The rules of the road exist to keep us safe. Why aren’t we enforcing them?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2017/jan/30/road-safety-enforcement-may-dejevsky

Version 0 of 1.

A haulage company owner and a mechanic were sent to prison for manslaughter last week after a horrendous road accident in Bath. Three adults and a toddler had died after a tipper truck with faulty brakes careered down a hill, crushing pedestrians and parked cars in its path.

Two months before, a different court sentenced a lorry driver to 10 years after an accident that killed a mother and three children. He was scrolling through music lists on his phone and smashed his “weaponised vehicle”, as the court heard, into a queue of traffic.

These two accidents stick in the memory not just because of the human cost – the merest snatches of the witness statements are heart-rending – but because, even more than most accidents, they should not have happened. For while the individuals concerned showed contempt for the law, it can be argued that they might have been more observant had not enforcement overall been so slack. A required brake check is not a matter of “health and safety gone mad”, but of regulation designed to protect all road users; ditto, zero tolerance of mobile phone use at the wheel.

I say this with particular feeling. Three weeks ago I was involved in a collision with a lorry on the M20 in Kent. I was driving, it was early evening, dark, and the road was wet. A lorry came up fast on my inside and indicated it wanted to come out. Both the middle and right-hand lanes were busy and I had nowhere to go. There was a loud crash of metal; a deluge of splintered glass, and the car span (fortunately) towards the hard shoulder, where I managed to stop it just before a ditch.

Miraculously, neither I nor my husband were hurt. The lorry stopped – which apparently is not to be taken for granted. So, at great risk to themselves, did a splendid local couple, who called the police and left their details as witnesses. What happened next, though, shocked me almost as much as the accident itself. The police took half an hour to arrive. They asked, quite properly, for my licence and insurance – gave us each other’s details and an accident number, then said we were free to go.

I am not aware that the lorry driver was either breathalysed or his mobile phone or tachograph checked. Nor was I breathalysed or asked for my phone. I am grateful that the police escorted us to a motorway exit, so we could continue to the hotel where we had been booked. But the idea that there might be further police proceedings or that someone might have been to blame in a law enforcement – as opposed to insurance – way? Well, that never arose.

Conversation with reception staff at the hotel only turned my surprise to indignation. Accidents exactly like ours, they said, happened at least once a month. Sometimes the cars were tossed towards the hard shoulder; sometimes towards the central barrier, ricocheting off back into the traffic. The police, they said, were only interested if there were serious injury or worse.

It was also their view that insurance companies rarely pursued a foreign driver, generally settling for equal fault. Equal fault? When a multi-tonne lorry smashes into a car because the driver has not looked or because their mirrors are inadequate? Scan the internet and you will find not just that dozens of aggrieved drivers have lost their no-claims bonus as a result of such accidents, but also that the incidence of this specific sort of collision has increased sharply over the past five years, even as the number of serious accidents overall has fallen. Which is where there are surely wider conclusions to be drawn.

Delegating responsibility for traffic policing to cameras might be fine for speeding, but is less so for other violations. Some offences are subject to crackdowns – breath tests during the festive season, the occasional sweep for uninsured drivers, periodic checks on the use of mobile phones. But how effective are they, really?

The last crackdown on phones – in November, in a few places for a single week – netted almost 8,000 drivers. If, as most people surely accept, mobile use at the wheel is dangerous, then it needs far more systematic discouragement. Doubling the points does not do it.

Of course, ministers and the police will point out that UK roads are very safe by European standards: we are right up there with Scandinavia and the Netherlands. But the fatality rate, which is mostly what is measured here, is not all that road safety is about. And, as the damage to our small hatchback from a 60mph collision with a lorry mercifully showed, advances in technology deserve some of the credit.

Nor are statistics all they seem. There are wide regional variations in the UK and the latest (2015) road safety figures for England suggest that improvements may be tailing off. The RAC says that the UK comes in the bottom quarter of European countries “in terms of its vision for cutting death and injury ... in future”.

So, while you could argue that its road safety record allows the UK to coast awhile, you might also think about the two recent court cases and whether we pay due regard to the murderous potential of our vehicles. And then you might reasonably ask whether, with more rigorous enforcement, not only those serious accidents that have made the news could have been avoided, but also the many more minor ones such as ours. And who is best served by the apparent normalisation of life-threatening recklessness on our roads.