The War Against Motorists Continues

The Russo-Ukrainian War and the small civil war in Sudan aren’t the only wars around. In every Western democracy, governments are waging a coordinated war on motorists. The same irrational arguments are used. Last week saw a small victory for the British government, the abandonment of further so-called ‘smart’ motorways (freeways). Widely hated London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s Ultra Low Emission Zone expansion is also running into trouble, although since I’ve been consulted over its legality I am somewhat constrained in commenting. The half-crazed ULEZ policy, no offense intended, is imploding almost as fast as Fox News following Rupert Murdoch’s cave-in to the Bad Guys, the biggest Aussie collapse since their second innings in the 1981 Headingley Test Match.    Incidentally, I can scotch the rumor that Shrimpton & Associates are supplying arms to the RSF rebels in Khartoum. It’s true that we were sounded out, informally, but I was a little unhappy with the genocide in Darfur. I know it was only a small genocide but nonetheless, it wasn’t very nice. As a general rule we don’t get involved in arms deals anyway – they can get very messy and are a bit of a legal minefield. If you’re nice, can supply an end-user certificate and the British Government have no objection we can always see what we could do, but nothing bigger than a main battle tank, please.

Dumb motorways

‘Smart’ motorways were introduced back in 2006 as a means of killing motorists. That’s not how it was phrased at the time of course – the British Civil Service never says what it means and never means what it says. The bright sparks who came up with the original plan were only interested in making life easier for motorists by widening motorways.

I should explain that from the late 1950s the Cabinet Office, which was desperately anxious about journey times in the UK being shortened, put pressure on the then Ministry of Transport (the old name survives in the annual MOT test) to make Britain’s new motorways as narrow as possible, with chicanes to cause traffic jams. The Cabinet Office understood that if you could narrow a six-lane freeway to four lanes you could back traffic up for miles. British motorways were designed with a hard shoulder, effectively an emergency lane, to provide a refuge for broken-down vehicles. New technology in theory allowed the hard shoulder to be turned into a running lane, with CCTV monitoring and automatic alerts. Most cars do not come to a sudden stop when they break down – even a vehicle with a punctured tire can run on for a few hundred feet. Provided there was a lay-by every few hundred feet there would be little chance of a vehicle being stopped in a running lane. The Cabinet Office saw their chance and turned the scheme on its head, spacing the lay-bys so far apart that motorists would be bound to be stranded in a running lane. The death toll so far is over 40. Another word for the policy would be corporate manslaughter. [caption id="attachment_701957" align="aligncenter" width="780"] A lay-by on a smart motorway - note there isn't another in view.[/caption] Unhappily for the Cabinet Office, a grieving widow kicked up such a fuss that the Prime Minister intervened. Although Sunak is compromised he also has kompromat on the Cabinet Office, in other words, it’s something of a Mexican stand-off. The Cabinet Office gets to determine most government policies, but not all. The Prime Minister is allowed a small concession from time to time. Scrapping new ‘smart’ motorways is the latest.

The cost of slowing down traffic

Motorways were first proposed in Britain by that nice man Lord Montagu of Beaulieu before the war (the Second World War, that is). Jerry of course nipped the scheme in the bud, the Cabinet Secretary of the day being – you guessed it - a German spy. It’s not impossible that the idea for the autobahnen actually came from Lord Montagu. If you can speed up your own traffic and slow down that of your strategic competitors you gain a significant advantage. My late old friend Idris Francis, a brilliant Welsh inventor, millionaire, keen motoring enthusiast, and Bentley and Alvis owner, did the computation about 20 years ago. For every mph you can slow average traffic speed you can knock around £2.5 billion off GDP. That was 20 years ago. These days it would be more like £5 billion.

Idris’s figures were widely circulated and never undermined. In other words, he was in the ballpark, probably right in the middle knowing Idris, who also held sound views on Europe. That’s why it’s so difficult to get motorway speed limits raised in Britain. The minute a Transport Secretary shows signs of raising the limit he or she will be moved, Cabinet posts in practice being in the gift of the Cabinet Secretary. (The current Cabinet Secretary behaves like King Charles 1, no offense intended, but without the latter’s charm or taste in music.) Originally there was no motorway speed limit at all, but Jerry was never going to allow us the same freedoms as German motorists. Labour’s Barbara Castle, who couldn’t even drive and would have been a menace on the roads if she had been allowed to (I liked Barbara but would never have allowed myself to be carried as a passenger in a car driven by her) was prevailed upon to introduce the absurdly low 70 mph limit. This was on the basis of one motorway pile-up in fog when nobody should have driven at more than 30 mph anyway. The lower the speed limit the longer it takes for a vehicle to transit a particular length of road. The longer the transit time the greater the congestion. The greater the congestion the greater the risk of collision. The consequences of a collision are less at lower speeds, but the likelihood of a collision increases. No doubt the Cabinet Office saw the extra accidents as a bonus. I am not implying by the way that everyone in the Cabinet Office is evil. British Intelligence has penetrated the organisation and several Cabinet Office officials are actually loyal to the Crown, strange though that may sound. A similar policy was foisted on the States by German assets in the Nixon Administration, which was heavily penetrated by the wily Hun, no offense intended. Nixon was persuaded to go with a ludicrously low 55 mph freeway limit on the specious ground that naturally aspirated gasoline automobile engines are most efficient at that speed. They might be, although it’s debatable. [caption id="attachment_701959" align="aligncenter" width="696"] Tricky Dicky[/caption] What the policy ignored was the economic efficiency of high-speed limits. So far as I know no one has ever calculated the economic cost of the 55 mph limit, which remained federal law, with limited exceptions, until 1995. I would be very surprised if the cumulative economic cost was much less than $500 billion. There was no proven safety benefit of course, as freeways became more congested and drivers had to take their eyes off the road to concentrate on their speedometers just in case the smokeys were hiding behind the next advertising hoarding. The policy was manically enforced by economically illiterate states keen to garner extra revenue, not caring about the bigger picture.

