Road crossings and The Slade

Wed 18 Jun 2008, 23:59

Oh come on Roger, do some basic statistics on road incident levels and impacts! If the levels caused by "personal transport systems" were caused by personal violence on the streets then Medellin is a mountain paradise.

Have people forgotten we buried a few months ago the mother of two young children? Many of us must have images and words from that service indelibly burned into our memories (I do). Our lives touched but tangentially - we just had her eldest around to play with our youngest after school. But in a small community many lives touch in many little ways. And then in a moment - It happens. At any moment, "it" happens to someone "close" to us in some way - family, friend, fellow parent, casual acquaintance, fellow villager. Everywhere around the country, sometime, someone becomes an "us".

Saying motoring things are "trivial" on our own little patch or rat run is simply an extension of the adolescent conceit of "it won't happen to me". Of course it can. Anywhere. Anytime.

Our infatuation with the personal transport systems means that all of us, at all times, almost anywhere, live with Russian roulette pressed to our, and our children's, heads. Puts a sharp heeled hoodie into perspective doesn't it?

Those scenes are being repeated, daily, in towns and villages throughout the land. If it wasn't the sacred motor vehicle and our personal "freedom" of movement this would be stamped out overnight.

At least Igor keeps on trying to get "us" to see the implications (the lunacy?) of our "choices" and the outcomes and implications of our "freedoms" and the way that the comfort of one part of our lives means that other parts of our lives are besmirched, made fearful and uncomfortable, by the fallout of that iconic symbol of our assault on Gaia:- the sacred motor vehicle.

Every time my 11 year old goes out with her friends around the village or cycling up the Ditchley Road, a necessary learning of independence to grow up properly and naturally, not wrapped up in a paranoid roll of parental cotton wool, I live and suffer in fear.

Of strangers? Of abduction and assault?

No - of motorists and motor cars and speed and the lack of a crossing on the Enstone/Slade crossroads, and the speeding cars past the Co-op shop, and the racetrack on The Slade past Ticknell Piece and the morons coming around the blind corner of Enstone Rd at 60mph who've nearly hit me and the toddlers on at least 3 occasions.

Everything Igor says is rooted in deep rationality. Why is he such a target for attack? It sounds more like attacks upon a heretic of religious belief, not upon a person pointing out our collective loss of sanity. The emperor has no clothes, but he drives a Mercedes Benz.

Why is the freedom of personal transit become a religion? Why do questioners become targets for oppobrium?

Its a pscyhological response, not one of intelligence, reason, rationality or the age of enlightenment - but a release of deeper and ursome forces.