During a brief stop-off on Wednesday morning at Brixton Cycles, I fell into the kind of chit-chat that’s a customary part of any healthy relationship with a cycle retailer. Recalling that the staff member serving me had previously complained about cycling conditions on Westminster Bridge, I remarked to him on the news that Transport for London is due to start installing protected bike paths on either side of the crossing.
“It’s good news about Westminster Bridge, isn’t it?” I’d asked.
“It’s good news about Westminster Bridge, isn’t it?” I’d asked.
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| The parliamentary clock tower: tourist icon turned site of terror |
The comment was to appear darkly ironic within hours, after Khalid Masood, a convert to Islam, deliberately drove a vehicle at pedestrians on the bridge, killing three, before fatally attacking a policeman guarding the Houses of Parliament. Masood was himself fatally shot following his attack.
I’ve had particular cause to ponder my comment, however, because following the attack I was called away from my normal reporting duties onto the effort to try to identify what led Masood to commit mass murder in the name of his islamist ideology. It was the latest of a large number of extremist attacks I’ve covered stretching back nearly 20 years to the 1998 Omagh bombing, which killed 29 people in a town in Northern Ireland.
As I tried to work out key details of the killer’s life, it struck me how many of the incidents I’ve covered have had some connection with motor vehicles. Two days before another islamist, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, killed a guard outside Canada’s parliament in October 2014, one of Zehaf-Bibeau’s associates had deliberately used a car to run over two Canadian soldiers, killing one. In the aftermath of the 2013 Boston bombing, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan, who had planted the two bombs, hijacked a car a went on a high-speed chase through the Boston suburbs. Tamerlan died during the subsequent gun battle when his brother accidentally drove the car over him. The Omagh bomb was planted in a car.
The Westminster attack follows two other recent serious attacks by motor vehicles. In July last year, a driver killed 86 people in Nice by driving a truck at them. In December, an attacker killed 12 people in Berlin with a truck.
The motor vehicle is an ideal weapon, it occurred to me, not only because it is so familiar and humdrum an item but also because it provides the dehumanising distance that’s a vital aspect of many weapons. It’s easier psychologically as well as practically to kill people via the familiar action of pressing down on the accelerator pedal than if one is looking them in the eye and throttling them.
As I rode my bike around Birmingham trying to make sense of Masood’s act, however, I had a further thought. It was impossible to miss how much of Birmingham’s landscape was blighted by the presence of sweeping dual carriageways full of high-speed motor vehicles. It was, in particular, a miserable experience spending time by Hagley Road, the six-lane thoroughfare next to which Masood seems to have spent the last few months of his life. While no-one but Masood bears responsibility for his appalling crime, it is unsurprising that cities criss-crossed by such barriers to walking and cycling end up feeling like atomised, impersonal places where it’s hard to make human connections with strangers.
None of this should minimise the horror of Wednesday’s events. There is something uniquely shocking about seeing coverage of such gruesome events in a place that one knows intimately. Masood’s attack ended on a cycle track down the side of parliament that I use frequently, most recently the day immediately before the attack. I spend a reasonable amount of time around Westminster and had been invited to an event in the Palace of Westminster last Tuesday, though I hadn’t attended.
It is an appalling shock to be reminded of how quickly a single, malicious act can transform such a setting. One of the injured people, for instance, had to be rescued from the Thames. It had never occurred to me that a person might be thrown by a car over the parapet and into the river. I often roll my eyes as I ride through Parliament Square at how tourists take delight in simple things like being photographed in a British telephone booth or pretending to hold the parliamentary clock tower between their fingers. I will regard the scene differently in future knowing that people engaged in such goofy sight-seeing were mowed down because of one man’s misdirected anger and confused ideology.
