The Peterborough Evening Telegraph reports that Ewa Petelska, 46, failed her Part 3 exam in November 2009, but she gave paid-for lessons to four Polish pupils over the subsequent five months. She was found guilty of giving paid instruction by an unregistered and unlicensed person.
You really need to read the story several times to convince yourself that she’s actually been punished. All that appears to have happened is that she must pay back part of the money she took from the learners she taught. Although she wasn’t charged with it, it is highly likely that she wasn’t insured – or her learners weren’t – when out on these lessons.
Petelska actually comes out of it looking better than the DSA. Her defence lawyer said:
…[she] had provided a vital service to Polish learners.
“She has not been convicted of any offences in the past and she is not likely to appear before the court again.
“She accepts she made an error, but there is no suggestion she posed a risk on the roads.
“She has four children, aged between seven and 25, who live in Poland and she sends money to them.
“She wants to work as a driving instructor in the future, but may not be able to because of this conviction.”
Well, at least we didn’t get the usual “she’s pregnant”, “her mother or father or brother or sister or friend recently died”, or that she was “seeking to come to terms with some personal crisis”. That’s the usual way to get off lightly.
Petelska was given an 18-month conditional discharge and ordered to pay back £1,318 to her pupils. Plus she was ordered to pay court costs of £85.
It makes you wonder why the DSA’s Fraud & Integrity people even bother. They’ve not recovered any significant costs (you and me will have to pay for that one way or another), whereas Petelska has come out with a glowing reference.
And since she is a non-national she, I wouldn’t bet against her making it on to the Register of ADIs at some point in the future.
The story describes how police spotted a motorist using a laptop – he was writing answers to a quiz on the radio – and drinking coffee at the same time.
Then there is this CCTV footage of teenage idiots car surfing:
Notice the little prat on the BMX bike in the foreground – that sums up the mental (and probably, the physical) ages of the ones in the car (and the little chavette accompanying another onlooker appears suitably impressed). Too stupid to see the CCTV cameras, they didn’t realise they were being filmed. One of the drivers was Kieron Burgess (physical age 21; mental age 2). The other was 17, and “too young to be named” – but he had only passed his test two months previously. Both were banned for 12 months.
In another incident, a bus driver was seen steering using his elbows – because he was using his hands to turn the pages of a paperback he was reading (video recorded by a passenger in the link).
In another case, a Romanian trucker videoed himself dancing in his cab as he drove along a motorway, even steering with his feet at one point (video in the link). He gave the recording to a TV station – probably thinking how great he was, and yet missing that big chunk of “stupid” that was also tucked in there somewhere.
It is somewhat ironic that when I loaded the link, one of the Google Ads immediately below the story trumpets:
Caught Speeding? Avoid fine and points Call T** V****** (I won’t publicise this moron’s shady business by naming him)
And they want to raise the motorway speed limit? It’s hard to work out who are the bigger idiots. The one’s who break the law, or the ones who make it.
I’m not sure ‘incandescent’ is the right word. It means glowing with white or intense heat/light – but whatever it is the forums are incandescent with, it sure ain’t white or brilliant!
It’s worth just clearing up what the proposals actually say:
it would only apply to motorways
it would require a full public consultation before becoming law
it would be introduced in 2013 at the earliest
it goes hand in hand with proposals to limit many – if not all – urban roads to 20mph
Almost exclusively, those most in favour of increasing the speed limit in the main appear totally ignorant of the “on motorways” part. Many seem to think it means on all national speed limit (NSL) roads. Most are also ignorant of the 20mph proposals, or the fact that it isn’t going to happen next week.
Another obvious feature of those showing the most support for the proposed increase is the fact that almost all of them are car freaks – young or old – who think they know everything, and who are so wound up in themselves that they can’t recognise how other people might be different… and who might not be able to safely handle an increased limit.
Most frighteningly, some of those car freaks are ADIs. They are openly stating that motorways shouldn’t have a speed limit at all, that the limit should be higher than 80mph, and so on.
