A friend tells me that someone on the Speed Awareness Course (SAC) she attended gave a disarmingly frank answer when he was asked to suggest reasons why people broke the speed limit.
‘Well, I just f****** love driving really fast!’ he said.
I have to say that nobody on the SAC I attended last Friday, after being caught on camera driving at 26 mph in a 20 mph zone, was anything like as brazen as that.
On the contrary, we were all on our best behaviour, perhaps because every one of my fellow law-breakers shared my fear that if we annoyed our trainer in any way, he might decide we were not taking our re-education seriously enough.
I attended a Speed Awareness Course last Friday after being caught on camera driving at 26mph in a 20mph zone
For all I knew, he could then have sent us to court, to be fined and awarded penalty points on our licences, with inevitably savage consequences for our insurance premiums.
Officious
Safer by far, I thought, to be teacher’s pet, look attentive and remorseful and nod in solemn agreement with everything he said, while thanking my lucky stars that I had been offered the soft option of the course.
Mind you, I have no complaints about our trainer, a likeable Yorkshireman called Mike, who seemed fair-minded, non-judgmental and thoroughly on top of his material. This was presumably because the poor fellow had been through this same two-and-a-half hour palaver a zillion times before.
Another criminal friend (most of my friends seem to have attended SACs, though this was my first) wasn’t half as fortunate with his trainer. He tells me that his course was run by a veritable Rosa Klebb, the sadist played by Lotte Lenya in the James Bond film From Russia With Love.
She was officious and self-righteous, he says, treating those who had been caught speeding like murderous vermin and firing sharp questions at those she suspected of failing to pay full attention to her every word, like a schoolmarm demanding of an eight-year-old: ‘What have I just said?’
There was nothing of that about Mike. It’s true that I did feel a bit patronised, like a naughty primary school pupil kept in after class. But then, this was in the nature of the occasion, and hardly Mike’s fault.
As for how valuable these courses are, well, I promised a few weeks ago that I would approach mine with an open mind. In that spirit, I must acknowledge that there was quite a lot we were told that I didn’t know, or had forgotten since I took my test more than 50 years ago. I was rusty, for example, on the default speed limits that apply to different types of road, illustrations of which were flashed up on screens.
Nor did I know which was the legally enforceable limit on a road with conflicting signs – with 20 painted in white on the Tarmac, for example, but 30 in a red circle on a pole right beside it.
When Mike asked me for my answer, I thought this was a trick question. So I said 30 mph, since I knew that a red circle round a sign meant the number it displayed was enforceable in law. The correct answer, of course, was 20.
But I quickly got the hang of the idea that whatever the question about safe speeds or enforceable limits, the best policy was to suggest the lowest credible number that sprang to mind.
It was interesting, too, to learn of the surprisingly big difference in stopping distances and the speed of impact with an obstacle (or a child) caused by driving at even one mile an hour above 20 mph.
But don’t ask me for the exact figures, since I’ve never been any good with numbers, and they’ve gone right out of my head. To be honest, they didn’t mean all that much to me, anyway, since Mike gave us all the stopping distances in metres, while I’m such an antique that I can think only in feet and yards.
Greed
But this is where I begin to take serious issue with the value of these courses – and not least because those of my fellow sinners who gave the correct answers to Mike’s questions tended to be repeat offenders, who had been on SACs before (which itself calls into question their effectiveness in preventing speeding).
If you ask me, drivers don’t learn about safe speeds and stopping distances by studying videos, diagrams and figures. Instead, we get an instinctive feel for them, born of common sense and experience behind the wheel.
Heaven knows, we can all think of circumstances in which driving even at 20 mph can be dangerous – icy roads, for example, or past crowds of jay-walking revellers at pub chucking-out time. But equally, it can be perfectly safe to drive at 30 mph on those same roads, in different circumstances. If only speed cameras had the wit to tell the difference!
I remain convinced that officialdom’s recent enthusiasm for 20mph zones has a lot more to do with greed for motorists’ money than any concern for safety
Indeed, I mean no disrespect to my trainer when I say that nothing I learned on his course has shaken my conviction that 20 mph limits, sprouting all over the land, are anything but a scam to squeeze yet more money out of motorists.
On that question, Mike said only that road accidents cost the economy £1 billion a week, and that therefore it was nonsense to suggest there was any profit for the authorities in fines for speeding.
Implausible
Well, perhaps I’m being thick, but I just can’t follow his logic.
Leave aside that his figure of £1 billion a week – only fractionally short of the entire defence budget – sounds wildly implausible, even once we’ve added victims’ lost earnings to every conceivable cost incurred by the police, the NHS, the Highways Agency, insurers, employers and the rest.
What can’t be denied, surely, is that speeding fines bring in more cash than they cost to administer. In my book, that means a profit, and a pretty tidy one, too. Indeed, some individual cameras – including one just down the road from me – are reported to rake in well over £3 million a year in fines.
That’s not to mention Speed Awareness Courses, which must also be a nice little earner (mine cost £91 a head) – and not only for those who provide them, but for the issuing police force, which gets a £45 cut.
Indeed, I remain convinced that officialdom’s recent enthusiasm for 20 mph zones has a lot more to do with greed for motorists’ money than any concern for safety.
I therefore salute the new First Minister of Wales, Eluned Morgan – herself a serial speeding offender – after her promise this week that she’ll scrap her predecessor’s hugely unpopular imposition of a 20 mph limit throughout the principality.
As for my own experience last Friday, I’m sorry to say that nothing Mike said has persuaded me that I need do much to mend my ways. After all, I’ve been driving on Britain’s roads for 53 years since I turned 17, without a single accident and only this one speeding ticket, for driving at 26 mph in perfect visibility on an empty road.
Another speed merchant tells me, however, that he thinks SACs are extremely effective in changing drivers’ habits. And he should know. He’s been on four!