Roadhogs, disown your inner Clarkson – slow down

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/16/motorists-toad-speed-drivers

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With the Jeremy Clarkson inquiry finally under way, Top Gear hangs by a thread. Worrying times indeed for the committed petrolhead as many urban motorists may soon find that reaching third gear is also a thing of the past.

The 20mph speed limits that have spread across the streets of Bristol and Brighton, and will soon cover most of Manchester and Edinburgh, are set to keep cars in check on London’s bigger, arterial roads. This move, which has delighted safety campaigners but left motorists fuming, is perceived – for better or worse – as a radical nationwide attempt to slow down traffic.

Some see this clampdown on speed as the latest blow to the virility of the untrammelled driver. When daily work for many has been physically reduced to clicking a mouse in an office, the act of flooring the pedal is perhaps one last hurrah for the hunter-gatherer within: a need for speed, as natural as allegedly throwing a punch at one’s TV producer.

Speeding, as has long been recognised by insurers, is largely if by no means exclusively a male trait. But speed’s real divide is town and country, where a car – like a fox, or wellies – can signify very different things.

In the rural village where I grew up, the eventual introduction of speed limit signs was regarded with amusement and mild derision, a townie affectation: cars were essential, and few observed the 60mph limit on the road into town. Living in London, where public transport is plentiful and more than 40% of households don’t have a car, traffic is usually someone else’s problem – and fault. And motorists, their cars’ suspension regularly punished by speed bumps, are used to going slow: average London journey speeds are well below the 20mph limit now being imposed.

Will 20mph be another method to raise revenue through fines? A sense of persecution was fuelled by the former transport secretary, Philip Hammond, and the communities and local government minister, Eric Pickles, who talked of “ending the war on motorists”; now Labour, too, has promised to abolish hidden speed cameras. The parliamentary advisory committee on transport safety (Pacts), though, warns that such loose talk costs lives: a long decline in road casualties was briefly reversed earlier this decade as councils cut cameras. The committee suggests that driver behaviour took its cue.

Driving more slowly, as all the evidence shows, saves lives. But our calculations of liberty versus risk are rarely straightforward. On the same day the Daily Mail warned against the march of 20mph limits, in response to 1,713 deaths and 22,000 serious injuries in road accidents in 2013, the Times splashed on human rights groups castigated for suggesting an increased risk of terror attacks was preferable to mass interception of personal data.

And while committed in principle to saving lives, the government is raising the national speed limits for HGVs as a boost to business, despite admitting that it will cause more deaths – a trade-off that has prompted concern from many, not least the lorry drivers who wish to be neither killers nor victims.

The mildly hippy-dippy musings of the “slow” movement have spread from food to travel. It might seem counterintuitive in transport, but the popular contempt for HS2 – “cutting journey times to Birmingham” – means that ministers barely mention the words “high-speed” as they extol the train network’s benefits.

Could we be happy driving more slowly? The transport minister, John Hayes, in the kind of reflection that might earn him a clobbering from the Top Gear team – should we encounter them again – has talked of making roads beautiful. More importantly, the people who manage traffic on motorways and via city red lights reckon we move further at a consistent, slower maximum speed; faster limits threaten stop-start congestion. When all are at 20mph, the happy G-Wiz driver slows no one.

You don’t have to be a Clarkson to yearn for the rush of wind in your hair, or the taste of diesel, slowly destroying heart and lungs; the inner Toad, longing for speed, lurks in many. Yet at the time of the 1865 Red Flag Act, a horseless vehicle capable of reaching 10mph was referred to as high-speed; after the advent of motor cars, drivers were freed with a new universal speed limit: 12mph. For a Victorian Clarkson, hitting 20mph would have been a sensation.

Drivers have become desensitised to their velocity. The results we know. But there is another way. The macho motorist of the future, rather than seeing the limits as an affront, might seek kudos being stately, unhurried, majestic. And from keeping everyone a little safer.

• This article was amended on 18 March 2015 to clarify that figures given for deaths and injuries in road accidents are for 2013, not last year.