One of my pupils asked me for my thoughts on it today. I told him that I don’t have any issues with an increase in speed limits from my own perspective – but I have a major concern when it comes to trusting other drivers to handle it properly.
There were two good illustrations of the potential problems yesterday.
First of all, I was on a normal lesson with a pupil. We were on a dual carriageway and at one point we simply overtook cars which were going slower than us (I’d suggest we were doing around 65-70mph, whilst the other cars were doing 55-60mph). Since we were going 5-10mph faster, that’s the relative speed we passed them at. However, as we went a little further we came upon a large road maintenance truck, which was travelling at no more than 40mph – as we approached to overtake I advised the pupil to be careful. We passed safely – going about 30mph faster than the truck.
Once it was safe, I got the pupil to pull over and we talked about the difference between the first overtake and the second. The first involved us travelling at almost the same speed as the cars in the lane to our left, whereas the second involved us closing in on the truck at a relative speed of 30mph. I asked the pupil to consider the risks and dangers if a car pulls out in front of you when you’re only doing about 10mph, compared with those if one pulls out at 30mph. That was why I advised caution in that second situation.
The second example came while I was doing a Pass Plus session on the M1. We were in the middle lane overtaking lorries on the section of the road approaching Leicester, where there are warning signs about slow vehicles as the road climbs. I’d just mentioned to the lad driving that lorries can pull out at any time and without warning on this section, when that’s exactly what happened. What made it worse is that if the lorry had done it 10 seconds earlier it wouldn’t have mattered so much – but he waited right until we were literally five car lengths behind and then he pulled out. He rapidly pulled back in again, then tried to pull out once more as he saw us brake hard (the car we were in was an automatic and picked up very quickly). The last I saw was him waving his arms around as though we’d done something wrong.
But rather than go on about moronic lorry drivers, the point is that if a driver was inexperienced and approached such a situation at 80mph (or maybe 85mph – you know what will happen whatever limit is set), he could be closing on the vehicle wanting to pull out at a relative speed of 30-40mph. Sudden braking at an absolute speed of 80-85mph, though, is likely to cause a skid or roll, which in turn could cause others to swerve, brake, or skid – and before you know it you have a multi-vehicle pile-up.
I’m not saying they don’t happen with the limit set at 70mph (not with prats like that lorry driver on the road, that’s for sure). But you need to be an idiot to think that if it happened with the limit set at 80mph the outcome would be less serious.
The media needs to stop keep trotting out statistics like “49% of cars go faster than 70mph on the motorway” if it isn’t going to include other statistics like how many miles of motorway are shut every day of the week due to accidents caused by people going too fast.
And anorak societies like the IAM need to stop publishing misleading data like those in this story. The simple fact is that speed DOES kill. The silly semantics over “appropriate speed” and “speed limits” is fine when debated over a half a pint of Old Scrotum Best Bitter down the golf club, but it has bugger all to do with the real world. All accidents are down to speed one way or another – if you weren’t moving, and no one else was, then you’d never have a collision.
As soon as you start moving, you need to make judgements about your own speed and other people’s. The larger the speed range involved, the harder that is.
And one final point about this Mickey Mouse government’s so-called reasoning. It claims that raising the limit will increase productivity. Will it? Well, consider travelling from London to Liverpool – a distance of about 200 miles.
If you could do it at a steady 70mph, it would take you just over 2¾ hours. If you could do it at a steady 80mph, it would take 2½ hours. So under totally theoretical and impossible-to-achieve conditions, you’d save about 15 minutes of travel time.
In reality, assuming that congestion isn’t so bad that you’re at a standstill, you’ll be able to do 80mph from one hold-up to the next. As you approach each one, the risks of an accident will increase as you’ll be doing a much higher speed relative to the slower people around you (raising the limit to 80 doesn’t mean those who drive at 60 will go any faster). You’ll need more concentration and skill – and by definition, you’ll be a prat in a hurry, so all that’s right out of the window before we even start!
All this coalition shambles is after is votes from brain-dead petrol heads.
I’m not sure about these figures, but the RAC has estimated the total cost to the young male of their first year of driving. They – or rather, IAM – says that the average 17-year old would have to pay £12,300, and the average 18-21 year old £14,400.
