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Car wheel at speed copyright Simon MacMichael.jpgBritain's roads "increasingly lawless territory" as half of drivers admit flouting rules
Half of motorists admit breaking the law while driving, according to a new survey from Brake, which says Britain’s roads are becoming “increasingly lawless territory.”
The road safety charity, which carried out the survey with insurer Direct Line, is calling on the next government to make traffic policing and reducing casualties on the road a priority.
A quarter of the 1,000 drivers questioned say they break the law through inattention and nearly as many, 23 per cent, admit doing it deliberately because they either disagree with the law in question, or believe they can get away with breaking it.
Brake says that motorists now have a higher opinion of their own driving skills than they did a decade ago – in 2005, half of drivers believed they were better than other drivers, a figure that has risen to 69 per cent.
More than half of motorists aged 17-24 – so those with least experience of driving, and also an age group more likely than others to be involved in road traffic collisions – believe they are much safer than other drivers, with 58 per cent agreeing.
An identical percentage believe there are more dangerous motorists than safe ones on the nation’s roads, with the unsafe behaviour they see among other drivers including distraction (eg from mobile phones) and tailgating, both at 71 per cent, while two thirds cited speeding and risky overtaking.
Brake’s deputy chief executive, Julie Townsend, said: “As these figures make clear, law breaking on our roads is not just down to a minority but endemic.
“For whatever reason, many seem to feel they are beyond the law or that traffic laws are somehow optional.
“This represents a failure by government to ensure traffic policing is receiving adequate priority and to make clear the importance and legitimacy of traffic laws.
“Traffic laws exist to save lives and prevent injuries and terrible suffering.
“No matter how experienced or skilled a driver you believe yourself to be, you cannot break them safely.”
Brake is urging whoever forms the next government to make enforcement a priority, to put more resources into traffic policing following cutbacks in recent years, and to reintroduce casualty reduction targets, scrapped in 2010.
“Whoever takes power after 7 May needs to make traffic policing a national policing priority, to ensure there is a strong deterrent against risky law-breaking on roads,” said Townsend
“We also need to see road safety given greater political priority, to set casualties falling once more and deliver safer streets for communities everywhere.
“That means reintroducing road casualty reduction targets, and working harder to win the ideological battle, to ensure everyone who gets behind the wheel understands why the rules exist and accepts their responsibility to abide by them and keep people safe.”
Direct Lines’ director of motor, Rob Miles, pointed out that besides potential criminal sanctions, breaking the rules of the road could lead to higher insurance premiums for drivers, or even being declined cover altogether.
He said: “Drivers continue to flout the rules of the road without realising the devastating impact their actions can have. Traffic laws are there for a reason and breaking them puts lives at risk.
“Breaking the law whilst behind the wheel can lead to a criminal conviction and being declined for car insurance, with even minor offences leading to fines and increased insurance premiums.”
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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30 comments
No doubt cars are being driven faster and a lot more tail gating going on. One of the causes is that cars are so much better than 35 years ago when I started driving. Go and stop quicker and road holding is much improved. All helps drivers feel safe.
Not sure why average speed cameras are not in much more use as technology must be cheap. Some of the stuff I see though would not be picked up by speed cameras though - just people taking chances.
Ive said it this week already, Motorists break the law 10x a day and few bat an eye lid, but the minute a cyclist rides more than 6 inch from the kerb or cycles without Road Tax all hell break loose and all motorists become complete Angels.
Yeah, but I saw a little kid yesterday morning riding along the pavement with his mum...bloody cyclists
As cyclists we need to accept here and now that our lives are dispensible and that those in cars are afforded an utterly unique and insanely perverse world geared at all and any cost to protecting the aggressor.
If I walk down the street and hit someone with a loose car bonnet and they die I am branded a killer and will go to prison.
Conversely if I as a supposedly trained and licensed operator of a killing machine use that bonnet whilst attached to the rest of the vehicle it is an accident...ergo not my fault.
