Time for crackdown on all forms of bad driving

HAVING read your Editorial covering the annual police drink drive fiasco (Yorkshire Post, January 20), I could not help but wonder if the headline “Drunks cause one festive crash in 10” should not have read “Sober drivers cause nine out of 10 crashes all year round”.

I have never understood why so much effort and money is spent on 10 per cent of a problem while the other 90 per cent gets little or no attention. I also find the figures deceptively vague, for instance if a crash occurs between a driver over the limit and a sober driver, and the sober driver is at fault, is that still counted in the 10 per cent.

Also, if 90 per cent of the crashes happen for other reasons, then some of them must fall within the 10 per cent attributed to drink driving, so how accurate is this figure?

I think it is well acknowledged that the most common cause of crashes is the parties not seeing each other in time, a problem which Sweden addressed some 40 years ago by making all vehicles drive with dipped headlights on all the time.

It’s surprising even on a bright sunny day how this makes vehicles more visible much sooner. Unlike enforcing a drink driving law, this can easily be done by a simple modification to the vehicles electrical system.

Even the American cars now have DRLs (daylight running lights) which are effectively dipped headlights, on all the time. The other thing I find odd is that little or no attention is paid to teaching new drivers how the human eye works, or more to the point, how it fails to work.

I am in no way advocating driving while unfit due to alcohol consumption, all I am saying is that it would make more sense to eliminate at least some of the 90 per cent before going full bore for the 10 per cent.