fact that alcohol abuse kills tens of thousands
too. Three thousand people die every single day from malaria, but they're mostly children
and in Africa so they don't matter, it would seem. One injustice doesn't excuse anoth-
er, but let's at least admit that we prioritise and contextualise our outrage at unnecessary
death.
One conducts the Jaguar through to Greenock and thence to Dalmuir, in Clydebank. In
Greenock one collects one's friend Mr David McCartney. In Clydebank one picks up
one's other chum, Mr James S. Brown.
