Drivers kill more of us than terrorists

I see that there is upset in Bath over proposals to close the centre to vehicles due to the risk of a terrorist attack.

Since 2000 there have been 16 terrorist incidents in the UK, resulting in 63 deaths, 4 of the incidents involved the use of vehicles as weapons.

In comparison there were 1,752 reported deaths on the roads in 2019, and between 2005 and 2018 542 people were killed on the pavement by motor vehicles, an average of 38 a year.

In the past week or so there have been three fatal single vehicle accidents in Somerset when cars went off the road, or on one occasion the motorway.

One driver drove into a house in Clevedon and five people were injured, one seriously, when a car drove onto the pavement in Stamford Hill, London.

Now at the expense of pointing out the blindingly obvious about six times as many people are being killed by drivers on the pavement as are being killed by terrorists each year, worse still we are about 292 times more likely to be killed in a traffic accident as killed by terrorists

More importantly the majority of these deaths are entirely avoidable, drivers are intoxicated, travelling too fast or playing the fool.

So why don’t we have the drunks, the boy racers and the mobile phone addicts stopped, dragged out of their cars by armed police officers and immediately remanded in a high security prison?

Oh, and in case you think I am being a bit over the top, given the number of police officers who have been injured by criminals using vehicles as weapons, I suggest that anything that encourages criminals in cars to come quietly and emphasise the seriousness of their crime might be no bad thing.

More to the point with more traffic policing we could save many many more lives than almost any other policing measure, make it harder for offenders to move around and make our public places much more civilised.

John Boxall Frome