Over-regulation on the roads

Should the amount of traffic lights on the roads be reduced? I say yes. There has been a steady increase in the number of junctions around where I live in London to which lights have been added and my impression is that most of the time it clogs the roads up and slows everything down. When driving outside of rush hour, frankly, I’d be tempted to ignore the lights and drive on where safe to do so, if it wasn’t for the fact that in many cases these days some wanker will have been stationed by the local council to watch my actions via a 24–hour camera and send me a £100 fine.

On a related note, TFL’s Road Safety Advisor, Jenny Jones was on BBC breakfast this morning having a pop at 4x4s in London. She did a good job of confirming my suspicions that TFL contains a fair number of irrationally prejudiced, interfering gits. Her basic argument was that 4x4s are unnecessary and that “PEOPLE NEED TO REALISE THAT THEY’RE JUST NOT ACCEPTABLE”. She did not have a sensible answer to arguments that 4x4s take up no more road space than do a lot of cars and are no more polluting, that the feeling of safety for which Londoners supposedly purchase them in fact has a solid basis in the statistics and that the real problem is actually goods vehicles, which take up much more space and produce a third of all pollution from vehicles, not to mention being noisy and damaging roads inadequately designed for their use.

My response to Ms Jones would be that everything beyond breathing and bare subsistence could be said to be unnecessary and, assuming that civilization is about more than the merely necessary, what is actually unacceptable is the government, the council and TFL steadily increasing the number of restrictions, obstructions, prohibitions, penalties, taxes, tolls and charges in the way of law–abiding citizens in a free country without reasoned, genuine justification.

Labels: driving, london