There is, it seems to me, an especial horror that the deaths and injuries that Masood caused were a result of a deliberate act. In the aftermath of the attack, some people have sought to relativise the attack by pointing out that the attack’s death toll of four was smaller than the five or so average daily deaths on Great Britain’s roads. But it must deepen the pain of the bereaved to know that their loved ones’ deaths resulted from someone’s deciding they were expendable, rather than from negligence, however blameworthy. There is a clear, well-established legal and moral difference between a premeditated and deliberate act and other deadly driving.
Nevertheless, motor vehicle terrorism is effective precisely because it can be so hard to distinguish the start of a deliberate, pre-meditated terror attack with a car from normal bad driving. When Masood first started revving his engine and speeding up on Wednesday afternoon, his behaviour can’t have seemed that different from the deliberately aggressive driving I encounter on a daily basis in London. I see countless drivers’ speeding up to grossly excessive speeds to express their momentary fury over having been held up, often by me on my bicycle.
The closer the interest one takes in road safety, the less removed from day-to-day driving an attack like Masood’s appears. In December, the driver of a Ferrari supercar was racing another driver down a street in Battersea, near my home in south London, when he lost control, mounted a pavement and hit six school pupils, including one who was thrown over a bridge abutment onto a car below. This past Saturday evening, the police were forced to clarify they didn’t suspect terrorism after a driver ploughed onto a pavement in Islington, north London, at 50 mph, hitting a group of people queuing to get into a pub. A car combines huge destructive power and ease of use in exactly the same dangerous way as a gun. While there is a moral difference between being willing to race a powerful sports car down a public road around pedestrians and deliberately seeking to kill people, the difference is not as big as the racers would like to think.
But I was struck anew by how pervasive the dehumanising effects of motor vehicle dominance are when I headed to Birmingham on Thursday to research Masood’s last days. When I first headed west from Moor Street station to Hagley Road, I struggled to find a viable cycle route and found myself on one-way streets wholly dominated by unbroken streams of fast-moving cars. When I finally reached the miserable stretch of Hagley Road where Masood lived latterly, I discovered an area blighted to an extraordinary degree by Birmingham’s planners’ decision to base the city’s transport around private cars. When I headed off to the traditional heart of the city’s Muslim communities, in south-east Birmingham, I encountered still more dystopian roads.
It seemed to me impossible to ride a bike on the fast-moving, six-lane “Queensway” system that carries the vast bulk of the traffic. In places, I resorted, shamefully, to riding down the pavement. The only consolation was that my decision jeopardised barely anyone since so few people walk in such a hostile environment.
One of the ironies of my trip was that the rougher, poorer areas such as Sparkbrook that have produced many of Birmingham’s jihadis were far less unpleasant for a cyclist than plusher areas such as Edgbaston. The narrow streets of brick, terraced houses in the poorer areas at least kept vehicle speeds lower. Even in these areas, however, cars crowded pavements and clogged the streets. Residents clearly preferred their cars to the buses that were trapped in the same traffic.
There are, of course, multiple, complex reasons for the spread of violent jihadism. The more I’ve learned about Khalid Masood, for example, the more I’ve been struck by how his act last Wednesday seems largely to have been an expression of nihilistic rage, rather than a defined ideology. I was struck by the obvious similarities with the personal story of Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people last June at a nightclub in Orlando, another incident on which I personally reported.
Yet my experience this past week in both London and Birmingham has led me to think that societies where people shut themselves off in cars will always be wary and fearful. A car provides a near-perfect shield for the violent, obscuring their faces and making their intentions harder to read. Like most cyclists, I know the terrifying readiness of many drivers to point their vehicles at cyclists and force their way past. The ultimate threat is a violent one: if you get in my way, I’m more than ready to drive over you.
While there is more work, clearly, to be done on weeding out Islamist ideology and shutting down Jihadi networks, it’s also obvious that western societies have for far too long shrugged at letting drivers wield deadly power with minimal accountability. That danger has seemed until now for most people an inevitable yet unavoidable side effect of cars’ flexibility and convenience as a means of transport. But no other killing machine as potent as private cars is given such free rein in most European countries as motor vehicles are. The logic of a renewed effort to boost alternatives becomes still more compelling as horrors like Thursday’s mount.
