Headlights

I have always thought that high intensity headlights are a pestilence. Now I find I am part of a massive majority. 80% of drivers surveyed by the RAC think that there should be better regulation for modern headlights.

“The headlights of some newer cars are so bright they are causing a road safety hazard for drivers with as many as two-thirds (65%) of motorists saying they regularly get dazzled by oncoming headlights even though they are dipped.

“Fifteen per cent of motorists surveyed by the RAC claim they have suffered a near-miss as a result of being dazzled by modern headlights that they believe are too bright.”

This is clearly a safety issue, but I was worried by the tone of some of the RAC’s press release. First of all, they see brighter lights as an improvement in technology. “the new designs of headlights are brighter, making it easier for drivers to see and therefore potentially safer for them...”; “Headlight technology has advanced considerably in recent years, but while that may be better for the drivers of those particular vehicles, it is presenting an unwanted, new road safety risk for anyone driving towards them...”. I doubt that it is safer for them. And it is only “better” if you accept the dominant view that people should be able to drive as fast as they want regardless of road, traffic, weather or light conditions. It is not better if one person’s ability to drive carelessly is bought at the expense of another’s difficulty.

We would not need brighter headlights if we drove a little more slowly. We might also reduce the 1800 deaths and 23000 serious injuries we cause on the roads every year.

Middle lane driving

I use the middle lane of motorways a lot. I do not consider myself a hog. I have rational reasons for using the middle lane. The government wants to bring in penalties for people hogging the middle lane, but middle lane use has to be considered in the context of overall road use. Some others consider me a hog, usually those intent on breaking the speed limit. If I am travelling at 70 mph, I cannot legally be in anybody's way. If somebody comes up behind me, flashing their lights to get me out of their way when the outside lane is clear, they can move over. If they want my co-operation with their intention of breaking the law, they're not going to get it.

If I do move into the inside lane, I will frequently come up behind traffic moving more slowly than me. I signal and wait for an opportunity to move out into the middle lane to overtake. That opportunity is often denied me for long periods by streams of cars flashing past at illegal speeds, none of whom will move over into the vacant outside lane to let me out.

It I am in the middle lane, with a slow moving vehicle in sight in the inside lane, when another car comes up behind me, I hold my position as I will soon be passing the slower vehicle. It is often the case nowadays that the driver behind decides to overtake on the inside lane instead of the outside, when the outside lane is completely clear. Perhaps they are trying to make a point. But they are actually making life worse for themselves, because the current fashion for overtaking on the inside adds an element of risk to changing into the inside lane as you now have to be aware of cars moving up on both sides.

So if you want me to move habitually into the inside lane, you have to do three things:

a) travel at or below the speed limit

b) exercise the courtesy of letting me out of the inside lane when I need to

c) overtake on the outside lane, not the inside.

But our driving culture is generally so self centred and so speed conscious that pigs will fly before that happens, so I will continue to use the middle lane.

If the government were to introduce penalties for middle lane hogging in the context of enforcing the law on speeding and on inside overtaking, they would have some rationale for it. Doing it on its own, however, is tackling the symptom rather than the problem.

Update 14th August 2014: if you wish to comment on this post, please read this first.

The responses I have had have been very interesting. There are some robust and informative debates below. There are also several assertions that it is all right for people to break speeding laws and laws on overtaking, but they take what they call middle lane hogging to be the ultimate sin. In order to take this stance, they usually have to exaggerate the behaviour that I have outlined in this post, which they then think justifies being rude to me. It does not.

If, after reading this post, you want to reiterate the arguments that your law breaking is OK but mine is not, then I will not publish or respond to them - I've done it often enough already. And if you think that defending your right to drive at any speed you want justifies you being rude to me, then I most certainly will not publish it.


If you have something new to say, and say it courteously, then I will be glad to publish it, and to respond if appropriate.

Is there a liberal case for not raising the speed limit?

When Philip Hammond announced that he was in favour of raising the motorway speed limit to 80 mph, my instinctive reaction was “That's stupid”. The immediate reaction was based on his reasons for doing it, the most prominently quoted of which, at the beginning at least, was that so many drivers on motorways exceed the limit anyway, that we may as well raise it. On that basis I look forward to him repealing the law on using mobile phones in cars and also voting for the legalisation of cannabis. No? No, I didn't think so.

