As the year draws to a close, and as we have just passed the day when there are more cars on the UK’s roads than any other (apparently, 18 million cars took to the road on 23rd December, this seems appropriate,
“Whereas most people, as they watched the coming and going of cars on a busy road, would see a normal, properly functioning traffic system, Stuart could only perceive it as an endless succession of narrowly averted accidents. He saw cars hurtling towards each other and considerable speeds, and missing each other by inches – time and time again, every few seconds, repeated constantly throughout the day. All those cars, he said to me, only just managing not to crash into each other. How can people stand it? In the end it became too much for him to contemplate, and he had to stop driving…
Watching the northbound traffic on the M6, you could see his point. Nobody seemed to think anything of taking a life threatening risk, just to shave a couple of minutes off their journey. I started to count the number of times people pulled out without indicating, or over take on the inside lane or tailgated someone remorselessly, or cut in on another car without giving it enough space.”
From “The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim” by Jonathan Coe (pages 5, 6 & 202)
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