Sunday, December 16, 2012

Not if his bad driving put our lives at risk. Second

Alternatives to Speed by Mike Scantlebury
Picture the scene. I'm driving sedately in my family car across the desolate moors of Derbyshire, in particular the High Peak area of North West England, the far side of Macclesfield. It's a long, fairly straight road, but there are some vicious bends in it, and if you take them too fast you can end up in the ditch, your car a write-off. Maybe that's why some sections of the road have a 50 miles per hour speed limit. It's known as a dangerous place to drive, and also fairly renowned for having more than its fair share of motorbike traffic. (It seems the 'Easy Riders' like the twists and turns and enjoy the risk. They're asked not to: there are posters at intervals along the road warning them to slow down. They regularly ignore the injunctions. So motor bike riders regularly crash, especially in wet weather.)
This day I'm talking about is fortunately dry. I'm keeping up a good speed, but well within the limit. I don't want to dawdle,1875 Ugg Sheepskin Cuff Short Black Boots, because I know that it can annoy those people following. Sure enough, that day,go out for a walk in your lunch break, there is a car a few metres behind me, pressing hard, trying to get past. He seems in a bit of a hurry, so, as I want to be helpful, I go as fast as I can (or, strictly speaking, as fast as we are both allowed). He doesn't care about that, he just wants to get ahead. Not surprisingly, he seizes the first chance he can get. As we come down round a bend, he swings out and hammers past me, his engine racing. He didn't judge it very well. The road ahead seemed clear for a while, but a car comes round the bend ahead of us, and my overtaker has to pull in abruptly in order to avoid a collision.
Firstly, he took a chance, an unnecessary risk, simply in order to get ahead. It doesn't help his journey. A mile further on is a junction and I caught him up there. Slightly further on are traffic lights, and he was forced to stop there too. So, simply because he didn't like his position on the road behind me he put all our lives at risk. If he had crashed his car, it might have caused me to come off the road too, plus the people in the car coming towards us. The slightest misjudgement could have been fatal. Being in pole position didn't speed up his journey because it's such a winding road that he couldn't build up enough speed to really get ahead of me. That was a mistake.
Still, let's be fair. He had a car that looked impressive. It was more modern than mine, and made all the right noises. Surely he was entitled to race it? Not if his bad driving put our lives at risk. Second, not if he broke the law, i.e. the speed limits, which were clearly marked and surely there for all our sakes. Anyway, let's think about that. Do we know it was his car,it's fine to ask them to repeat.? It might have belonged to his employer. Would his boss have encouraged him to hammer his vehicle, knowing it would shorten the serviceable life of the car? What if more likely the car belonged to the bank? Yes, we don't like to think about it, but it's a fact that when we 'buy' things on credit then they don't actually belong to us, not until they're paid off. 'His' car might be yet another consumer possession that the man was able to use, but hadn't quite paid for yet and therefore didn't actually own.

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