The return of the horse and carriage.....

You love to drive your car, it’s a brilliant car, it does 0-60mph in 7.5 seconds and it hits a documented top speed of around 150mph, you will state here that you have a clean driving licence and have never had a road traffic collision in the time you have been driving, over three years. You have also attended fatal RTCs, and visited the victims of these collisions in hospital.

You were watching a program earlier on ITV1 about whether or not the limit should be lowered on rural roads to 50mph, in a blanket fashion. A road that you know of quite well is the A617 from Newark to Mansfield, you don’t drive on this road a lot, but you know it has recently also been reduced from 60mph to 50mph. Recently you were driving along that road, travelling at around 50mph and a woman in a Vauxhall Corsa VXR overtook you, you thought she must have been doing around 70mph maybe more, in order to overtake you, she contravened solid white lines and just missed oncoming traffic by a matter of centimetres.

Obviously the local council had taken the advice of the extremely beautiful, but perhaps naïve Miss Katie Shephard, and reduced the speed limit. But had that had any effect on this driver? No. She broke the speed limit, contravened solid white lines and almost caused a head on collision.

Lowering speed limits will have absolutely no effect on drivers who are willing to drive over the speed limit. If a person is willing to drive at 100mph on a 60mph limited road, then will lowering it to 50mph make them slow down? No, of course it won’t, it will just make those drivers who want to drive at 60mph (lawfully), slow down, and make their journey more mundane and less of an experience.

Last but not least, one thing you can’t stand is drivers who toddle through a NSL road at 45mph and then continue through 30mph limits at that speed, be damned the children who get in their way. Will the proposals that Miss Shephard supports stop these drivers from killing children? No, of course they won’t, it's obvious.

Next thing, people will be crowing like cockerels, you can hear them now:

‘Lower the speed limit to 10mph on all roads, let’s reduce traffic collisions, let’s save lives.’

You can't understand their naivety, it is quite disturbing.