His other key reason makes marginally more sense in that both cars and roads have become safer since the limit was set. Both fatalities and serious accidents have reduced significantly and steadily over a long period, and so it makes sense to look at whether the limit is still appropriate. So I thought I should, rather than nurturing my own prejudices, look at what the liberal arguments are for and against raising the speed limit.

One of the issues I think is that the argument for raising the speed limit is quite simple, whereas the argument against has to be put in a more complex way. The argument for is that people should not be prevented from doing what they want to do unless it harms someone else. If it does harm someone else then in order to come to a decision on what to do, you have to consider the relative harms of restricting the rights of person A, the doer, or person B, the done to. The main issues you have to deal with are that people get killed and that there is a cost to the environment. The figure for last year, 2010, is that, with our modern safer cars and roads we managed to kill 118 people on our motorways. Even if you accept the argument that speed kills (lots of people don't – but more of that later) presumably those 118 were killed by a probable maximum of 113 perpetrators (there were 113 accidents). These figures are from the DfT. One might say that the other millions of motorists should not be prevented from doing what they want because of the consequences caused by a very small number of people. On the environmental issue, you either ignore it or you try to come up with an argument that says the gains in time saved etc are worth the environmental costs. I don't plan to spend much time on the environmental argument, because I'd like to concentrate on the human angle and the rights angle.

To look at the other side – the case for not raising the speed limit, I think there are two key issues. First of all the principle of freedom is clear – if I want to restrict other people's freedom I need a good reason. Secondly, the reasons should be based on evidence rather than doctrine. Problems arise of course when the evidence is equivocal. Then the skills of weighing it and interpreting it come to the fore.

So, first of all, let us visit the evidence. The debate is about freedom versus life and limb (leaving the environment aside for the moment). My right to travel at what speed I like against other people's right to remain alive and unharmed. So the evidence must show how many people are killed and injured, how many of those accidents are preventable, and whose fault they are.

In terms of deaths and injuries on our roads, the trend has been firmly downwards for many years. To take a sample year pretty much at random, in 1990 5217 people were killed and 60,000 injured seriously on our roads. In 2010 the corresponding figures were 1850 and 20803. (Note: 1850 is a revision in the latest version of the 2010 figures released by the DfT.) The collection of these figures has been challenged in that a study in 2006 found discrepancies in police reporting and hospital admissions, suggesting that the method of police reporting, on which the official figures are based, was reducing the actual number. This is now acknowledged in the DfT's annual summary. But the reporting effect is minimal. So, yes, our roads are a lot safer than they were. Does that mean they are safe enough? In the announcement something was made of the fact that our roads are among the safest in Europe. That claim has been examined by fullfact.org and shown to be broadly correct, if a little disingenuous. Now, that is not an evidential claim. It's a comparative claim, and it is open to us to say “So what?” I'm not that impressed by the fact that our roads are safer than Romania's. I'd rather they were safer still. The fact that our roads are safer than other people's means nothing when we still managed to kill nearly 2000 people on them last year. So I'm discounting that comparison for the purpose of deciding what a liberal response should be.

Part of the context of this is that motorway driving is considerably safer than driving on other roads. Motorways make up less than 1% of our road network, yet take 19% of the traffic. Even so, 5% of last year's fatalities happened on motorways. So by comparison with other roads, they are very safe. But that still does not necessarily mean that they are safe enough. The next thing to check is whether speed is a contributory factor in deaths and injuries on the motorways. The evidence here needs to be divided into two parts. Does speed contribute to accidents happening? And does speed contribute to the severity of the consequences if an accident does happen? The evidence for the first question is that it makes a limited difference. There is a problem here in that the safety of cars has increased in such a way that people get the impression that they're perfectly safe to drive at high speeds because the car will protect them. Road, tyre and braking technology have also increased to the point where it is much more rare for a driver to lose control of a car at high speed. But that does not mean that it does not happen. A significant number of deaths are in single vehicle collisions – in other words, a vehicle colliding with a tree or failing to negotiate a bend. I have no data for the proportion of such accidents on motorways as opposed to other roads. It is almost certainly a lot less, but equally certainly it does happen. The safety of new cars and roads is only relative. The higher the speed, the longer the reaction distance needs to be to allow for safe braking even with new technology. And driving at least two seconds apart is an activity that seems to have escaped a lot of British drivers. (I will come back to driving habits later.) Overall the WHO estimate that 1 km/h decrease in travelling speed would lead to a 2–3% reduction in road crashes.

