Looking Back: Highway Code Without Deterrents

From May 1955

Does it need the sanction of the Law?

At a time when deterrents have been swinging back into the popular mind as necessities of law and order it is curious that the new Highway Code has not been given the sanctions of law. It is an admirable manual of considerate road use; and Mr Boyd-Carpenter is right in saying in his introduction that the advice it offers for one penny would make safe driving and intelligent walking matters of course. But its rules are not rules in the ordinary sense of the word; there is no penalty for breaking them, unless the breaking of them should involve careless or dangerous driving leading to an accident. How, then, is the criminally-callous driver to be deterred?

It is true that the carelessness of a pedestrian can be almost a criminal carelessness too, if he races into the roadway from behind a stationary vehicle and causes a car to swerve on to the pavement; and the carelessness of a parent in allowing a young child to use a tricycle on a slope leading to a busy thoroughfare is just as bad. But at its worst it is usually a tragic foolishness, a culpable forgetfulness. It stands in a different category from the folly of the car-driver who deprives himself of necessary alertness by alcohol-drinking or drives a car at speed across a “slow” crossing outside a school. It ought not to be necessary for him to kill or injure a child before he can be convicted. A burglar can be arrested in a house before he has stolen; a man can be apprehended for having in his possession certain prohibited lethal weapons. It does not seem unjust that the driver of a car, which has become a ‘lethal weapon’ in his hands, should be deterred by the knowledge that, if he makes it such, he is a law-breaker and incurs the penalties of the law, even before he has done injury. At present he has less in the way of deterrents than any other citizen capable of doing similar harm.

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