Not to make this political as I'm sick of all of them but Cameron made it clear that he would be a 'friend to the motorist', which explains the 'road safety' camera cull, the axe of casualty reduction targets and the lack of effort by government to oppose the speed increases granted to HGVs on some roads.
In the UK it is OK to kill someone as long as you do it under the guise of it being an accident and you perform that cull with a vehicle - that's not an assumption, it is simply factual.
I got an in car navigation system last week, my first one, and it didn't surprise me that whenever I strayed over the speed limit in the car (not intentionally but it happens particularly in areas where you're unfamiliar with the speed limit perhaps) that the unit sat silent.
Whenever I got near a safety camera point however suddenly it was interested in my speed and made every effort with an assortment of noises and flashing images to tell me to slow down. That alone is a sign of how the 'road safety' crap is not geared at actually slowing vehicles down, it;s geared at not getting caught.
In effect I could do 140mph wherever I want and the unit is programmed only to give a damn when I could get caught by a camera. Beyond perverse and a single finger salute to every victim and every bereaved family of the car since time began.
The very sad fact is the UK is wholly hostile to the concept of true road safety.
Private profit driven groups such as the entire insurance industry (who compete to put dangerous people back onto the roads as cheaply as their little mathematical risk formulae will allow them to) and the Motoring Manufacturers Association (who issue reckless nonsense such as defending manufacturer decisions to make facebook accessible from a central car unit 'as the responsible motorist knows when to use such resources in an appropriate manner') dictate fully to government as to where things should head - and the safety of the vulnerable is not on their radar.
Until we start dropping paving slabs off of motorway bridges in response to every single serious cycling injury or death in the UK caused by motor vehicles (accidentally of course so not my fault) the whole issue will continue to be ignored.
B***dy motorists! Law breakers, the lot of them! They need to get their house in order, I say.
I agree with mrmo, the 49% figure for breaking laws sometimes is unrealistically low, and many of our traffic laws almost seem to be written to be broken and you'd only expect to be prosecuted for an extreme or persistant break.
I don't think any of us expect to be prosecuted for travelling marginally faster than the speed limit for a few seconds, or briefly crossing a solid double centre line by a few cms to pass a cyclist who is doing 11mph, or riding a bicycle in the hours of darkness without pedal reflectors, or waiting a few cms in front of the white line at traffic lights, or driving over the centre of a mini roundabout, but they are all illegal.
I don't think many people regularly drive and never do any of those things.
As an example if people really wanted to avoid breaking the speed limit then there would be a market for systems to alert drivers before they reach the limit so they could stop accelerating. I don't see these.
Most sat navs or sat nav apps can do this, I find it quite easy to do with my eyes though
Do they? I had a look online and Google Maps and Garmin don't seem to have anything like this. Tom Tom has an alert but it seems it only happens after the driver has exceeded the speed limit by about 10%.
Aye, they notify of speed cameras, it ruins my journey across French France each summer...on the M25 they also notify the traffic cameras and those on the roads under the M25.
Before the proliferation of TomToms, Satnav etc there was a dark market for little black boxes that bleeped like a bugger when approaching using IR [or similar] tracing of the camera...they used to go off if near automatic doors in the services on the M4....
I was driving my motorbike home from work behind this real clunker of a Transit van this evening. The driver had the window open and was smoking some pretty strong weed. When I decided it was safe to overtake I glanced across and spotted he was on the phone as well. The van was a wreck and even if it still had a valid MOT, there was no way it would pass one as one of the taillights was out and it had a flat tyre. It was rusty and battered and I bet it had more faults too.
The thing is, where are the traffic cops? The van driver was going slowly so there was no way a speed camera would pick him up. But smoking weed that smelt that strong, there was no way he was in a fit condition to drive.
When I got home I decided I'm going to buy a camera for my lid. I'll start filming these idiots and passing the footage to the cops.
