OneAndOneIs2

There's a reason I watch very little TV. In fact, there's two reasons: Most of what's on is crap; and too much of what's on makes me angry.

The latter reason is the one currently on my mind.

Lou turned on the TV and did some channel-hopping this evening, in her ever-optimistic hope that there might be something worth watching on at the time.

There wasn't, but there was something on BBC 1 about traffic accidents and how not enough is being done to stop them. When we tuned in, they were showing a crash test dummy, child-sized, being hit by a car at 20 and at 30mph.

The fact that four year old children very rarely stand alertly at attention in the middle of the road facing a car coming towards them at 30mph and not braking was deemed an irrelevance, I assume, because it got no mention when the presenter was exclaiming in mock-astonishment about how much more damage was done at 30mph.

Then there was a load of tired old repetition of car-haters most cherished myths, such as how many lives have been saved by speed cameras (the figure they invariably quote is an outright fabrication - look up "regression to the mean" and you'll understand more than the people who came up with the number) and how many accidents are "speed related" (Which they pad mercilessly in order to make it seem significant: If a drunken thirteen year old stole a car and drove it at 40mph down the high street before careering off the road and hitting somebody on the pavement, they'll count it as "speed related" because he was going faster than the speed limit.) This was followed by an outraged example of how the local councils were failing in their duty by not putting reminders of the speed limit up near a school - something that's utterly unnecessary, since school roads are either deserted because the pupils are in classes, or so swamped with kids that any motorist on the planet will slow right down because we all know how fecking stupid kids near roads can be.

The constant message being hammered home was always "If cars slowed down, less people would be killed" and that is a message that really, really gets my back up.

Because in their constant attempts to show how much harm a car does when a pedestrian steps into the road in front of it, the focus was never once off the car. Never once did it occur to them to ask why, exactly, the pedestrian had been so fucking stupid as to step in front of a ton of metal traveling towards them at high speed.

They were so busy pointing out that a child's head would hit the bonnet of a car doing 20mph at 17-and-a-bit mph, as compared to a car doing 30mph resulting in a head-to-bonnet speed of 34mph, that they never spared a moment to explain what the child was doing in front of a car in the first place.

When I was a child, we were positively plagued by the big road safety campaign, the Green Cross Code. Every time we watched TV, Doctor Who or the Green Cross Code Man's daft robot was there, brainwashing us with "Stop look listen" messages. Every bus stop had posters reminding us to look both ways before crossing the street. As a result, in 30 years of crossing the road, I've managed to avoid leaping out in front of an oncoming car. (Just you wait, I'll be run down by a bus tomorrow now)

The road safety messages that they pester us with today is "If every car slowed down by 2mph, fatalities would drop by several hundred people a year" - never once do you see "If parents taught their kids to look before running into the road, they wouldn't be in a position where they're likely to get hit by a car"

Here's a simple example of the basic principles, guys:

Child A is standing on the pavement when a driver comes towards him at 5mph over the speed limit. Child A sees the driver coming and stays on the pavement. Result: No accident

Child B is standing on the pavement when a driver comes towards him at 5mph under the speed limit. Child B doesn't look and steps into the road. Result: An accident occurs

There was an article in the local paper last year. Some teenage girl had gone out for the night with friends, and on her drunken walk home, she stepped into the road without looking and was hit by a car, which happened to be speeding. She wound up, not surprisingly, in hospital. She was outraged, outraged, when the car owner's insurance company sued her for the costs that arose from the accident.

The paper tried to slant the whole situation in her favor, constantly highlighting the fact that the car was going too fast and reminding everybody how greedy insurance companies are, but the article was left profoundly unconvincing by the simple and obvious fact that she was the one who had caused the accident. The fact that the car was breaking the speed limit was an irrelevance: It was her own fault that she had been hit by it.

It's not often that you feel sympathy for insurance companies, but it must be said that if every time a Darwin Award candidate decided to pick a fight with a car I was insuring, I was expected to pay for it, I'd be pretty unhappy too.

The search for safer roads today is aimed at one single factor above all others: The speed of the driver(s) involved. Tailgating, aggressive driving, driving without due care and attention, you never hear anything about. And if a car hits a pedestrian, you'll never hear any sympathy directed towards the emotionally-scarred driver.

I blame the media and politicans, personally. But not for the obvious reason, that they focus on a single measurable quantity, speed. No, for their constant over-use of the "Think of the children" cry and the constant reminder that there are pedophiles loose in the world today.

You'd think that child abuse was something that only started happening a decade or so ago, if your only source of information was the headlines. It clearly isn't, as is made abundantly clear every time I go to the library or a book shop. It seems every week, there's yet another entry in the "Best Sellers" list that's the autobiography of somebody who was abused as a child.

(Am I the only one, by the way, who finds these books repugnant? I flick through them occasionally and every single one has read more like "erotica for paedophiles" with overtones of "A guide to molesting children without getting caught" than it has like "I want to raise awareness of this terrible crime in the hopes that it will stop others going through the same ordeal I did". The sheer graphic sexual detail they go into would put any hardcore sex book to shame - is that kind of information really needed in the type of book these are meant to be?)

The upshot of the huge surge in awareness about paedophilia is a whole generation of children is being brought up by parents afraid to let their children out of their sight. The kids that live next door to my parents play exclusively in their own back garden, unless their mother is watering the front garden, in which case they're allowed briefly out onto the pavement. They've asked to be allowed to go and play at a friend's house, only to be told no because (I kid you not) their mother wouldn't be able to see them if they went to somebody else's house.

Most parents don't go to quite that extreme, but they do bar their kids from going more than a few hundred yards from their home. With such limited range available to them, is it any wonder that kids are encouraged to think of the roads as playgrounds where it's suitable to play football and generally run around heedless of traffic?

We did the same when I was that age, of course, but we picked very quiet roads and we kept an eye out for cars. We didn't, as kids do today, act like the roads were ours and cars were the intruders who should get out of the way.

With attitudes like that being instilled in today's youths, is it any wonder that kids keep being involved in traffic accidents?

I'm a geek. I'm a fan of technology and when I have problems to solve my thoughts usually turn first and foremost to computers and other such gadgetry for a solution. And yet *I* can see that if you get hit by a car when trying to cross the road, the problem is that you picked a damn stupid place or time to cross the road, and not that the car was traveling at the wrong speed.

So why is it so hard for the people who say they really care about reducing accidents to stop focusing solely on the machines and start looking at where the real problems are?

Is there some kind of psychological blind spot involved? Or are these Speed Kills Campaigners really just a more vocal version of the grumpy old ladies that tut disapprovingly and shout "Maniac!" every time they see a car driven by somebody younger than they are at a speed faster than they can walk?