The views in this blogpost are entirely my own private reflections and are unrelated to my work for my employer.
I’ve had particular cause to ponder my comment, however, because following the attack I was called away from my normal reporting duties onto the effort to try to identify what led Masood to commit mass murder in the name of his islamist ideology. It was the latest of a large number of extremist attacks I’ve covered stretching back nearly 20 years to the 1998 Omagh bombing, which killed 29 people in a town in Northern Ireland.
As I tried to work out key details of the killer’s life, it struck me how many of the incidents I’ve covered have had some connection with motor vehicles. Two days before another islamist, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, killed a guard outside Canada’s parliament in October 2014, one of Zehaf-Bibeau’s associates had deliberately used a car to run over two Canadian soldiers, killing one. In the aftermath of the 2013 Boston bombing, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan, who had planted the two bombs, hijacked a car a went on a high-speed chase through the Boston suburbs. Tamerlan died during the subsequent gun battle when his brother accidentally drove the car over him. The Omagh bomb was planted in a car.
The Westminster attack follows two other recent serious attacks by motor vehicles. In July last year, a driver killed 86 people in Nice by driving a truck at them. In December, an attacker killed 12 people in Berlin with a truck.
The motor vehicle is an ideal weapon, it occurred to me, not only because it is so familiar and humdrum an item but also because it provides the dehumanising distance that’s a vital aspect of many weapons. It’s easier psychologically as well as practically to kill people via the familiar action of pressing down on the accelerator pedal than if one is looking them in the eye and throttling them.
 |
| The site of a raid on Hagley Road, Birmingham: one of many parts of the city made more miserable by its dependence on a deadly dangerous transport mode |
As I rode my bike around Birmingham trying to make sense of Masood’s act, however, I had a further thought. It was impossible to miss how much of Birmingham’s landscape was blighted by the presence of sweeping dual carriageways full of high-speed motor vehicles. It was, in particular, a miserable experience spending time by Hagley Road, the six-lane thoroughfare next to which Masood seems to have spent the last few months of his life. While no-one but Masood bears responsibility for his appalling crime, it is unsurprising that cities criss-crossed by such barriers to walking and cycling end up feeling like atomised, impersonal places where it’s hard to make human connections with strangers.
None of this should minimise the horror of Wednesday’s events. There is something uniquely shocking about seeing coverage of such gruesome events in a place that one knows intimately. Masood’s attack ended on a cycle track down the side of parliament that I use frequently, most recently the day immediately before the attack. I spend a reasonable amount of time around Westminster and had been invited to an event in the Palace of Westminster last Tuesday, though I hadn’t attended.
 |
| Cyclists wait by the Palace of Westminster: a familiar sight, easily transformed by a moment's violenc |
It is an appalling shock to be reminded of how quickly a single, malicious act can transform such a setting. One of the injured people, for instance, had to be rescued from the Thames. It had never occurred to me that a person might be thrown by a car over the parapet and into the river. I often roll my eyes as I ride through Parliament Square at how tourists take delight in simple things like being photographed in a British telephone booth or pretending to hold the parliamentary clock tower between their fingers. I will regard the scene differently in future knowing that people engaged in such goofy sight-seeing were mowed down because of one man’s misdirected anger and confused ideology.
There is, it seems to me, an especial horror that the deaths and injuries that Masood caused were a result of a deliberate act. In the aftermath of the attack, some people have sought to relativise the attack by pointing out that the attack’s death toll of four was smaller than the five or so average daily deaths on Great Britain’s roads. But it must deepen the pain of the bereaved to know that their loved ones’ deaths resulted from someone’s deciding they were expendable, rather than from negligence, however blameworthy. There is a clear, well-established legal and moral difference between a premeditated and deliberate act and other deadly driving.
 |
| A car crash I encountered on Thursday morning: a reminder that automotive mayhem is a constant, not an exception |
Nevertheless, motor vehicle terrorism is effective precisely because it can be so hard to distinguish the start of a deliberate, pre-meditated terror attack with a car from normal bad driving. When Masood first started revving his engine and speeding up on Wednesday afternoon, his behaviour can’t have seemed that different from the deliberately aggressive driving I encounter on a daily basis in London. I see countless drivers’ speeding up to grossly excessive speeds to express their momentary fury over having been held up, often by me on my bicycle.
