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Pity the poor, oppressed driver forced to share their roads with the rest of us

Catherine Bennett




We’re still in thrall to the car – to judge by the lenient sentences for reckless motorists

Reports from the frontline of the war on motorists have made distressing reading for some vehicle owners. With low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) surviving both physical and media assault, improved protections for pedestrians and cyclists in a revised Highway Code will weaken still further, they discover, a right to road domination long understood to be, if not divinely ordained, something even better: unassailable.

Howls of below-the-line outrage in traditionally motor-friendly media confirm that views on road use can still, given the number of cycling and walking motorists, be startlingly tribal. To make vulnerable road users safer, as the government intends with revised hierarchy at junctions, appears for the extreme motorised group to be a more grievous insult to their status, if possible, than the sight of a straggly planter where there was formerly a Land Rover’s right to roam.

What, after all, is the point of a massive city-based 4x4 if it must now give way, as in the revised regulations, to a cyclist enjoying the right to ride safely in the middle of the road, or to go first at a junction? The rage is near palpable. “Goes against the natural order of things,” offers one Telegraph reader. “Cyclists and pedestrians will die clinging on to their rights, while ordinary citizen motorists will rot in gaol at the taxpayer’s expense.”

What next for an oppressed and often unloved group whose only fault, beyond the environmental damage, is their involvement in the majority of vulnerable road user deaths? Could they soon face prison sentences for simply being a bit pissed and turning a car over? Permanent driving bans for, say, killing someone or quite reasonably driving over an extra-irksome cyclist? It may be some comfort to these persecuted drivers that UK targets for road casualty reduction were abandoned back in 2010. That Grant Shapps, the transport minister, introduces himself as a “petrol-head”. And whatever excruciating junction-based humiliations may lie ahead at the hands of pedestrians and cyclists, terrible drivers can still, as demonstrated last week, hope for leniency in the courts.

In the first of two cases that could, equally, have been designed to frighten potential cyclists off the roads, a Mr Alan Moult, aged 73, was jailed for chasing after a cyclist (including along a pavement) then running over him with his Land Rover Freelander. His victim, who had annoyed him, was fortunate to survive injuries including a fractured pelvis, torn genitals, six broken ribs and a punctured liver.

By itself, a dashcam recording in which the cursing Moult’s wife screams at him to calm down, makes a powerful case for acknowledging that cars, like kitchen knives, are murder weapons in the wrong hands. Since Moult’s conviction was for causing serious injury by dangerous driving, he was jailed for 18 months and chastised for behaviour that was “grossly disproportionate”. Locals can expect to see him back in his Freelander, a lifetime ban having presumably been judged over-harsh, after a three-year disqualification.

A reluctance to impose long bans seems to have coincided with the 'stagnation' of UK road safety.

In what can’t have been the best promotional week for Land Rover (an angry Range Rover driver was also charged for “nudging” Insulate Britain protesters), another prominent customer, the minor celebrity and driving ban veteran Katie Price, received a suspended sentence for driving when uninsured and disqualified. She was under the influence of alcohol and cocaine. The judge also imposed costs of £213, and a two-year driving ban – an arguably disappointing choice when a longer version could have protected the public from a motorised Price for 80 years. Then again, a speeding driver recently jailed – for 40 months – after killing a 15-year-old boy, was disqualified for three years.

A reluctance to impose long bans seems to have coincided with what the Towards Zero Foundation regrets as the “stagnation” of UK road safety. If the UK aligned itself with the UN’s target of a 50% (by 2030) reduction in road fatalities and serious injury, it argues, “we have the opportunity to save around 170,000 people from dying or experiencing life-changing injuries from road collision”.

Sussex police are considering appealing against Price’s sentence, which “could have and should have been much worse”. It might even, given her vast following, have doubled as one of those teachable moments recommended by anti-knife crime experts: “An event or experience which presents an opportunity to learn something new or re-evaluate an existing belief.” In this case, to re-evaluate the existing belief that, whatever the Highway Code might say about junctions, car drivers belong at the top of the road-using hierarchy. A serial traffic offender who was lucky to trash nothing more than her own car, has, the public may instead have noted, been more forgivingly treated than the Insulate Britain pedestrians jailed in November. Their sentences of between three and six months (along with combined costs of £45,000) were welcomed as a deterrent by National Highways: “The judge’s decision will hopefully make people think again about carrying out reckless and dangerous protests such as these.”

Teachable moment: if you want to behave recklessly and dangerously on a road without incarceration, inconvenience, or even incurring a large fine, it’s advisable to do it inside a car. As for almost killing a stranger in a moment of madness: that too, as demonstrated by Mr Moult, is best done, for the avoidance of more stringent penalties, from a seatbelted position inside, for preference, one of the car industry’s more environmentally objectionable models.

Where does this leave the war on motorists (as the imposition of any road safety measures is traditionally known)? Some, no doubt, are likely to feel deeply their humbling by less magnificent road users.

“Pedestrians leap from the prow of my Morgan,” Boris Johnson wrote when a motoring columnist, “the bonnet connoting the size of my organ.” By way of compensation for this lost status they may, then, escape a good deal of future disappointment.




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