Speed cameras

Manic enforcement is not just confined to the States. Speed cameras and guns, both fixed and manually operated, have proliferated. Very determined efforts have been mounted both here and in the States to conceal serious flaws in both radar and laser speed guns. Dutch-designed Gatso cameras in the UK for example use the same frequency as some weather radars, resulting in wild distortions in the event of precipitation. I’ve seen readings way above the maximum speed of which the vehicle was capable. Radar speed guns normally need a control measurement for enforcement, hence the white calibration lines painted on the road surface in the UK. Laser speed guns however do not need a control check on motorways in the UK. LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) is great for measuring the distance to a single object, provided no other object is close to the gun itself.

LIDAR performance deteriorates markedly in a multiple-target environment, such as a road, however. Moreover, lasers emit three lobes, not one. Police operators in the UK are not trained to avoid target capture by the side lobes and I doubt that they are in most American states. In one case in which I was involved, working with a laser scientist, the officer, who had no idea what he was doing with respect, dragged one of the side lobes across three cars parked on the opposite side of the road, creating a wholly false reading. The calibration check was out by a similar factor of course.

The drink-drive limit

Almost all official government advice gives different safe levels of alcohol consumption for men and women. This is nothing to do with discrimination and everything to do with physiological differences between the sexes. Why are these differences not reflected in drink-drive limits? I have defended and prosecuted many drink drive cases. I can only remember one where a male motorist over the official UK limit (80 milligrams of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood – in metric so that nobody can understand it) actually wrecked his automobile. Even then he only rolled it (after a fairly wild New Year’s party) on the way home and didn’t actually manage to hit anybody. Drink drive limits in both the UK and the USA are unscientific. The limit for male drivers should probably be 120 milligrams, not 80. The war on motorists will continue until the German-influenced Civil Service in the UK and the federal bureaucracy in the States can be brought under democratic control. Legislators need to grasp the fundamental point that slower traffic speeds mean slower economies. As the forcing out last week of British Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab, effectively at the behest of civil servants opposed to government policy, demonstrates, transforming the UK and the USA into functioning democracies is still a long way off.

RBN Interview

With apologies for the sound quality here’s the link to my interview with Mark Dankof on Republic Broadcasting Network last Friday:  republicbroadcastingarchives.org Not sure what happened to the sound! My next interview is a podcast, on VT Radio! Russian readers may have caught me last Monday on Channel 1.

Barry Humphries AO CBE (1934 – 2023)

The great Aussie comic Barry Humphries sadly passed away in hospital on the 22^nd following a fall at home that broke the poor man’s hip. He was the author of the Private Eye comic strip The Wonderful World of Barry McKenzie, later made into a hit movie. Born in Australia, Barry moved to England in 1959, where he became friends with fellow comics Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Willie Rushton. A friend of a friend (Christopher Booker), he introduced British audiences to colorful Aussie phrases such as ‘chundering’ and ‘pointing Percy at the porcelain’. [caption id="attachment_701962" align="aligncenter" width="96"] Sir Les[/caption] He is most famous of course for his superb characters Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson, the wonderfully authentic Australian Cultural Attaché in London. As a female impersonator, he had no peer. A magnificent stand-up comic he never really retired, indeed he was planning a further tour later this year. He was extremely funny and will be much missed. Good on ya, mate.

We’ve also seen the sad loss this week of another golden oldie, a black actor and singer Harry Belafonte, friend and colleague of Martin Luther King. He was both talented and principled.

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All contributions are gratefully received! buy.stripe.com/14k5kZ8R74XofscfZ0 Plan A is to publish my next column on Friday, May 5^th, the day before the Coronation of His Majesty King Charles III. Hopefully, the Cabinet Office won’t have done too much damage to the ceremony – they’ve been interfering of course, and it will show, sadly. No Coronation robes for the peers and, even more absurdly, no elephants in the Coronation procession! Indeed they haven’t even invited the Indian princes. I am sure that His Highness Yaduveer Krishnadatta Chamaraja Wadiyar, Maharaja of Mysore, who I gather is a splendid chap, with respect, would have welcomed an invitation, for example. No word from New Delhi yet on the date for His Majesty’s Durbar. https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2023/04/the-war-against-motorists-continues/?feed_id=182