ON THE SPOT

Ah... Other drivers, eh...?

What an absolute pain they all are.

My own driving is, of course, like everyone else's, absolutely perfect... (and don't any of you DARE to suggest otherwise...)

But as for the rest of those idiots...

Well, most days it seems as if nobody's got a clue any more. How any of them got to pass their test is beyond me, etc., etc., etc. Ad nauseum, ad infinitum...

[Drifts off into the back of shot like Griff Rhys Jones in an old "Not the Nine O'Clock News sketch - only without the irony...]

So having started off this piece with a reasonable facsimile of what the average typical curmudgeonly soul might be thinking, what has brought me once more to this dreadful place this morning...?

"Something really ought to be done about it..." seems to be a common mantra amongst the chattering classes and now, unfortunately, it seems rather as if somebody has...

So now the government's big, shiny new plan is to introduce spot fixed penalty fines for motorists who are quite obviously driving around like idiots which is all well and good, and probably extracts a healthily satisfying "tut" from quite a lot of the people who are responding to this idea positively, and will help to bolster the dwindling coffers of H.M.G. by targeting the "evil" motorist all over again as they try to get to the dwindling supply of jobs without resorting to the almost nonexistent public transport network connecting their house to wherever they might have to get to.

And we're going along with this because it plays to that simple psychology that we all seem to think that everyone else is an idiot and deserve everything they've got coming to them, which is the kind of "one size fits all" thinking that finds us giving up so many of our little liberties in the blink of an eye or at the stroke of a pen.

"That sounds like a good idea to me" you might be thinking, confident in your own perfection when it comes to your driving skills, but it will be another matter if you get nabbed yourself by doing something that you've been doing "perfectly safely for years" and then have to immediately fork out a couple of hundred quid unexpectedly because someone's got it into their heads that our own interpretation of what ought to be regarded as "good" driving doesn't quite match up to theirs...

To be fair, some of the sights you see does make you wish that there was someone in authority around at that moment; The person reading the paper over the steering wheel, or the one putting on lipstick, or texting as they go, or thinking that using their indicators is some kind of a sign of weakness, or weaving from lane to lane at ninety miles an hour to get past those "only" doing the speed limit...

Quite often I think that someone tailgating me because I'm doing the posted speed limit is an idiot, but at the same time they're probably thinking that I'm the idiot for driving far too slowly in their opinion...

But equally, I sometimes see cyclists who seem to believe that red lights and "one way" signs are only intended for other road users and not for them, and I don't hear any suggestions of bringing in any "on the spot" fines for treating the rules of the road with that sort of contempt, either.

The worrying thing about all this for me is the small matter of proof. Just because someone claims that you've been driving poorly, or that you've been "hogging" the centre lane doesn't automatically mean that you actually have been. If you are pulled over and told that you've been committing offence "A" and you really know that you haven't, how do you go about proving it?

Or are we all just expected to hand over the kinds of quantities of cash few of us carry with us any more anyway, and take their word for it without any kind of appeals system being in place?

In a lot of cases, it might just come down you being one person's word against another's, although you can just imagine which one will be believed, and, no matter how many protestations and genuine good reasons you can put forward for having been in that middle lane for slightly too long, "There's a junction coming up and I didn't want to block it...", "The guy on the inside of me accelerated..." when it comes to listening to your excuses or just raking in a few quid for the coffers, there won't be many comebacks, I imagine.

Mind you, given that speeding, or driving without a seat belt, or using a mobile phone whilst driving are already supposed to be offences which are being policed, I can't really see these new ones making much difference either, not unless someone's very bored or needing to make up their quota, anyway...

Oh well, I suppose that anything that helps with road safety is a good thing, but I've yet to be convinced that this is the right way of going about it...