The GOS belongs to the Association of British Drivers, a splendidly Grumpy organisation and highly recommended. Their opponents in the tree-hugging-save-the-ickle-foxy-woxy-I-ride-a-bicycle-and-so-should-you Road Safety industry often try to portray them as a bunch of jack-the-lad boy racers, but nothing could be further from the truth - let's face it, the GOS is 65 years old, has 40 accident-free years of driving and only three SP30s behind him and drives a tiny little diesel hatchback, so he wouldn't exactly feel at home in their company if they weren't a sober, rational and remarkably well-informed bunch of people united solely by their desire to have common-sense rule the roads.
Which over-long preamble is to introduce to you their magazine, "On the Road", which drops through the Grumpy letter-box regularly and always provides a feast of things to be grumpy about.
Here's a selection from the latest issue …
• The Department for Transport is not meeting most of its targets and lacks a clear strategy to put it right, a committee of MPs has concluded. Targets for congestion, air quality, public transport and CO2 emissions are all being missed. Of seven targets, the department only met two - road safety and rail punctuality.
Committee chairman Gwyneth Dunwoody said "This is a terrible picture of failure … I imagine most rail users would be surprised to hear their experiences described as the pinnacle of the department's annual achievements".
And, of course, we all know that road casualties fluctuate remarkably little from year to year, and any improvement is likely to have been achieved by manipulating the statistics.
• Ealing Council have been very sensible and opened six of their bus lanes to cars to ease congestion. They claim that the bus lanes just add to the congestion. Ken Livingstone's Transport for London were furious, and at one stage threatened the Council with legal action.
• The 2006 Road Safety Act comes into force next Autumn, and includes a new offence of causing death by careless or inconsiderate driving. Anyone who causes death by driving without due care and attention will face up to five years in prison. Wow, that's longer than many people convicted of rape, GBH or manslaughter.
At present careless driving does not carry a jail sentence, even if it leads to death or injury, and legal experts are very worried about the new offence. "That might involve no more than a moment's carelessness," said a senior judge, "you could be distracted by a child in the back seat. We have all been in that position."
Judges fear that juries will refuse to convict defendants once they realise it will mean a prison sentence for a motorist with no previous convictions who might not have been driving too fast, or uninsured, or under the influence of drink or drugs. James Richardson, editor of the lawyers' textbook Archbold, writes of his "despair at the prospect of ordinary, hard-working citizens being sent to prison for the unintended consequences of a moment's inattention." He says it abandons the long-held principle that criminal law should punish people only for their criminality, and that criminality involves an evil act and a mind that goes with that act.
Lord Lyall, former Attorney General, said recently "if ordinary negligence, which sadly happens to lead to a death, is to send yet more people to prison, the tragedy of the death will not be undone. It will simply be compounded by injustice."
The GOS has said several times before that, to put it crudely, shit happens. People make mistakes. Things go wrong. Sometimes accidents happen just because they are accidents, not because anyone's at fault. It's terrible when these cause death or injury, but taking revenge on those involved is childish and spiteful. What it certainly won't do is make the roads any safer.
Here's a case in point: last July a drunk wandered into a dual carriageway in Wigan and was killed by a car. The speed limit was 70, but the car was only doing 50. Predictably there were cries of "something must be done!", so they've reduced the speed limit to … wait for it … 50mph. Presumably after the Autumn the driver would be in danger of going to jail for something that wasn't his fault.
• William Allen died of cancer. After his death, his family received a Notice of Intended Prosecution from the local scamera partnership. His daughter explained that William was dead, and sent them his death certificate.
The partnership replied that there was still enough evidence to pursue the matter, and that "mitigating circumstances cannot be considered".
It would be nice to be able to report that the partnership had ordered his family to dig him up to face the charge, but sadly he'd been cremated.
(I made that last bit up).
• A woman whose car had been crushed by a falling tree during recent gales, went back the next day and found that a traffic warden had slapped a parking ticket on it.
