Weymouth JournalWeymouth Journal

A man who was stopped for not wearing a seat belt discussed the matter with Sgt. Lee Savage, left, and Police Constable Graham Pinney on Thursday in Britain’s Dorset County.

The officers cautioned another Dorset driver against tailgating.

One after the other, the motorists were caught blatantly violating the law. One after the other, they tried to talk their way out of it with elaborate diversionary narratives.

Though he had been spotted exiting his driveway with no seat belt, the man in the Isuzu Trooper stated that he had unbuckled the belt just that instant, in preparation for entering a gas station. Though his cellphone registered an outgoing call, the man in the Mitsubishi L200 Animal claimed that he had merely answered the phone, almost as an afterthought, as he rounded a traffic circle. And the woman in the silver Vauxhall boldly asserted that she had left her BlackBerry at home and that anyone who observed her typing while driving was sorely mistaken.

Oops. “I’m sure your mum told you never to lie to a policeman,” said Sgt. Lee Savage, a traffic officer with the Dorset Police Department, casting doubt on her credibility by locating the BlackBerry — open to Facebook — on the passenger seat and fining her £60, about $90.

Special pleadings are not acceptable in the “No Excuse” initiative being run here in Dorset, a largely rural county on Britain’s south coast. The yearlong, $1.25 million project — a combination of advertising, education and increased police patrols — is an effort to reduce the number of accidents caused by driver inattention, a common problem across the car-driving world.

The New York Times - In Dorset County, inattentive drivers are being watched. 

violations include things like changing CDs, fiddling with the radio, folding maps, programming GPS navigation devices, dialing hands-free phones, looking for stray French fries in fast-food bags and steering with one’s elbows while pouring a cup of coffee.

I'd like to see that one: pouring coffee whilst steering with one's elbows.

The drivers caught that day tended to employ the “I shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot the deputy” defense, admitting only to part of the misdeed. Stopped for making a call while driving to his job as a window repairman, a man in a dusty Vauxhall tried to claim in mitigation that he had just bought his phone and had not yet had time to activate his plan to install a hands-free system. His assertion was undercut by the obvious elderliness and grubbiness of the phone.

It gets better.


Mr. Smith, the road safety manager, said that the campaign’s name was a homage to motorists’ endless litany of fruitless rationalizations. “I was out about a year ago and we stopped a lady who had three children in the back of the car,” he related. “The officer said, ‘Why aren’t these children belted in?’ and she said, ‘They’re not my children.’ ”

Or worse.

What is a car?

Is a three-wheeled vehicle an automobile? That question is at the center of a vigorous lobbying effort in Washington. The vehicle in question is the Aptera 2e, a machine that looks like a cross between a Cessna plane and a tricycle. It's the brainchild of Aptera Motors Inc., a three-year-old, closely held car company in Vista, Calif.

Interesting visual simile: a single-engine plane and a tricycle.

Aptera wants to borrow $75 million from a Department of Energy program created by Congress in 2007 to speed development of fuel-efficient cars. Aptera's backers include some big-money donors to the Democratic Party, and its quest for help has received a boost from a group of mostly California lawmakers who want to help a home-state enterprise. Allies of Detroit's big auto makers are lined up against them.

Detroit versus California.

Aptera's quest for federal help raises a bigger question about Washington's effort to subsidize fuel-efficient vehicles: How much of the money should go to traditional companies with the most customers, versus start-ups with unorthodox ideas?

Taconic Parkway accident

I drive this stretch of road every time I go upstate. Earlier this year I got off at Pleasantville to pick up Ben, Melissa and Dave. I'm feeling spooked.

A better battery

Engineer Yoav Heichal, right, explains Better Place's automated system for quickly swapping electric-car batteries.

What Life Is Like Behind the Wheel

I drive my car very fast. As a result, I think the other drivers on the road are subhuman vermin with the IQ of a turnip. I suspect that other drivers feel the same way about me.

Whew; what an opening line.

In "Traffic," a fascinating survey of the oddities and etiquette of driving, Ted Vanderbilt explains why we have such views. Cars, he notes, isolate us from social contact, converting us into ego machines. But when a traffic light fails and we must all stop at an intersection, we look at one another, gesture politely and take turns.

Mostly; some drivers only gesture with their middle fingers, if at all.

Mr. Vanderbilt observes that jaywalking in New York is routine, while in Copenhagen it is rare. Certainly people pick up the culture of the city in which they live. I have learned that in Los Angeles you never jaywalk, while in New York you are expected to. Washington, D.C., is a mixed case: People do not jaywalk there unless they see somebody else do so first, and then they follow suit. Especially if the lead jaywalker looks affluent. Mexican drivers honk all of the time in Mexico, but they don't in Los Angeles.

I found Mexican drivers to be polite; even taxi drivers will give a nod of acknowledgment or deference to the other driver if they can not get in first. I have not seen middle-finger salutes in Mexico, but have seen some aggressive driving.

The "Peltzman Effect," named after University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman, suggests that greater car safety (e.g., using seat belts) makes people drive more aggressively and cause more accidents.

women can help men drive better. When teenage boys pull out of high-school parking lots, they drive much faster when another boy is in the car than when a girl is. (This gender-correlation does not hold true with my wife; when she rides shotgun, she loves high speeds.)

The first statement I know is true; I don't know his wife.

And women may be better traffic cops. Mexico City replaced its corrupt male officers with females (they are called cisnes, or swans), who tripled the number of traffic tickets.

El DF is renown as a traffic nightmare.

Congestion pricing has worked in London and Copenhagen and could be made to work in many American cities if we got over the view that roads are "free."

Congestion pricing lost in New York, seen as discriminatory.

Until we have congestion pricing, Bondurant-trained drivers and women riding shotgun, I will continue to regard everyone else on the road as subhuman vermin with the IQ of a turnip.

Me too.