The closer the interest one takes in road safety, the less removed from day-to-day driving an attack like Masood’s appears. In December, the driver of a Ferrari supercar was racing another driver down a street in Battersea, near my home in south London, when he lost control, mounted a pavement and hit six school pupils, including one who was thrown over a bridge abutment onto a car below. This past Saturday evening, the police were forced to clarify they didn’t suspect terrorism after a driver ploughed onto a pavement in Islington, north London, at 50 mph, hitting a group of people queuing to get into a pub. A car combines huge destructive power and ease of use in exactly the same dangerous way as a gun. While there is a moral difference between being willing to race a powerful sports car down a public road around pedestrians and deliberately seeking to kill people, the difference is not as big as the racers would like to think.
 |
| Sparkbrook: an area with problems, but less blighted than many plusher parts |
But I was struck anew by how pervasive the dehumanising effects of motor vehicle dominance are when I headed to Birmingham on Thursday to research Masood’s last days. When I first headed west from Moor Street station to Hagley Road, I struggled to find a viable cycle route and found myself on one-way streets wholly dominated by unbroken streams of fast-moving cars. When I finally reached the miserable stretch of Hagley Road where Masood lived latterly, I discovered an area blighted to an extraordinary degree by Birmingham’s planners’ decision to base the city’s transport around private cars. When I headed off to the traditional heart of the city’s Muslim communities, in south-east Birmingham, I encountered still more dystopian roads.
It seemed to me impossible to ride a bike on the fast-moving, six-lane “Queensway” system that carries the vast bulk of the traffic. In places, I resorted, shamefully, to riding down the pavement. The only consolation was that my decision jeopardised barely anyone since so few people walk in such a hostile environment.
One of the ironies of my trip was that the rougher, poorer areas such as Sparkbrook that have produced many of Birmingham’s jihadis were far less unpleasant for a cyclist than plusher areas such as Edgbaston. The narrow streets of brick, terraced houses in the poorer areas at least kept vehicle speeds lower. Even in these areas, however, cars crowded pavements and clogged the streets. Residents clearly preferred their cars to the buses that were trapped in the same traffic.
 |
| Orlando's Pulse nightclub: scene of a previous horror |
There are, of course, multiple, complex reasons for the spread of violent jihadism. The more I’ve learned about Khalid Masood, for example, the more I’ve been struck by how his act last Wednesday seems largely to have been an expression of nihilistic rage, rather than a defined ideology. I was struck by the obvious similarities with the personal story of Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people last June at a nightclub in Orlando, another incident on which I personally reported.
Yet my experience this past week in both London and Birmingham has led me to think that societies where people shut themselves off in cars will always be wary and fearful. A car provides a near-perfect shield for the violent, obscuring their faces and making their intentions harder to read. Like most cyclists, I know the terrifying readiness of many drivers to point their vehicles at cyclists and force their way past. The ultimate threat is a violent one: if you get in my way, I’m more than ready to drive over you.
While there is more work, clearly, to be done on weeding out Islamist ideology and shutting down Jihadi networks, it’s also obvious that western societies have for far too long shrugged at letting drivers wield deadly power with minimal accountability. That danger has seemed until now for most people an inevitable yet unavoidable side effect of cars’ flexibility and convenience as a means of transport. But no other killing machine as potent as private cars is given such free rein in most European countries as motor vehicles are. The logic of a renewed effort to boost alternatives becomes still more compelling as horrors like Thursday’s mount.
