It was an accident, by the way: the cause of the sudden increase in traffic volume I noticed while writing the last blog entry. In fact, it was on the very road I was talking about – where I'd enjoyed that surprisingly revealing if noisy and smoky walk – probably at the rather dangerous junction where I regularly turn off to go down to my village.
There've been fatal accidents there and at other points on the road nearby before. Indeed, it seems part of the experience of modern driving that if you regularly travel along the same stretch of road – particularly out of town – you become very familiar with the accident black spots, even to the extent of having personal recollections of when such and such an accident took place, usually because it held you up on a journey. These recollections are often prompted by the roadside shrines to accident victims that have become a familiar part of the landscape. One route out from Cambridge I frequently drive along is peppered with such memorials – for one of which I indeed remember seeing the wrecked car being attended by the emergency services – and more and more seem to crop up all the time.
And yet we accept such daily horrors, probably precisely because they are an inevitable by-product of driving, at least with the technology, infrastructure and cultural attitudes that characterise this activity in the present. Driving is an inherently dangerous, potentially lethal activity. Yet we blind ourselves to this fact, possibly because this is the only way we can pluck up the courage to actually get behind the steering wheel. You could call this a benevolent form of blindness – so long as we still bear in mind that we need to be safety-conscious – in that it enables us to perform a useful function for society and ourselves.
But there is another form of blindness to the risks of driving, which consists of the absence of any proper sense of danger at all. At the risk of generalisation, I would say that this is typical of many men, who seem to go through life altogether without believing in the dangers associated with some of their activities. It's this same attitude that leads some men to find the idea of war – at least, in anticipation – exciting rather than terrifying, as if they don't really believe they could be killed. This lack of a sense of danger is typical, too, of another type of driver: the young, particularly the male of the species, who very often also seem to have no concept of their own mortality (bless them). But then it is precisely this sort of driver who is likely to drive most recklessly, not just for the negative reason that they don't believe they'll have an accident (though that helps) but for the 'positive' reason that they're enamoured with the excitement of driving as fast as they can and the thrill of the chase. Allowing kids like this to drive without any form of restraining supervision or technology (such as an accompanying adult or automatic speed limiters) is like putting a loaded gun in the hands of a child, taking off the safety catch and then telling them not to pull the trigger.
It may sound outlandish and reactionary to suggest that tough restrictions should be placed on young persons' freedom to drive, at least that of newly qualified drivers. But then you read news stories such as one that appeared today about a 19-year-old girl who's been sentenced to four years' detention because she crashed into a car while texting on her mobile phone, killing the other driver: a 64-year-old grandmother. She clearly didn't realise how dangerous it is to take one's attention away from driving even for an instant; so perhaps she really wasn't fit to drive.
The leniency of the sentence has been criticised. Far better to have tougher preventive measures in the first place and thereby reduce the number of accidents of this sort. But let's consider the sentence. Along with the majority of people in this country, you could be forgiven for thinking, I'm in favour of a radical overhaul of sentencing for criminal offences. What kind of punishment fits this girl's crime, if such a question makes any sense? I would like to see sentencing be a factor of two main objectives: 1) to make the perpetrator of the crime fully aware of the gravity of what they've done, so as to encourage remorse and a true resolution never to repeat the same mistake; and 2) to satisfy the demands for justice for the victims. On the second criterion, you could say that a proportionate punishment might have been a term of imprisonment so long (e.g. 25 years plus) that the girl in question could never have a family of her own, given that her action has deprived a family of its mother and grandmother. But on the first objective, the term that has been imposed will probably be sufficient to make the driver feel truly remorseful about what she did and determined never to do it again. So perhaps something in between would be appropriate: maybe a sufficiently long time to make the offender have serious concerns about whether she could ever have a family of her own, without necessarily destroying that possibility altogether – enough to take away the so-called best years of her life. Certainly, it would be worth considering a life-time ban from driving, rather than the five years that was imposed.
Sad, though, that one should have to talk in such terms and that two families have been devastated (that of the victim and that of the offender), as one of the police officers involved in the case put it. And this is just an illustration of how awful the human effect of motoring accidents caused not even necessarily by recklessness, but by carelessness or inattention, can be. Perhaps we really do need to give serious consideration to changing the way we assess people's suitability to drive and the punishments we mete out for driving errors to reflect a greater moral consciousness of the gravity of such incidents.
Sometimes it surprises me that there aren't many more accidents than there already are. In a way, driving is a quite bizarre phenomenon: we devolve the responsibility to provide mass transportation to individual amateurs, who are expected to be able to operate potentially lethal equipment (cars) and be capable of making intelligent, informed, split-second life-and-death decisions with a relative absence of training to a truly professional standard such as that which is expected of pilots, train drivers or even coach drivers. Put millions of such drivers onto the overcrowded, low-tech road infrastructure of this country that is supposed to support them, and it is inevitable there will be lots of crashes. Perhaps it's time to up the competency level and reduce the number of drivers.
No comments:
Post a Comment