Looking at the consequences of accidents the evidence is much stronger. Many studies demonstrate that increases in speed cause great increases in severity of impact. The WHO paper referred to above estimates “For car occupants in a crash with an impact speed of 80 km/h, the likelihood of death is 20 times what it would have been at an impact speed of 30 km/h.”

It seems clear from this evidence then that raising the speed limit from 70 to 80 would cause a small increase in accidents and a significant increase in the proportion of fatalities and serious injuries resulting from such accidents. This is admitted by the DfT, whose initial analysis indicates a 1% increase in deaths, according to the Guardian.

This still leaves open the question of what we should do. Millions of motorists used our motorways in 2010. Only 113 of them, at most, killed somebody, and only 668 caused serious injuries (injuring 798 people). Does a few people getting it wrong give us reason to restrict everybody's liberty? I think that there is an argument for that. Here we leave evidence behind and move into the realm of consequence, principle and practice.

A lot of people assume that those who cause fatal and serious accidents are different. They are idiots, bad drivers, unlike the rest of us who are good drivers. But there is little indication that those who cause such accidents really are different – they are not boy racers, they are not serial offenders, they are not all travelling at egregious speeds that nobody sensible would ever consider. They are ordinary drivers, just like most of the rest of us, but their luck ran out. We might more legitimately think that some are a bit sillier than most of us, but even if we assume that, can we assume that the way we behave has no effect on them? We have in this country a culture of driving badly. We do not recognise it as such, but if you consider the common driving behaviour, it is difficult to escape that conclusion. Most people do not think of speeding as a crime, far from it. Large numbers of people think that they have a right to break the speed limit. This applies to people who regard themselves as law abiding in every other way. I once said to a room full of pensioners that we are all law breakers. There was instant disapproval. I asked for a show of hands of people who had never broken the speed limit. “Oh, that's not the same thing”, they said. I have one eye on Question Time as I'm writing this. The usual audience – the kind of solid upstanding citizens who are actually interested in politics. Good people, who think through and about issues. If I asked in that studio right now how many drivers could, hand on heart, say they had never broken the speed limit, I doubt that any would be able to do so. It has become routine; it is part of our driving culture. We assume that speeding is OK, which is one reason why Philip Hammond is raising the issue – he assumes it too. In his case, I think he has an idea that, given that people are travelling at 80 now, if you raise the speed limit to 80, they will continue to travel at that speed. I think their perception is not that they are travelling at 80, but that they are travelling at speed limit plus 10%. If the limit is raised, then the limit plus 10% will be raised commensurately.

Another indication of the kind of driving culture we have in this country is the way use our car horns. The meaning of sounding a horn, in the Highway Code, is “I am here”. The meaning of the horn, as used by most of us, is “I am angry with you”. The overall culture is one of a general selfishness, and a great carelessness. We work on the basis that we can get into our cars and then not pay attention till we get to our destination. We do not value awareness of what is going on around us. This is why so many of us think it's OK to use a mobile while we drive. “1/5 of UK motorists admit accessing social networking sites on their mobile phone while driving.” and many more will phone or text with. Many of us will travel at the fastest speed we can, or for the law abiding, at the stated speed limit pretty much regardless of the weather, road or traffic conditions. Varying our speed to suit the conditions does not come naturally to many of us. The culture will not change because the speed limit is raised. All it will do is assimilate the new limit into its way of thinking. (Work carried out in the United States confirms this.)

My general point here is that the driving culture is made by all of us. When people get killed on the roads most of us can quite rightly say we did not kill anyone. But it is wrong to draw from that the conclusion that we can escape responsibility for the cumulative effect of the things that we do. We determine and preserve the culture that enables the few who drive so carelessly and at such speeds that they do kill people. The speed limit as such isn't the problem: it's the way we drive that results in so many deaths and so many serious injuries. But the speed limit is a factor, because it is part of the equation people use to determine the speed at which they will drive. I doubt that the way we drive is going to change (I would like it to, very much, but I am not optimistic) so any decision made about speed limits has to take that into account.