I’m not sure why it goes up as you get older, but the breakdown of these figures also raises an eyebrow or two.
Apparently, the new driver typically pays £3,000 for a five-year-old Kia Picanto, and £7,900 for insurance.
I’m sorry, but those figures are nothing like anything I experience as "an average". I can’t think of any pupil who has paid more than £2,800 for insurance – that was on a Ford Ka. Other cars have included Fiestas, Puntos, Corsas, Saxos, Clios… but no Kia Picantos that I can recall. I think someone somewhere has forgotten that there is intelligent life outisde London. Those figures might be correct for mummy’s Beemer or daddy’s Ferrari in Chelsea, but up here – north of Watford – insurance on cars is still affordable, albeit still more expensive than it used to be.
In fact, one of mine who passed recently is buying a Renault Megane for just over £1,000, and his insurance is around £2,000 for him and his girlfriend (who also passed with me recently). Both are early or mid-20s.
This is an OLD story from 2011. The campaign referred to is outdated now.
The Westmorland Gazette reports that Cumbria police are launching a month-long campaign to get drivers to check that their tyres are safe and legal before winter weather sets in (note that this article is from Winter 2011).
Obviously this is a highly laudable campaign. But one thing is niggling me about the story. It talks of the “20p test”, and how you can use a 20p coin to gauge the depth of your tyre tread. This isn’t quite right.
The official minimum specification for tyres on a car is that they should have not less than 1.6mm of tread across the middle three-quarters of the tyre’s width, and this should apply all the way around the tyre. Also, there should be no damage (such as cuts and gashes) or bulging on the sidewalls.
You can measure your tread depth using a suitable depth gauge, and these are available for a few pounds from any Halfords or motorists’ store. They’re very simple – just a plunger that you push into the tyre tread and a scale where you can read off the depth in millimetres. I definitely recommend that you buy one if you’re serious about driving safely.
At a pinch, you can use a 10p (NOT 20p) coin to check against the legal limit. That ring of small dots is about 1.6mm away from the edge of the coin, so if you poke the coin into your tyre tread the dots should be hidden. If they aren’t – or if they are anywhere near not being hidden – then you must get your tyres fixed to remain legal. It’s worth bearing in mind that garages probably won’t MoT your car if it has less than 3mm of tread on any tyre, and it’s also my understanding that tyre manufacturers make no warranties below about 3mm anyway. (Edit: 2013 10p pieces don’t have dots anymore – I’m not sure if that’s temporary or a permanent part of the design from now on. If you use this method to measure your tyres, keep an old 10p piece somewhere handy.)
To be fair to the article above (and the Cumbria police), they don’t mention the minimum legal specification – theirs is a safety campaign with its own criteria – so they talk of using the 20p coin to measure your tyre tread depth. That rim with the writing on it is about 2.5mm wide, so if you poke the 20p into the grooves and you can see the edge of that border with the writing on it above the tyre then you’re unsafe inasmuch as you have less than 2.5mm of tread, and your road holding will be impaired as a result.
If you just comply with it, you’re less than 1mm away from being illegal. It’s very dangerous ground the Cumbria police department is treading, as it is actually saying that you ARE safe if you have 2.5mm of tread, when in fact anything less than 3mm is the usual limit of acceptability.
It smacks of launching a campaign but being afraid of how it will be received by the many people you’re likely to catch out with it – so lessen the impact by widening the acceptable limit and just give people a stern talking to!
This story was covered a week or so ago in another newspaper, but I didn’t think it was worth mentioning it. Well, not again, anyway (see this article, and this one). Wouldn’t want to be labelled a misogynist, now, would I?
The North-West Evening Mail has picked up on it as an editorial rather than a revelation.
The author, Louise Allonby – yes, a woman – notes that official DSA figures show women are about 7% more likely to fail their test than men, and that a major factor appears to be parking skills. Well, a lack of them.
As she quite rightly notes: well, there’s a surprise!
I agree. Keep saying women are bad at parking is just stating the obvious, and it’s not that which made me comment on the story. It’s some of the examples that she – as a woman – mentions.
