Life in the slow lane

I had the misfortune of driving down the Naas dual carriageway on Saturday, heading for Straffan. Dawdling along in the inside lane, going at 40 miles per hour, I felt like a complete plonker.
Why so slow? In that stretch of the dual carriageway, close to Rathcoole, for reasons that defy the merest hint of logic or sanity even, the speed limit is actually pitched at 40 – so I was observing the letter of the law, just about. I gritted my teeth and kept my foot from plunging towards the floor. So maddeningly soporific was the effect that I wondered, meanwhile, might I nod off, veer across the road and kill a load of people including myself.
Cars were going past in numbers. Some were pulling steadily by, probably going at 43 or 44. Others were zipping past at a rate of knots, travelling at speeds of between 50 and 60. A squad car and gardai with a camera, parked on a curve, on the left hand side of the road, loomed over the horizon. A speed trap.
Gimping along like a octogenarian with a zimmer frame, I didn’t have anything to worry about. Others, however, clearly did – the seven or eight cars that had whizzed past me in the 30 seconds before I spotted the gardai were clearly breaking the speed limit.
Someone shooting along that stretch at 80mph would certainly be pushing it. But given the kind of road they were on, even the cars that were travelling fastest looked well within any sensible person’s estimation of a safety comfort zone. They were a danger to no one. And yet most, if not all of them, had been nicked. A notice hitting them with penalty points will almost certainly land on their doormats during the next few weeks. And they’ll have to pay a fat fine too.
Apparently someone in Government regards this as a positive achievement. Lots of people in the gardai as well – it is what they are doing to enforce the penalty points system. More accurately, it should be seen for what it is: an insult to our collective intelligence that brings the rules of the road, and the gardai in particular, into disrepute.
The obvious question is this: what in the name of fuck is the point of penalising people for doing something which in the first instance is perfectly safe?
There is none, apart from the bullshit PR spin that is put on these things. The gardai rack up the numbers, probably reaching some arbitrary quota or other, in the laziest possible way, without even having to bother their holes thinking. The Minister gets to make a self-congratulatory announcement. Over 200,000 drivers – or whatever the latest figure is – now have penalty points, blah, blah, blah…as if this represents some kind of victory.
The whole thing is a horrible little bureaucratic farce. For a start, the Naas dual carriageway is a mess of different speed limits, which go from 40 to 50 to 60 and back. The changes are badly sign-posted in places, meaning that there are patches where you end up asking yourself: what the hell is the limit here, anyway? (Oh, there’s a speed trap – maybe I should stop and ask them!)
Here’s the biggest joke. I turned off the dual carriageway onto the road to Straffan. This road is disgracefully bad, uneven and bumpy. It is also narrow and twisting. And, while the limit on the main road at that point is a laughable 50mph, cars are allowed to go at 60mph along this lousy, winding, minor road.
The truth is that a driver travelling at 60 here would be putting themselves and everyone else in the vicinity in danger. Pedestrians can’t be seen around corners. There are sudden dips in the surface that drag you towards the ditch. It is exactly the kind of road on which appalling accidents happen all over the country, all the time. But was there a speed trap in sight? Is there ever one along here?
Do fornicating pigs fly?

Newspapers on Monday carried the details of a terrible and tragic sequence of events which had taken place early on Saturday morning: a hit and run accident, in the vicinity of Sandyford near the Dublin mountains, was followed by another accident – probably involving the same driver – just past Stepaside. In the second crash, a man died and his wife was badly injured.
In a companion piece, it was revealed that the number of road fatalities so far this year is up by more than 10% on the same period last year. I seem to remember the Minister for Transport, Seamus Brennan, wallowing in reflected glory when the number of deaths went down last year, amid claims that the penalty points system was working. So where is he now, – and will he accept personal responsibility for the increase in the numbers being killed?
Do pigs fly even when they’re not fornicating?
The bottom line is this: the penalty points system is a crude instrument. Badly applied, it is hopelessly and stupidly anti-citizen.
It punishes people disproportionately for trivialities while allowing the gardai to give the impression that they are doing something substantive to promote road safety – when they are not.
The policy of setting up speed checks on dual carriageways, motorways and other places, where safety is never an issue that hinges on a few miles per hour, is an example of the worst kind of lip service. But drivers still get drunk and drive. They speed like crazy along narrow roads at night, especially in the country, often with too many passengers on board.
This is characteristically where accidents – and certainly the worst ones – are most likely to happen. And yet the gardai do not do even the most obvious thing to counteract this: for example, checking car parks outside pubs around closing time and engaging in a positive, planned prevention campaign by getting anyone who has had too much to drink to leave the car where it is.
No one bothers with what might really have an effect, because sitting on your arse on the Naas road of a Saturday is the easy option.
What a load of offensive codswollop.