I work in central Bristol, and cycle to work most days. I'd just assumed it was a Bristol thing, but you do smell an awful lot of weed coming out of cars nowadays (more now than, say, a couple of years ago). I'm presuming it's still against the law, isn't it?
Please, get a life....
hard to believe that half of drivers actually believe that they don't break the law. From experience i would honestly state that most drivers break at least one law every time that they drive a car. I suppose it is possible that half of drivers don't actually know what the law is???
Driving bans and high premiums don't seem to stop many people driving, they just take the risk that they won't get caught.
they know that with so few traffic officers out on the roads now that they have a greater chance of winning the lottery than being caught...
Lawlessness?
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I can't agree with these findings. In my experience, most people drive in a generally safer and more orderly way than 30 years ago. The proportion of genuinely reckless drivers is much smaller. It will continue to reduce as the notion of driving on public roads as a mode of self-expression continues to lose its appeal. With the rise of driverless cars, this behaviour will be marginalised and become culturally obsolete, as has happened with drunken driving.
I've held a driving license since 1994 and i would disagree with you. Maybe as a result of there being much more cars on the roads but the driving i see either locally or nationally is very poor now. With three major issues:
1. Mobile phones and specifically now mobile internet. I regularly during my cycle commute see people checking facebook, favourite website or even internet banking during their daily drive to work
2. Impatience. Majority of drivers now willinging block others cars in purely to stop someone else getting a few feet ahead of them. Yesterday i sae a perfect case in point where a coach had broken down and everyone on the coachside of the roads had blocked all sideroads which in turn blocked the otherside of the road and nobody could get onto the side roads.
3. Aggression. The aggressiveness of drivers is most definitely on the rise and mix that with impatience and you witness people driving incredibly dangerously and silly speeds.
Cameras are fine and do a job but it's real traffic policing that is most definitely needed.
Speed on rural roads especially has long been out of control. I was involved in publicising 20 is Plenty in our town and the local council rolled it out 6 months ago as part of a county wide change.
I now spend my time listening to people ( mainly my speeding neighbours) bleating about the lack of Police enforcing the new speed limit. My response that once 30% or more locals are obeying the limit everyone else has no choice doesn't go down at all well.
People feel entitled to drive exactly as they wish because for the last 30 years government have let them. Taking control will probably mean black boxes. It's the only way I'm sad to say. Bring it on.
The only way this will change is more traffic police. When was the last time you saw one?
You think this is a solution ……..
. The last time I saw one he was driving and dialling too. They are as bent as most in this survey.
bit of a sweeping statement 'half of drivers believed they were better than other drivers'
Half would be correct.
Problem is that at least 2/3rds think they're better drivers than the other 90%...
Problem is, increased premiums depends on the policyholder declaring any convictions, unless DVLA notify insurers which I don't believe happens. All too many simply 'forget' to declare a conviction (and take a chance on not having an accident and subsequently being asked for a copy of their licence).
they share a database with the DLVA which flags undeclared offences, they did anyway when I worked in the field some years ago.
Until drivers face life bans, presumed liability the flouncing of the law will continue.
Oddly, we're more likely to be helped by insurance company's when it comes to road safty than we are the police. The improvements in terms of driver tracking systems (black boxes) are coming on leaps and bounds and are more and more like to be mandatory for insurance policy's in the future. If you drive like a c-unt your policy will cost you more, much more and it's not reliant on you having an accident first.
Then there is driverless cars just round the corner too.
69% believe they are better than other drivers... 58% believe there are more dangerous drivers than safe ones.
Says it all, really.
Only half? And the other half lie about it.
A grand total of no people are surprised by this news.
Only half? And the other half lie about it.
"Breaking the law whilst behind the wheel can lead to a criminal conviction and being declined for car insurance, with even minor offences leading to fines and increased insurance premiums."
Sadly many drivers are more likely to see a premium rise that outweighs any fine.
More enforcement - absolutely but it has to be combined with a strong deterrent. Presumed civil liability and proper sentencing for those who kill and maim would be a good start.