There’s one about parking per se, but others about clipping wing mirrors, 3-point turns, not going on “scary” motorways, not going on bridges, not switching on their lights, using mobile phones, and so on.
And it appears that a disproportionate number of cars being driven particularly badly around our towns have those ridiculous “Baby on Board” badges stuck to the back windscreen. To which the only possible response is “so what?”
Or is it that by having one of those badges in their car, women are somehow magically absolved from the normal rules of driving? If so, I think I might invest in one.
I lose count of the number of chavs I see with these things stuck in their cars, kids leaping around all over the place, being driven like they’re on a mission.
Another interesting story – on a very interesting website by the name of Lady Motor!
The article cites some recent statistics, which says that 6% of accidents on our roads come about as a result of changing lanes. They estimate that damage resulting from this amounts to nearly £440 million each year.
The article adds that poor awareness is the culprit, and that the figure has doubled over the last two years.
The article says not checking blindspots and not indicating have been highlighted as major reasons for the increase.
It’s interesting that on one of the forums frequented by learner drivers, there was a recent discussion about the things you’re taught that are a “waste of time”, and which you don’t bother with once you have your licence.
Top of the list was “mirror checks”. It seems that our darling little A*** GCSE and A Level geniuses don’t think mirror checks are important when driving on the road!
The problem clearly goes deeper than just not doing it.
For example, why would someone do a lane change without checking? Perhaps because they’re in the wrong lane to start with? Most likely, the outside lane – it is a trait of poor drivers/chavs that they always migrate to the “fast” lane, whether it is on the straight, at traffic lights, or on a roundabout.
So it isn’t not doing mirror checks which is the ultimate problem – it’s being in the wrong lane. And even that can’t be nailed as the absolute cause, because it is being poor drivers that makes people get into the wrong lane. And the definition of “poor driving” is down to a whole raft of issues.
Northern Ireland has been in the news today concerning plans to drop the current 80mg/100ml blood alcohol limit to 50mg/100ml. The changes would see an even lower limit of 20mg/100ml set for younger drivers and people who driver for a living.
The UK decided against a lower limit earlier this year – quite possibly because lower limits would bring us into line with Europe, and this government is overtly anti-European.
The What Car? article says that it would be the first time different zones of the UK as a whole had differing limits.
Scotland is also in favour of a reduced alcohol limit, and also of giving police wider powers for random roadside alcohol tests. Unfortunately for Scotland, the decision still lies with the UK government – unless the Scotland Bill is passed, which would allow them to make their own laws.
Also according to the article, Wales is not considering any change to its laws. I find that one particularly strange, as Wales has as much of a problem with this as Scotland, Northern Ireland, and England do.
A reader pointed me towards this story on WalletPop concerning a survey done by the Motor Insurers’ Bureau.
The story identifies so-called blackspots, where “almost” a third of drivers are driving without insurance. Uninsured drivers add an average of £30 to everyone’s annual motor insurance premiums.
I am totally against uninsured driving, but I can’t respond to the drama they seem to be creating around these blackspots. Is it any better if you’re maimed by an uninsured driver from, say, Richmond or South Kensington instead of Halifax, Birmingham, or Manchester? I don’t think so.
I remember one of those TV police shows where one of the traffic cops said that on the normal roads, you might find that 1 in every 10 routine stops involves an uninsured driver (this was in South Yorkshire), but there was a particular (very rough) housing estate in Sheffield where you could be sure that every stopped car would be uninsured.
And Sheffield doesn’t even feature on the list in this article.
If they aren’t – or if they are anywhere near not being hidden – then you must get your tyres fixed to remain legal. It’s worth bearing in mind that garages probably won’t MoT your car if it has less than 3mm of tread on any tyre, and it’s also my understanding that tyre manufacturers make no warranties below about 3mm anyway. (Edit: 2013 10p pieces don’t have dots anymore – I’m not sure if that’s temporary or a permanent part of the design from now on. If you use this method to measure your tyres, keep an old 10p piece somewhere handy.)
