Dear Sir/Madam

We all know that Telegraph readers are intelligent, well-educated and among the country’s best drivers, so why is it that so many are incapable of accepting the life-saving logic behind the enforcement of speed limits on our roads? (“Microchipped number plates join fight against vehicle crime”, 30 November 2002 and the letters in response).

It is a case, I think, of them doing what, of course, we all do, and using their intelligence to justify and rationalise getting what they want, i.e. the freedom to break speed limits at their own discretion.

There is a direct and indisputable relationship between speed and the number of deaths and serious injuries that occur on our roads, just as there is between smoking and lung cancer. But just as the tobacco industry justifies and rationalises the promotion of its harmful products, because it wants to continue making a profit from their sales, so too many drivers justify and rationalise their demand for the freedom to break speed limits at their own discretion, because it increases the pleasure and satisfaction they get from driving.

It is an understandable, natural and health desire, the freedom to make one’s own decisions, but the price for it’s fulfilment is the unnecessarily high number of people killed and maimed on our roads.

Because, as with smoking, the relationship between speed and serious road accidents is a statistical one and not something many of us experience directly (thank goodness!), it doesn’t get through to us and affect our behaviour as it should do. Evolution has had no time to adapt our gut responses to statistical information, which is also why we continue to promote an economy and pursue lifestyles (for both of which the motor car is an essential part) which, given a planet with finite resources and carrying capacity and more than 6 billion inhabitants, are utterly and fundamentally unsustainable and must have catastrophic consequences for coming generations, if not for our own children.