The views in this blogpost are entirely my own private reflections and are unrelated to my work for my employer.
I'm grateful for this post. As one who for a quarter-century has campaigned against killer-driving, I've wrestled with the simultaneous similarities and differences between "normal bad driving" that kills innocents and "deliberate premeditated terror attacks" carried out with cars. This post is helping me understand the likenesses and the distinctions, without trivializing any of the horrors.
ReplyDeleteI tweeted it: https://twitter.com/Komanoff/status/846176746730913792. Apologies for mangling a quote to fit it in.
Charles,
DeleteThank you for your kind words. We're all indebted to people like you who've been looking at this issue since it was even less fashionable than it is now.
All the best,
Invisible.
Compelling thoughts. In the past there was no practical solution to this dilemma. With the advent of computer-controlled cars, a solution may be on the horizon.
ReplyDelete@cwhope
Chris,
DeleteThank for your the comment.
The point about future autonomous vehicles is an interesting - and I think rather fraught - one. It's certainly true that autonomous vehicles will be programmed to drive more safely than human drivers. They'll pay attention and keep working reliably in a way that humans don't. It's noteworthy, for example, that the death toll in last year's Berlin Christmas Market attack was limited because the truck had an automatic braking system that stopped the driver from carrying out more than a small fraction of the attack he apparently attended. But I was at a meeting recently where someone raised the possibility that autonomous vehicles might in future be used to deliver car bombs. So I suspect that, as in many fields, there will be swings as well as roundabouts as this technology matures.
All the best,
Invisible.
There is a closer link between Masood's act and the daily death toll on our roads than you care to admit. Someone *has* decided that vulnerable road users are expendable - the government and other authorities who persistently refuse to make roads safe for us.
ReplyDeleteSo it's the exact same thing, just a different ideology - the primacy of motor transport, 'smoothing traffic flow' and the willingness to ignore the danger it poses.
Stevie,
DeleteThanks for the comment. The ultimate purpose of this blog is to reflect on the moral philosophy issues behind use of the roads. It makes no sense at all to me to claim that poor road design and a deliberate, ideologically-driven attack are the "exact same thing". The UK has one of the world's best road safety records. It's deeply regrettable that the record for vulnerable road users is far less good than that of many other countries. But, while I wish that record were better, the failure stems from nothing like the desire to kill for ideological reasons that seems to have driven Khalid Masood. I've laid out in the piece some of the many ways that I think British planners have got these issues terribly wrong over the last 70 years. But it helps no-one, it seems to me, to pretend that there's deliberate malice of the kind you suggest.
All the best,
Invisible.
Dear Robert,
DeleteI believe that Stevie was not referring to "deliberate malice," but to a belief that one's political goals are more important than human life.
British planners know full well that implementing their plans will result in a large number of dead people. But they do it anyway.
Consider the following two scenarios:
1. A British government organization deliberately chooses not to use the latest Dutch traffic designs; each person involved knows full well that this decision will result in several deaths.
2. A terrorist organization decides to plant a bomb; each person involved knows full well that this decision will result in several deaths.
Quite frankly I see little moral or ethical difference. In each case, the people involved see attaining the goals of their organization as more important than human life.
Good read, thanks, though "... poorer areas such as Sparkbrook that have produced many of Birmingham’s jihadis ..." reads as being harsh on Birmingham which isn't actually a 'jihadi-factory' - and doesn't 'Jihad' mean only 'Struggle' rather than the more ominous connotation it picks up along the way?
ReplyDeleteAnonymous,
DeleteThanks for the comment.
I was careful in my use of language. A single institution in Sparkbrook - the Darul Ihsaan Islamic and Fitness Centre - has been at the centre of two separate terror trials in the last five years. One trial led to the conviction of six men planning a gun and bomb attack on an EDL march in 2012, while the second led to the conviction of 11 men in 2013 on charges of planning a rucksack bombing campaign against UK targets. I don't think these are the only recent convictions of people associated with Sparkbrook. So, while it's clear that the vast majority of Sparkbrook's Muslim population finds the beliefs and actions of such people abhorrent, the area has produced more than its fair share of violent would-be attackers.