In summary, my argument is:
- evidence shows that increasing speed causes small increases in the likelihood of accidents happening, and significant increases in the consequences of accidents, in terms of deaths and serious injuries.
- life has value, although we drive as if it does not - although the bulk of motorists are not directly responsible for deaths or injuries, the majority of us maintain a culture in which people are encouraged to drive selfishly and carelessly
- it can therefore be justified, on a liberal basis, to restrict everybody's freedom to drive at speed, in order to allow as many people as possible the freedom to live.

A more positive liberal approach would be to work on educating people about good habits of responsible driving, awareness, and the need to protect the environment. An even more liberal approach would be to get them out of their cars and onto more frequent and more reasonably priced trains and buses. But I only meant to discuss the speed limit.

Lightmare

I've been bothered by new style "HID" headlights ever since they were introduced. I've always thought they were brighter than necessary, and I find being on the other end of them a real trial. It's worse being in front of them than behind them. They wobble about like anything and they have a way of flashing up and down that delivers a laser like burst to all three mirrors at once, blinding you to anything ahead of you. They are horrible. I didn't realise how many other people felt the same way until reading "Campaign launched over 'dazzling' HID car headlamps" on the Beeb this morning.

I thought the most provocative bit in the report was the po faced response from the industry rep. "High intensity lighting [headlamps] have been solely developed to improve road safety - they are part of what is a quite sophisticated lighting system." No hint of acknowledgement that they might cause a problem to other road users. He's clearly never driven in front of one.

Apparently drivers who have them like them because they can see more. Maybe so, but they have to take some responsibility for their effect on other road users. Trouble is we don't do that sort of thing in this country - actually taking account of other road users. We don't like slowing down either, so I dare say any suggestion that people who need really strong headlights in the dark could try driving a little more slowly will be met with unnecessary derision.

If you feel like me, do go and sign the petition.

Is it possible to change the way people do things

Not when it comes to driving apparently.

The BBC reported last week on Britain's most dangerous roads, as enumerated by the Road Safety Foundation. As one might expect, half of Britain's fatal accidents happen on one tenth of our roads. The answer to this, according the Foundation, is to spend money making the roads safer. It never occurs to them to make the drivers safer. A particularly telling point is that "most crashes happened at weekends during the summer in dry, daylight conditions" which kind of suggests that the roads themselves are not at fault. They may be twisty, they may be narrow, they may be bumpy, but there is nothing dangerous about them if the drivers on them would just............. slow down a bit. And keep their eyes open. So many of us seem to think that there is no need to concentrate on the road while driving as fast as we can possibly go; the radio, the mobile - even if handsfree, the conversation of passengers and, for heaven's sake, looking at the scenery all rank more important than actually looking at what is happening on the road in front of them.

I have two suggestions, which would be a lot cheaper than the improvements suggested by the Road Safety Foundation. The first is to erect large signs all the way along the dangerous roads: "If you drive here the way you usually do, you are twenty times more likely to have an accident".

That of course relies on drivers being sensible, which is unlikely. So my second suggestion is signs that say: "If you drive here the way you usually do, you are twenty times more likely to find your insurance going up."

Neither is likely to do the job. It would be nice if one of them did though.

The Road Safety Foundation also responds to what I am tempted to call "Parsons' law of monetisation", which states that the more widespread any phenomenon is, the more likely its financial cost is to be reported, and the less likely its human cost. There is no mention on the Eurorap report page of twisted bodies, mangled limbs, orphaned children. But there are several mentions of the cost of the suggested changes and the potential savings to the Exchequer.

Perhaps I'm being unfair to the RSF. It does report its purpose as being to reduce road casualties by acting on all three components of the system - roads, vehicles and behaviour. But there's no mention of behaviour in this report. Shouldn't there be?

