The North London Naughty Boys held our annual summer lunch at a pub off the M25 last week. A jolly affair it was, too.
Conversation turned to speed awareness courses, the subject of a recent column in the Mail by Tom Utley.
A quick show of hands and the vote was unanimous. In the past 18 months all five of us had been caught ‘speeding’ and had opted for a couple of hours in a classroom rather than points on our licences.
I put ‘speeding’ in quotes because there was no suggestion that any of us had been driving dangerously.
There are few things more soul-destroying than having to crawl along an empty six-lane main drag at 19mph at 1am because there are speed cameras every few hundred yards
We’re not talking boy racers here. To get things into perspective, I was the young whippersnapper at the table. None of us are screeching round the streets in hot hatchbacks wearing back-to-front baseball caps.
In the immortal words of blues great Willie Dixon, our cars – like us – are built for comfort not for speed.
No, we’d all been flashed doing a few miles over the limit, without even realising it.
I was nicked by a police mobile unit doing 36mph in a 30mph zone on a downhill stretch of a deserted road within 100 yards of a sign reading 40mph.
The camera van was sited deliberately at the spot where the limit increases to trap drivers lulled into a false sense of security. Most people see the sign and assume it’s 40 all the way.
Others had fallen foul of recently introduced 20mph limits on roads which they had been negotiating safely for decades.
In my case it was the first speeding ticket I’d had since I passed my test, aged 17, when the Esso sign meant happy motoring.
No more. These days, motorists are Public Enemy Number One – at least as far as the authorities and the police are concerned.
Since the wholly inappropriate – to use a modern buzzword – 20mph limits were introduced on main roads (not residential, or those near schools ’n’ hospitals), you can lose your licence racking up 12 points in little more than a mile.
There are few things more soul-destroying than having to crawl along an empty six-lane main drag at 19mph at 1am because there are speed cameras every few hundred yards.
This has nothing to do with dangerous driving. If the aim was to deter the lane-jumping maniacs who think they’re extras in Grand Theft Auto, we might see more police patrol cars on the streets.
Fat chance of that happening. Far easier to milk hapless drivers drifting 4mph over the limit.
As some of us have maintained since the first of those hideous yellow spy cameras started appearing at the roadside, this is little more than a shameless money-spinning, job-creation scheme.
Not that any of us five minded coughing up £90 for a speed awareness course when the alternative was points on our licence which could lead to a driving ban. We each spent that much on lunch. It’s not the money, it’s the principle.
Still, we got away lightly, compared to Paula Rosevear, from Plymouth. She was woken by a bailiff sent by Bristol Council threatening to seize her car unless she handed over £508.
This was apparently a fine she’d incurred passing through Bristol’s clean air zone last year, without realising it, on her way home from the airport.
The bailiff told Ms Rosevear, who cares for her mother with Alzheimer’s, that she had ten minutes to come up with the money or he was taking her car, which he’d already clamped. She’s just one of more than 285,000 motorists trapped by Bristol’s ‘low emissions zone’ last year.
Henry Morton Stanley faced fewer hazards when he travelled halfway across Africa to find Dr Livingstone (artist’s impression)
Another, Adam Soble, from Stroud, told The Times that about 50 metres of the city’s ring road fell within the zone and ‘it seemed to serve no other purpose but to catch people going to the airport’.
Sounds about right. These ULEZ zones are cash cows for councils run by far-Left, two-bob chancers such as London’s Sadiq Khan.
Parking apps serve the same purpose, being especially designed to be fiendishly complicated so as to confuse drivers and extract fines.
I’ve described here before how the introduction of apps in my neck of the woods tripled parking charges and drove shoppers away from local businesses.
The Mail on Sunday revealed that motorists have been hit with £5 billion – yep, billion – since 2019. One unfortunate woman was slapped with an £11,000 penalty by a private parking firm because she was unable to pay for a ticket because of poor internet coverage.
Yet the councillors, cowboys and highwaymen responsible claim it’s all our fault.
Bristol City Council said motorists should always check council and Government websites ‘before travelling to find out if they need to pay a charge for their chosen route’.
What? You plan to take the kids to the seaside, and you are expected to consult the internet for any snakes and ladders along the way?
Henry Morton Stanley faced fewer hazards when he travelled halfway across Africa to find Dr Livingstone.
At this rate, you’ll have to employ a sherpa to navigate your way round the North Circular.
As I’ve argued for more than 20 years, we now live in a punishment culture, where the police work hand-in-glove with the far-Left, anti-car fanatics who have seized control of transport policies to persecute otherwise law-abiding citizens for trivial, and invented, motoring infringements.
Record numbers of people will set off by car over the Bank Holiday weekend. There’s enough to worry about – roadworks, potholes, fractious kids in the back seat – without having constantly to be staring at the speedo for fear of going over 20mph or worrying that you may have inadvertently strayed into a sneaky ‘low emissions’ or ‘congestion charge’ zone.
Otherwise you could end up spending more on speeding, parking and ULEZ fines than on your hotel bill, meals and ice creams.
Happy motoring!
