Toby Young
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The Highway Code, it turns out, is like the tax code: incomprehensible to everyone except paid experts. Einstein said the hardest thing in the world to understand is income tax, but I’m guessing he wasn’t a British road-user. Which brings me, finally, to the point of this column: the Highway Code is about to get even more mind-bogglingly complex.
As it stands, it includes 307 rules, and eight annexes, but from 29 January it will be longer still. The new Code is the result of a consultation process that began in October 2018 and didn’t conclude until last month, and it reads as if it’s been written by the same crack team that covered Britain in cycle lanes, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and pop-up one-way systems during the lockdowns.
Its great innovation is to create a hierarchy of road users, with pedestrians at the top, cyclists below them, and drivers at the bottom. So if a pedestrian is waiting to cross at a junction, drivers must give way, even if it causes a ten-car pile-up. Worse, on quieter roads cyclists are advised to ride in the centre of their lane to make themselves more visible and, if it’s a narrow country road, they should ride two abreast. Talk about incitement to road rage! And here’s the kicker: that guidance applies even if there’s a cycle lane running alongside the road. They are entirely optional, apparently. The town-hall Sir Humphreys who’ve spent tens of millions of ratepayers’ money disfiguring Britain’s roads must have had a good laugh at that.
It’s hard to dismiss the suspicion that the new Highway Code is designed to make life even more miserable for motorists. It’s not enough to force us all to switch to Priuses from 2030; for the net-zero zealots, all drivers will have to be constantly humiliated. And if that doesn’t ‘nudge’ us into abandoning our vehicles, other measures will be called for.
It won’t be long before you’re given an instant lifetime ban if you’re done for speeding — and more and more of us will be, as our society approaches Chinese levels of surveillance. Indeed, it’s already beginning: since 2019, any driver who’s had a licence for less than two years has been required to take the test again if they rack up six points.
I felt a bit miffed about having to do a speed awareness course, but soon we’ll look back on them as belonging to a golden age.
Because you read about cars
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