Speed limiters

The BBC tells us people are calling for speed limiting cars, to help with safety and to cut down on emissions. I am at odds with Safe Speed on a lot of its policies. For instance, I have a revolutionary answer to the problem of getting caught by speed cameras: drive within the limit. But on the issue of speed limiters I agree with them - stupid idea, really stupid idea, even on a voluntary basis. For far too long we have allowed ourselves to indulge in a culture which encourages drivers to believe that they ought to be able to do anything they want if they can get away with it. Viz the campaign to emasculate speed cameras. It's time that stopped. It's time we began to use all the means of social pressure available to get everybody to drive safely and sensibly. The root of the problem, I think, is that we learn very quickly that we can just get into a car and then not pay any attention to anything. Driving takes care and attention; most of the time we give it neither. Maybe everybody should be required to take the IAM's advanced driving test. It revolutionised the way I drive when I took it, and I'm sure it would do the same for many, many people. The beginning of the IAM's document is significant; "Recognising that the majority of collisions are caused by driver error...". Speed limiters simply enable drivers to *feel* safe without actually changing their behaviour. And the problem there is that it's not just salesmen and teenagers. The fact is that people within every demographic grouping kill and maim people by driving too fast and by making mistakes. And then claiming there was nothing they could do about it. It's everybody's responsibility, even if they're not driving, because it's a cultural issue and we need to change the culture so that drivers who break the law experience our disapproval instead of our sympathy.

Picture this scenario. A new year's party in a comfortable Sussex village, to name no names. A bunch of very respectable people - doctors, maybe, lawyers, businessmen and women, accountants, farmers, engineers, lecturers,shop owners. Somebody says to somebody else, "How's the new BMW?" The answer is, "Absolutely brilliant. I was on the bypass yesterday and I was doing ninety before I realised it". Now nobody at the that party is going to say, "Well, you were a bloody fool, then, weren't you". It's just not done. But it's time we started doing it as well as altering our own behaviour.

(I know what the reaction to the BMW driver being called a fool is going to be - it wasn't his fault, it happened too quickly. Well, it was his fault. He's just bought a powerful new car. He knows it's powerful, that's why he bought it. So when he gets into it, he should take care to look at the speedometer regularly, and when he's familiarising himself with the car he should accelerate watchfully the first few times to see how it does without breaking the speed limit. I've heard people say - and they seem genuinely to believe it - that they can't keep looking at the speedometer all the time because it takes their attention away from the road. Well, if they can't, we should take the keys away from them now, because if their eyesight and reaction times are that bad, they're a danger to themselves and everyone around them.)

On driving and reporting

Another in my very occasional series of news reports headlined with the opposite of what the news actually says. A new charge of causing death by careless driving will entail sentences of up to five years in jail. Its effect will be to apply harsher (I would say more appropriate) sentences to people who cause death by driving carelessly. Most people convicted under this charge will be more heavily penalised than they would have been before. So why do all the headlines say "Killer drivers could avoid jail" - BBC, "Killer drivers could escape jail" - Independent, "Killer motorists may be spared jail" - Guardian. Our media - and these are the respectable ones - are cloning themselves again, and looking for a good headline.

On the whole, despite what I said above, I think we should be concerned if drivers who kill - for whatever reason - get away with anything other than a custodial sentence. I like the approach quoted in the BBC article "Lorna Jackson, from the road safety charity, Brake, said she still hoped custodial sentences would be a "starting point"." In other words a non custodial sentence would only be applied in truly excceptional circumstances. It doesn't matter how good a driver's record is, it doesn't matter how exemplary they are as a person or a driver; if they've been careless they need to take responsibility for that. Driving stands along side binge drinking as one of the last areas where people feel the right to defend to the death (in this case usually someone else's death) their right to be irresponsible.

A moment's carelessness when you're driving is not just a moment's carelessness. It's symptomatic of an attitude which most drivers in this country have, which is that they can just get into a car and drive. They don't think as they get into the car that they need to concentrate on their driving every wheelturn of the way from point A to point B. It is culpable behaviour if they allow themselves to be distracted by their phone - even if handsfree - or their passenger, or their tomtom, or their radio. And I will admit that, yes, while driving home this afternoon, I did shout at the idiot on the Jeremy Vine show who wanted to close all our libraries. If the act of doing that had distracted me from what was going on in front of the car to the extent that I mowed down and killed somebody else, then I would have had to take responsibility for that, and not say, "I'm truly, deeply sorry, but please let me off with community service because it was just carelessness".

Brake can be found at http://www.brake.org.uk.