SO the road carnage continues. Maybe current prescriptions oppressive regulation, eager recourse to speed cameras, constant tinkering with speed limits, road signage and markings, and so on aren't working?

There is a county-cultural alternative. It won't be popular, of course, with those who feel they can only justify their existence in the bureaucracy by being seen to do something.

Driving today is very much rule-based. It wasn't always so. Once, it was more 'intuitive', Driving tuition included 'roadcraft', the art of reading road and traffic conditions and adjusting driving behaviour accordingly. There is much to suggest that this skill has been lost, crowded out by endless mechanistic instruction to do, or not to do, this and that.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than through our apparent dependency on speed cameras as the counter-measure of choice. The call for more of these every time there is a serious accident seems to be the gut response from citizenry and officialdom alike. The mantra 'speed kills' is as over-used as it is over-simplistic. By and large, I suspect it is bad driving which kills, in which inappropriate speed is sometimes but not always an element.

So what is the alternative? Sweep away the present paraphernalia of repression and focus effort instead on catching and addressing bad driving. Driver re-education might then become the counter-measure of choice against inadequates on the road.

Observation suggest that standards of driving in this area are poor. They are poor, not necessarily because people drive too fast it can often be the reverse but because we are driving without proper attention to the task in hand, with inadequate technical skills or with insufficiently developed judgement of road and traffic conditions.

Education is the key, not more tinkering with speed limits and their enforcement.

JS HOLDEN

Bradford on Avon