Speed Awareness Course

It’s a fair cop.  You got me.  I was speeding.  When the letter came through I was, predictably, pissed off.  Pissed off that all those times I was doing 110mph on the way to Scotland nobody batted an eyelid but then I got busted doing 35 in a 30 zone just a mile from my house.  If I was going to get caught I’d have gone faster, really got my money’s worth.  Anyway, here was the simple choice: take 3 points and a fine or attend a Speed Awareness Course.  

I chose the course, mainly because the wording of the letter made it appear like it was free.  It wasn’t, it was £97, same as the fine.  In fact, technically, all it enables you to do is to pay ANOTHER £97 before you start on your points, meaning that the government can get more money out of you.  There used to be a time when you could argue against speed cameras, ask for the photograph, which was always taken from the rear of the car, and then say you couldn’t remember who was driving and the photo failed to identify the culprit.  Then they got wise to this, so the owner of the vehicle was assumed to be liable if the actual driver was not forthcoming.  Just to be clear, the rest of the legal system operates on the assumption that you are “innocent until proven guilty”, but not speed cameras.  Speed cameras are about generating revenue, so nobody gives a toss about 1000 years of legal precedent or basic human rights, they just want the cash thank you very much.  Now you don’t even get the option, they won’t release the photograph until you identify the driver.

Sorry, did I say this was all about revenue?  Of course it isn’t it’s about safety.

I booked my day off work and attended the early morning session at The Holiday Inn in Harrogate.  There were three sessions, each 4 hours long, the earliest beginning at 8am and the latest finishing at 8pm, and there were 25 people at each session.  To be clear, that’s 3 sessions, 25 people per session, £97 per person, so just short of £7500 for the day.  But this is not about revenue, it’s about safety.  The dangerous delinquents at my session included 2 nurses, a vicar, a woman who provided full time care for her disabled brother and a guide dog trainer, all of whom had had to take time away from their commitments and all of whom had been caught by speed camera.  In fact everyone had been caught by speed camera, the reason being that they wouldn’t have been stopped by the police, it would have been a complete waste of their time.  We’d all been snapped by a camera, denied access to the legal system and coerced into coughing up.  Of course, you CAN defend this in court but it will cost you £900 and, if [when] you lose you can be hit with a bigger fine and more points.

The course itself was nowhere near as bad as I was expecting.  I won’t say that the four hours flew by however the patronising was kept to a minimum and it was a useful refresher, given that it’s 19 years since I passed my test.  Ultimately, however, what I took away from the session was that I am actually quite a good driver, so surely it would be better to concentrate on genuinely dangerous drivers on the road by introducing some sort of common sense selection criteria to those snapped by cameras, after all, this is not about revenue, it’s about safety.  There was a “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” style quiz with handsets so all answers were anonymous and nobody was shamed, but for the most part everyone answered everything correctly.  There was a mind-numbing video showing the effects of a Vauxhall Omega breaking at gradually increasing speeds, 15 minute of watching a car slowing down, and there was a lot of frank honesty: even the instructors conceded that they speed from time to time, EVERYBODY speeds sometimes (as REM didn’t say) and we were, in fact, more unlucky than dangerous.  And that’s it, it’s all about the luck of the draw, we didn’t do anything that pretty much every driver will do every day, we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  We were a token gesture to social conscience.

As I sat in my car, ready to leave, I felt a strange sense of vindication.  I AM a good driver, I am a considerate driver, so did I need this course?  Well...yes, actually.  Because I WANT to be a good driver, I don’t want someone’s death on my conscience, and I certainly don’t want to die in a car crash, so in order to keep on being a good driver I need to be snapped out of bad habits every now and again. In fact I’d go as far as to say that everyone who uses the roads – cars, vans, lorries, busses, motorbikes, pushbikes – should ALL have to attend one of these courses every 5 years to keep the highway code fresh in our minds.  Then we might actually believe this was about safety when, at the moment, it’s blatantly all about revenue.