Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Scientific rigour has not come up trumps
UNBELIEVEDLY, it is almost 60 years since the government of the day announced that the white heat of science and technology would take centre stage in furthering the economic advancement in this country. It even set up a Ministry of Technology (shortlived) to further those aims. Electricity would be so cheap that it need not be metered. Cars would be so cheap that they would be available to all, not just the elite few. And an expanded road system provided. Scientific rigour would be applied.
What was not mentioned was that all this progress would come at a price and that would be in the form of more regulation and more draconian laws.
So have those lofty aspirations been met? Far from giving more freedom to the masses, we have more road and rail congestion, more time-wasting commuting and ever worsening air pollution in in our towns and cities. Motorists could no longer be trusted to use their own judgment however, so ever more specious legislation was introduced. Scientific rigour was not always evident, so injustices were inevitable – and still are.
If people generally were to be asked today what they thought were the major dangers on the road, most would respond with drunk drivers, speeding motorists, elderly drivers and those with poor eyesight. Utterly and completely wrong.
Parliament saw the invention of the breathalyser as a glorious opportunity to control irresponsible drivers. How many innocent road users are harmed by inebriated motorists? I do not know and neither do you. Blood alcohol concentration and impairment can be quite different things, but the law treats them as the same.
Heavy drinking over a weekend can leave you over the legal driving limit even into Tuesday or Wednesday. The human brain will have returned to sobriety faster than the liver can process the alcohol. Speed limits were restricted to urban areas before the 1960s. Governments invented the mantra that ‘speed kills’. Isaac Newton (not a motorist himself ) knew that the force of any impact was related to deceleration, not speed. Safety applied to Concorde just as it does to a Tiger Moth. Speed is an essential to all travel.
It is not an ogre. Some people clamour for reduced speed limits outside schools, but these areas are busy for at most four hours a day, five days a week, 39 weeks a year, so full time limits are irrational. Anyone who imagines that average speed cameras have any bearing on safety enforcement clearly does not understand what constitutes safety. Or averages.
Age and senility are conflated, just as eyesight and observation are. Seeing and looking are quite different verbs.
For much of the past 60 years Parliament has been in control of its legislative process. Scientific rigour has often been conspicuous by its absence. Over that time, millions