I recently received a speeding notice after I was caught driving on a dry day at an utterly reckless 36mph along a road with a ridiculously low 30mph speed restriction. It’s a road with very wide pavements along its length, and parking is forbidden on it. I honestly don’t think it would be possible to strike someone crossing it if you tried, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pedestrian cross it in the 25+ years I’ve lived in Bedford.

I was given three options to atone for my heinous crime, in addition to three penalty points. The first, at £89.00, was a three and a half hour “speed awareness course”. For good measure, the cost of the course was only revealed after wasting 30 minutes on online form filling. I could relate everything anyone would need to know about speeding and risks of injury and death in 30 seconds, so it would surely be some otherwise unemployable jobsworth – a blue-haired Gender Studies “graduate”, something like that – running the course, an object lesson in ritual humiliation. I would have challenged the person to explain to me why, if the objective is to minimise injury and deaths from motor vehicles striking people, the government doesn’t just ban driving.

The second option was to pay the outrageous fine of £100.00, which I duly did. The relevant section of the form was titled, “I DO NOT want to attend an educational course. I want to accept the Conditional Offer of Fixed Penalty.” Who would willingly face three and a half hours of humiliation rather than pay £11.00 to avoid it?

The third option started encouragingly with, “I do not want to attend an educational course or to accept the Conditional Offer of Fixed Penelty and want to…”. I’d have ended the sentence with, “… stick this speeding notice up your arse, you thieving b******!” but, sadly, that wasn’t on offer – instead it ended with, “… have my case dealt with in the Magistrates’ Course.” Given that my chance of getting justice in a Magistrate’s Course on this matter is on a par with my chance of becoming pregnant, I declined that absurd non-option.

In the quiet suburb of Bedford where I live, there are plenty of quiet roads with 20mph speed limits which make no sense and people routinely exceed. The state is engaged in full-scale highway robbery.

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