Police speed checks don’t cure road ills
Of all new car registrations, 65% are on the monochrome scale. Isn’t that a bit boring?
As soon as I saw three or four headlight f lashes, I knew what was ahead: the safety (speed) camera van that occasionally sits in the 40mph zone through a nearby village was in operation.
It happens a lot. And that half of oncoming vehicles tend to warn you of its presence shows, I think, how seriously or not speeding is viewed by most drivers. You wouldn’t warn a stranger not to nick a loaf of bread because there’s a security guard on a supermarket’s door.
So sure enough, a minute later I came across it, in one of its preferred spots on the verge, lens poking through the back window as I cruised past.
I’m not convinced many people speed on this 40mph stretch and, if you do, you deserve what you get. But there’s justifiable reason the van is there: it’s a dodgy stretch of road. I drive it a lot, a few times most days, and by my reckoning, around once a month there’s a prang at some point within its six-mile length.
Thing is, they’re not in the zone inhabited by the van, because that has good visibility and that 40mph limit. The problems come in the five miles of tree-lined, arcing, narrow 50mph limited road each side, which has muddy verges, poor visibility, difficult junctions, and on which I know people approach those hazards too fast – though that doesn’t mean, necessarily, at above the speed limit.
So I have cognitive dissonance about this. I’m grateful the road’s problems have been noted and some effort has been made to slow people on it, yet also I’m encouraged by oncoming driver’s warnings. Because I, and perhaps they, are unconvinced that the occasional presence of a van with a camera in the back of it is enough to cure this road’s ills.
Greetings, pop pickers: it’s the least surprising top five of the year. And grey is back at number one.
For nine straight years until 2008, silver was the most popular colour for new cars in the UK, following which white and black have, between them, kept the top two spots in the charts nailed down. But last year grey crept to the top of the pile, relegating black to second, with white in third.
Fine. Grey is arguably a bit more interesting than white or black – and it’s easier to keep clean than black, which is, for me, a terrible colour for most cars.
But what strikes me, for yet another year, is that when you add the sales for those three colours and silver together you end up with more than 1.62 million cars, so around 65% of all new car registrations are on the monochrome scale.
And isn’t that just a bit, I dunno, boring? Looking around the car park of a modern office building has all the colour of a 1950s TV programme.
So who is to blame? Fleet managers who want to preserve residual values by making sure company cars are coloured monochrome, the automotive equivalent of house builders painting rooms cream? (Only 559 cars, a drop of 34%, were cream last year, incidentally.) Or is it car makers that offer one kind of blue but about seven greys and silvers, and with non-metallic white and black as their least expensive colour options? Or are we just not very imaginative?
Either way, the campaign for more colourful vehicles begins here.