Dear Sir/Madam,

I am writing in response to the article in Sunday’s Observer, “Jail terms for killer drivers”.

Varying degrees of dangerous driving - mainly in the form of speeding – is rife on our roads, but most offenders are fortunate enough to get away with it. It is just the unlucky few who cause an accident that results in someone being seriously hurt or killed.

There is no sense and no justice in punishing someone for simply being unlucky. It doesn’t help the victim, it only adds to the suffering of the offender (who will already be racked by guilt and remorse), and it manifestly does not deter other drivers from driving less dangerously or from breaking the speed limit.

Why does it not deter other drivers from dangerous driving? 1) Because no driver considers himself to be driving dangerously even when he is. 2) Provided he doesn’t drive (speed) “too” dangerously, the punishment, if he is caught, is hardly worth worrying about. 3) The chances of his (unadmitted) dangerous driving actually causing a serious or fatal accident (for which he can expect to be severely punished), although “statistically” greater, are in fact still quite small.

The statistics tell us clearly that speeding is the cause of many (if not most) serious accidents, just as they tell us that smoking kills tens of thousands of people every year. But this knowledge, for the most part, remains in the cerebral cortex of our large brains; it doesn’t speak to us directly as experience does. Every day we see people smoking and speeding without it seeming to do any harm.

This is why appealing to people’s reason has so little effect. The statistics, which should cause us to change our behaviour (not to speed, smoke, or whatever), fail to sink in.

If we want to reduce the number of serious accidents on our roads, the way to do it is by cracking down on dangerous driving, principally in the form of speeding, BEFORE accidents occur. The chances of detection and the severity of the punishment need to be increased to a level which ensures that everyone keeps to the speed limits and drives carefully.

And the punishment for those who do not should be as appropriate and simple as it is just: the removal of their driving licence: either you drive strictly according to the rules or you are required to leave the road for an appropriate period of time.

Only if you are caught driving without a licence, should you be fined or sent to prison.

It won’t be easy, of course, so long as so many motorists, at all levels of society, continue to consider it their constitutional right to be able to take the risk of speeding with relative impunity whenever they think fit.

We have to decide whether we want to take the statistics seriously now, or wait for evolution to make the necessary adjustments to our behaviour, by which time the age of the motorcar will be long past – Thank God!