• In Ohio the state government has concluded that speed cameras lead to an increase in collisions, and has banned them.
• A spokesman for Transport for London has publicly admitted that they lied in the run-up to Foxy Ken Livingspoon's congestion charge. "We knew that first impressions would be lasting," he said, "and we decided to publicise the risk of chaos even though we were pretty sure there would be no serious problems. It worked superbly …."
The charge duly failed to raise the sum of money predicted, and they have had to rely heavily on fining non-payers. In order to make this possible, TfL have also admitted that they deliberately made the charge difficult to pay.
Nor has the system been remotely efficient. Only seven percent of the drivers who appeal have their fines upheld, and one driver was able to use photographs to prove that when the congestion camera snapped him, he was actually 80 yards outside the zone.
It has also been revealed that TfL claimed that the charge had saved up to 70 injuries a year, but that they'd actually made the figure up. Their own annual review ("Fourth Annual Monitoring Report") shows that congestion has increased, which didn't stop them from claiming they had cut it by 30%. On some roads there is now 5% more traffic than before the charge. An RAC investigation also found that average speeds are only a third of what TfL claim, while even TfL's own figures show that on the example journey they'd selected to show how well it was all working, the time saved was just 8%, or 20 seconds.
Not a resounding success, then, Foxy Ken? Still, never mind. Who knows better than a Labour politician that the truth is a negotiable commodity that should never be allowed to stand in the way of what you want to do?
• In Belfast the enforcement of parking regulations has been "sold" to NCP. This means that in future they will have to pursue motorists in the civil courts rather than the criminal courts - because NCP aren't the police, and don't have access to the criminal justice system.
Trouble is, civil courts award damages, not fines. If NCP want to pursue a motorist for a parking offence and want him to pay, say, £50 - how are they going to explain that to the judge? Who has the motorist injured by overstaying his parking time or parking in the wrong place, and how are they going to prove that this has caused exactly £50-worth of damage?
• Some estimates suggest that to introduce Road Pricing on a national basis will cost the government £62billion. It takes £30million to build one mile of motorway, so if the GOS's maths is correct that money could build 2,066 miles of new motorway (we have 4,800 miles of motorway at present).
'nuff said?
• There are sinister indications that there is a move afoot to make ALL national speed limit roads carry a 50mph limit. In Suffolk campaigners have already been unsuccessful in their attempts to prevent the County Council from imposing a completely unnecessary 50mph limit on the whole of the A140.
Now there's news that one of the finest, straightest rural single carriageways in the country, the A515 from Buxton via Ashbourne to Sudbury is to have a 50mph limit.
And Kent County Council really did try to place a 50mph limit on all the national speed limit roads in the county, but were refused by the Department for Transport who have insisted that they tackle each road separately.
Which, one suspects, they damn well will. If you live in Kent, you've been warned.
• If the government does press ahead with national Road Pricing, one company that will profit is German-based T-Systems who make the satellite spy technology. Which is presumably why they gave more than £10,000 to the Labour Party last year, and £45,000 to the IPPR, a pro-road-charging think tank.
• Finally, one often hears the same old clichés about the need for Road Pricing. Two of the hoariest are "Doing nothing is not an option" (true enough), and "We can't build ourselves out of trouble" (absolute b*ll*cks. Almost every country in Europe is doing exactly that, building new roads to cope with new traffic loads).
There is a third cliché which is even dafter - that new roads create new traffic. Just imagine it - the road-laying machinery chugs off into the distance, the chairman of the County Council puffs out his belly and cuts the ribbon, little lumps appear in the tarmac that push and heave and grow bigger until voilà! - thousands of bright, shiny new cars suddenly pop into existence by some sort of parthenogenesis and go tooting off nose-to-tail down the road. Sweet.
What particularly puzzles us is, how come when we're short of entry-level housing the answer is to build thousands of new houses, but when we're short of roads the answer is to tax us until we bleed?
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