Shropshire Star comment: Slow going on better road safety

It's a lose-lose question. If you think you are a good driver, it just goes to show you are too complacent and unaware of your own failings to be one.

However wonderful motorists think they are and skilled at the wheel, there is not a human being in the entire world who is incapable of making a mistake.

Some of the best drivers in the world are racing drivers. Need we say more?

Those who accept they are not good drivers are arguably better drivers than the self-declared good drivers. This is because they are more inclined to drive within their abilities.

New figures underline all this. Across the county of Shropshire, the most common cause of road accidents is driver error, typically not keeping a proper lookout, misjudging the speed of other vehicles, and losing control.

There is nothing surprising in any of that. In centuries to come folk may study the history of the 20th and 21st centuries with astonishment.

They will wonder how it was possible that ordinary people of all adult ages and abilities were allowed on the roads driving potentially deadly vehicles with relatively little experience, travelling in opposite directions on carriageways and missing each other by mere inches and with closing speeds of up to 120mph or more.

They will find it amazing that despite the elevated accident rate among the young, rookie drivers and motorcyclists, the prevailing attitude was that they would "get better as they go along."

Were they all mad? That's what they might think of us.

A concerted effort to make us all better drivers would go some way to easing the dreadful toll of death and injury. Yet here is the problem with that.

Like them or hate them, cars have been a great liberalising force, giving ordinary people an ability to travel which is truly cherished. Raise the bar on driving standards, and that freedom is diminished.

Reduce the problem to basics, and the only safe drivers are those sitting on their sofa watching telly with the car parked on the drive. Arguably the constant factor in accidents is speed, as a car that is not moving hurts nobody.

Efforts to get blanket 20mph zones in Shropshire towns are, according to surveys, popular among residents, even though experts suggest they will be ignored.

Blame the drivers, if you will. And indeed, all should strive to improve, however good they think they are.

But they real key to creating safer roads is designing out the risk factors, rather than hoping that humans will become less fallible.