You also queried the use of the term Jihadi. I'm aware, of course, that jihad means only "struggle" in Arabic. But Jihadi is by now an accepted term to describe those who view violence as an integral part of their religious obligation to jihad and who seek to use violence to further their islamist ideology. While any term to describe ideological violence inevitably falls short, I prefer this one to loaded terms such as terrorist and I certainly prefer it to ones that link the islamists' ideology to islam as a whole, rather than strictly to their marginal and tendentious interpretation of the religion.
All the best,
Invisible.
...and our legal system appears to justify the killing of others with motor vehicles by punishing people more for damaging a van wing mirror (£800 fine) than for running someone over with a car (£30).
ReplyDeleteThe English (and Scots) legal systems certainly have many shortcomings when it comes to the treatment of death on the roads. There is certainly scope for improving its handling of such issues. I'm not sure it makes sense, however, to point to two individual, extreme cases and suggest that they paint a picture of a system that justifies killing.
DeleteAll the best,
Invisible.
The very same day as the London terror attack, a driver on the Wirral was cleared of death by dangerous (and careless) driving, even though he drove his truck onto a pavement, killing a four-year-old child. Dehumanising indeed.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.chesterchronicle.co.uk/news/chester-cheshire-news/delivery-man-cleared-causing-neston-12781152
That's a very sad, and sobering, story. What's clear is that the driver was driving dangerously by the very act of using the pavement as a convenient place to park his van. Pavement parking is, as we know, all too common in the UK and seen as perfectly acceptable by many drivers. So I'm not surprised the jury saw nothing wrong in it and found him not guilty. They completely missed the point - or chose to miss the point - that he shouldn't have been driving on the pavement in the first place. If he'd parked properly - on the road - the little girl would not have been killed. Thoughts to her and her family.
Deletepaz,
DeleteIt so happens that I'm very familiar with Neston, since my wife's parents live on the outskirts of the town, and I know exactly where that awful incident happened.
I'll repeat the point that I've made in response to another post. I believe there are terrible shortcomings in how road death cases are prosecuted. I wasn't in court for the case in question so don't know all the evidence, nor why the prosecutors didn't pursue the lines that Russell has already outlined. It's clear, nevertheless, that the system should do a much better job of instilling in drivers a full sense of their responsibility for their vehicles' terrible killing power. Prosecutors should be more forthright in pursuing cases against drivers who fail to recognise that responsibility. Most important of all, of course, is that roads should be better designed to guard against the risk of this kind of tragedy, which is all too predictable when drivers are routinely allowed to park on both sides of a street that's too narrow for it.
All the best,
Invisible.
The bottom line, of course, is the little girl should have been safe walking on the pavement. The danger was introduced by the van driver. Last Thursday I was walking up Crwys Road (busy, lots of shops and people) in Cardiff and in front of me a small child was walking slightly ahead of her mum. A large parcel delivery van pulled up and mounted the pavement ahead of us, swung across almost the pavement's full width and then parked halfway across it. He was no further than 10 feet from the little girl and clearly couldn't give a rat's arse about anyone apart from his urgent need to deliver his goods. The similarities between this incident and the one that killed the little girl struck me hard at the time. I was tempted to say something - I sometimes do - but was in no mood for the verbal assault that would undoubtedly have been flung my way.
DeleteCheers
Russell
An excellent read. I've recently come to the view that, where America has guns, we have the car as our outlet for primordial rage.
ReplyDeleteWanderlust,
DeleteThank you for your comment.
I think I've already discussed this issue with you on Twitter. While I don't like Britain's high degree of car dependence and don't like many of the attitudes that it encourages, I'll reiterate two points I made on Twitter in response to this neat piece of equivalence.
