The Crittenden Automotive Library

The Error Of Their Ways

The Error Of Their Ways

Geoff Maxted
DriveWrite
January 11, 2014

The other day I had occasion to drive out locally both in the morning and the afternoon. The truth is I was required to chauffeur Mrs DriveWrite on various ‘essential’ errands. Essential errands, BTW, are the ones that always seem to cost me money. As it turned out though, this was handy because she was witness, as I was, to no less than seven examples of atrocious and/or selfish driving.

Remember the old saying, ‘there’s never a copper about when you need one’? Well, there’s never a copper about when you need one. The near gross errors of judgement we saw, including two that almost involved us, proved conclusively that driving standards are going down. They also prove that so-called ‘safety cameras’ have no impact on driving standards. Everyone knows where they are, slow down accordingly and then speed up again.

The lurking presence of the police - at the roadside, on the flyover - has all but disappeared and DriveWrite believes this is the single biggest factor in the neglect of driving skills by at least some members of the populace. A secondary factor is gadgets. We all see mobile phone users chatting blithely away in flagrant disregard of the law but they aren’t worried, are they? There’s no one to challenge or, indeed, nick them.

And it isn’t just telephones. There have been stories of tablets being used at the wheel and then of course, there’s all the toys built in to our ‘lifestyle’ cars. In an era when it seems it would be pretty straightforward to communicate with NASA’s space shuttle from the comfort of the middle lane of a motorway, it should come as no surprise to realise that people are fiddling about with stuff all the time.

So, we saw phone users and drivers with their eyes glued to something on the dashboard and, as a consequence, wandering about the road. We had two incidences of people entering roundabouts without a single glance one way or the other, one of real speeding and one of traffic light jumping. Drivers are lane jumping at close quarters without so much as an indication. Reprimand them with your horn and do you get a wave of apology? No, you get a stiff-fingered example of the universal sign language.

A few days ago DriveWrite wondered whether a new app that users can utilise to grass up bad parkers was morally desirable but now I’m beginning to err towards draconian use of dashboard cameras to show these misguided folk the error of their ways. That way, the evidence could be passed to the Peelers. That’s if you can find one, obviously.\