Oliver, you talk like a politician i.e. can't you just get straight to the point?
It's quite simple: whatever vehicle you are in charge of - obey the rules/law of the road or get sent to prison for being a twat.
How difficult is that?
Oops, missed this earlier--must have posted at the same time.
Not quite sure what your issue is with my post. I was getting perfectly straight to the point I wanted to make. You wanted to make a completely different point.
I certainly agree that people should adhere to traffic law, but I doubt that even 100% adherence to the law would solve the many issues that present. Obviously, it would help a great deal, but it's not so simple.
The law in this country is demonstrably weak. For starters, the Highway Code isn't even a law, unlike other countries. Rules for drivers of vehicles have to be cobbled together from all sorts of laws by an executive agency of the DfT (the Driving Standards Agency) into a non-statutory document. It is well known that the Highway Code contains a lot of questionable advice. Much of the advice in the HC doesn't have the status of laws. This leaves plenty of loopholes, and that's only the law before a crash has happened. After the crash, as we know, the situation is much worse and many injustices occur.
None of this changes the point that I was making, simply outlining the causes of why our commitment to excessive mobility causes people to make mistakes, e.g. to be careless through being too tired. That's not an excuse; people should of course not drive when they're too tired but still do it all the time, and there are reasons why they take this cavalier attitude. But how tight is the law or enforcement against being too tired to drive? There's no objective measure, no tiredness breathalyser test or anything like that. People don't often get prosecuted for falling asleep at the wheel; the driver who caused that terrible train crash a few years ago was a rare exception. I can't remember if he actually confessed or not.
So, no, it's not as simple as you say. I was only arguing that there's no single issue, but a complex of issues. Other examples could be added.
Oops, missed this earlier--must have posted at the same time.
Not quite sure what your issue is with my post. I was getting perfectly straight to the point I wanted to make. You wanted to make a completely different point.
I certainly agree that people should adhere to traffic law, but I doubt that even 100% adherence to the law would solve the many issues that present. Obviously, it would help a great deal, but it's not so simple.
The law in this country is demonstrably weak. For starters, the Highway Code isn't even a law, unlike other countries. Rules for drivers of vehicles have to be cobbled together from all sorts of laws by an executive agency of the DfT (the Driving Standards Agency) into a non-statutory document. It is well known that the Highway Code contains a lot of questionable advice. Much of the advice in the HC doesn't have the status of laws. This leaves plenty of loopholes, and that's only the law before a crash has happened. After the crash, as we know, the situation is much worse and many injustices occur.
None of this changes the point that I was making, simply outlining the causes of why our commitment to excessive mobility causes people to make mistakes, e.g. to be careless through being too tired. That's not an excuse; people should of course not drive when they're too tired but still do it all the time, and there are reasons why they take this cavalier attitude. But how tight is the law or enforcement against being too tired to drive? There's no objective measure, no tiredness breathalyser test or anything like that. People don't often get prosecuted for falling asleep at the wheel; the driver who caused that terrible train crash a few years ago was a rare exception. I can't remember if he actually confessed or not.
So, no, it's not as simple as you say. I was only arguing that there's no single issue, but a complex of issues. Other examples could be added.