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The modern car is designed for speed. Its feel, poise and gearing actually makes it difficult and irritating to drive at a sensible suburban speed. It makes its driver itch to get into top gear. It insulates him from outside noise and makes him too comfortable. This gives him a false sense of speed and a diminished sense of danger. It protects him in a steel safety cage with energy-absorbing crumple zones front and rear. It has side impact bars and crash-triggered air bags. These make the car and its occupants safe.
But not the cyclists and pedestrians outside. They are in mortal danger. Their interests are not considered. The manufacturer has no commercial motive for considering them. They are not paying for the car. And you certainly cannot expect the generic British driver to consider them.
See the young dolled-up modern mother collecting her children from school. Once she has cacooned her own children safely in her protective steel cage, she speeds along narrow suburban streets, chicaning in and out of parked cars without a care for the safety or nerves of other people and their children who have to walk home.
See the inevitable and pathetic young Mr Testosterone squealing around the tight suburban streets in his beat-up 'hot hatch' with pounding 'music' drowning the sound of his cracked exhaust. Trumpeting around the empty late night supermarket car park doing hand-brake turns into the disabled parking slots. Basking in the marvel of his gormless peers.
See the morning rush yuppie dressed in his immaculate power suit as he speeds off to work in his car, splashing carelessly through puddles soaking any hapless pedestrian in muddy water. Watch him menacingly tailgate anyone driving at a sensible speed in the wet leafy conditions. It will never happen to him. But it does. The good driver has to stop suddenly to avoid a child. He stops in time. The tailgater doesn't. He shunts the good driver's car over the child, then denies it was his fault and blames the sensible driver for the child's death and for the damage to his car. That's the way it is.
In our modern suburbia, pedestrians are now an uncatered for minority. With so few now actually walking suburban streets, drivers do not consider them. Concern for their safety, and stress caused to them by speeding traffic while walking the streets is not of majority interest. Police are far more concerned with majority public opinion than with enforcing laws which protect a mere minority from injury and death.
One particular suburban road near my home which I frequently have to cross is very dangerous. It is in a 30mph speed limit. Most cars travel at about 45mph which is extremely dangerous for pedestrians. One has to depend on hearing whether or not a car is coming because cars come round the corner at speeds at which they could not possibly avoid pedestrians who had already started to cross the road. I used to see a black Peugeot which sped down that road every morning as I was on my way to catch my train. I am certain it hit almost 70mph down the straight part of that road. Yet the police do not want to know. They are not interested until there is an accident in which somebody is injured.
For a short time I regularly had to go to Cambridge. I had to get used to the fact very quickly that most cyclists ignore traffic lights at pedestrian crossings and that the small busses ignore zebra crossings. They simply do not expect pedestrians to expect them to give way. I had one or two close calls before I got wise to it. Perhaps the same happens in other cities.
Then there are the motorways. The rules are that there is no speed limit and that might is right. A small family hatch-back with three children in the back seat travelling at 70mph past a lane of slow trucks. Impatient businessman is in a hurry. He has been travelling at a nice cool 100mph in his four-wheel-drive monster complete with bull bars. Suddenly and irritatingly, he is confronted by the back of this little family car. He has to slow down. He will be late for a very important meeting. He may lose the contract.
He tailgates the little car at about one or two metres. Half a miles go by. Still the trucks are smoking their way slowly up the incline. He stares at the rear bumper of the offending hatch-back. A ghost-jam suddenly materialises. Before he realises it, the businessman's bull bars have crushed the hatch-back. The rear parcel shelf of the hatch-back has decapitated the children and partially crushed the parents in the front. One dies. One is maimed.
The businessman is upset. He 'did not mean to do it'. However, there are no willing witnesses to the tailgating. They are all desperate to avoid getting involved. Think of all the inconvenience. It is classed as 'an accident'. The businessman is fined for not leaving sufficient distance to stop. Years go by. Soon it is all out of sight and out of mind. He enjoys Christmases with his family. He is soon once again laughing and joking and pursuing his selfish ends. But for the survivor of the hatch-back there are no merry Christmases. Her spouse and children are forever out of sight but never out of mind.
The motorway was once heralded as the ultimate means of free passage for all. But the forsaking of law, manners, consideration for others and self-discipline by the arrogant and reckless has made it their exclusive domain. It has left much of society, for example:
When I was young, I used to walk miles along country roads. But not any more. I would neither walk nor cycle along country roads today. Country roads are now speed tracks for yuppies in their 4-wheeled bullets. They blind along country roads without a care about what many be around the next corner. The steering and poise of a modern car makes it easy to handle at speed down winding roads. Once a young driver 'knows the road' he thinks he can drive safely down it at the very edge of his car's handling envelope. He could, if he were the only human inhabitant of the planet. The trouble is that he assumes that he is. He gives no consideration to the fact that people may be walking or cycling round the next corner. He also pays no heed to the possibility that there could also be a slow farm tractor round the next corner with a raised buck rake on the back ready to send a steel spile through his windscreen.
Still, who cares if one skittles a few cyclists or walkers as one blinds down country lanes in one's big 4-wheel drive monster. A certain Member of Parliament and former Tory Cabinet Minister doesn't. Presumably he represents the views of those British constituents who unceasingly vote him into power each election. Of course he has the wealth never to need to dash his dainty feet against the tarmac. He undoubtedly leaves that to the big fat tyres of his 4 x 4 monster. I remember him laughing and joking about this while being interviewed on television by a well known motoring presenter. They both jokingly condoned such a game of 'country road skittles' as a perfectly legitimate sport.
Back in suburbia the car is again the means by which people exhibit yet another form of inconsiderateness towards their neighbours. And that is bad parking.
People from outside the area frequently park outside houses close to shops or railway stations. They thus deny the house owners access to their own homes for genuine visitors or deliveries. They also frequently park across driveways or directly opposite them in narrow roads, thereby preventing the house owners from getting their own cars in and out of their garages or driveways. There are also some neighbours who, being van or truck drivers by trade, park their massive vans and trucks outside other people's homes at great inconvenience.
Other people's cars parked slightly down the road from my house make the council sweeper truck have to veer round them. In so doing, the sweeper truck has to miss sweeping the gutter across my frontage. By pulling out it also dumps debris over the road. I have to sweep it up myself. The car owners do not condescend to clean up the road in front of my house themselves. The road in front of their house is, of course, cleaned by the truck.
The car, designed and used sensibly, could have been a blessing. Its exploitation as a means of making capitalist profit, coupled with the antisocial behaviour evoked within its drivers by their frustrating and impersonal suburban existence, has made it a curse.