The first point is that, as someone who lived four years in the United States, I can assure you that Americans express their rage with cars even more than people in the UK. The US last year suffered more than 40,000 road deaths, compared with 1,810 in the UK. Since the US's population - around 320m - is around five times the UK's 65m, that's a far higher death rate per head of population than the UK's. It's also a far higher death rate per mile driven.
The other point is that, while the UK's record isn't as good as it should be, particularly for vulnerable road users, the UK still boasts some of the world's safest roads. I wish, of course, that the UK's roads were safer. But it's also worth bearing in mind that the UK's roads are, shockingly, relatively civilised compared with those of somewhere like Germany or, worse still, eastern Europe and the developing world.
All the best,
Invisible.
Have you seen this? Apparently, the cycle lanes are to blame for the incident.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bikebiz.com/index.php/news/read/peer-blames-cycle-lane-on-westminster-bridge-for-terrorist-attack/020958
Andy,
DeleteYes - I was aware of that and didn't get into it because it's just a piece of stupidity by a man who was once very sensible but seems to have gone a bit off track lately. I decided to concentrate on the real issues instead.
All the best,
Invisible.
Your post is timely, though forlorn. My wife thinks my suggestion of a "not allowed in cars" list (starting with those on the no fly list), along with extreme vetting of drivers, will not fly politically, even though riding/driving in cars is a privileged subset of the right to travel, unlike the explicit, stated guarantee of the right to bear arms. Certainly my suggestions might reduce car-related violence, which would make all of us safer. You in the UK don't benefit from a proper, written constitution. We in the US do, though it's more ignored than observed...
ReplyDeleteSteve,
DeleteThanks, as ever, for your comment. I'd certainly like to think it would be very hard for anyone who's on the no-fly list to rent a car. In common with many of the recent horrors, the Westminster attack was carried out with a rented vehicle. It could be challenging, I imagine, to prevent anyone who hasn't been convicted of a crime from ever getting into a vehicle. I certainly think it should be harder to get a driver's license in the US. I say that as someone who's sat both a UK and US driving test: http://invisiblevisibleman.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-driving-test-mistaken-questions-and.html
On the constitutional point, meanwhile, I think you're slightly underselling your own country. While I would gladly repeal the 2nd amendment, it seems to me that your checks and balances are currently doing a pretty good job of reining in Donald Trump's extremes. In the UK, by contrast, we're in the course of blowing up a key cornerstone of our constitution and there seems to be very little anyone can do to limit the damage.
All the best,
Invisible.
With respect to the 2nd Amendment (or any other part of the US Constitution): our founding fathers, in their wisdom, provided a means to do that. Hint, it is the same means by which Prohibition was repealed, not by chipping around the edges with activist judges. I'm heartened that your comment cites the 2nd as a "repeal" issue rather than as a simple making rules one. That being said, I'm not sure it is a good idea for even "well regulated milita" to have atomic weapons or even biological WMD. In between we reach some "gray" area (grey to you).
DeleteMy love affair with the car ended seven years ago when I took up cycling to commute to work. The fog lifted and I began to see the thousands of cars parked up and littering our streets and dominating our roads. I cannot bear to drive in the city now and despair at the poor standards of driving shown by far too many drivers. I used to think these drivers were out to get me but now realise most are simply distracted by the toys in their car, mobile phone or desire to get somewhere quickly. They do not see me because they are not paying attention. I am not on their radar at all.
ReplyDeleteRussell,
DeleteThanks for your comment. I agree that one gains an entirely different perspective on the state of the roads when one tries as a cyclist to share them with drivers. Even though standards in the UK are far higher than in many other countries, people behave shockingly dangerously. Future generations will struggle to understand how anyone put up with it.
All the best,
Invisible.
Ever notice how the speed limit is 50 MPH+ on the residential side streets, in the alley, and through the parking lots, same as on the main drags?
ReplyDelete