DESPITE Britain's roads being the safest in the world, was not the turbo-charged, politically-correct war on cars by councillors and road planners who are so sure they are right, shown up to be both hugely expensive and open to guesswork by two recent instances in East Lancashire?

The first was when the cost of adding yet more irritating traffic calming to that already in place in the village of Tockholes was revealed to be £20,000. Often, such measures go through on the nod, but this time councillors wanted to know why the bill for a just a handful of traffic-calming measures came to so much .

And a report on same Blackburn with Darwen Council highways committee agenda as the Tockholes plan says traffic calming white lines on the A675 at nearby Belmont had actually led to cars going faster.

Not only that, the number of injury accidents had gone up, not down, and included two fatal accidents, one of which was put down to speed.

It makes me wonder if they really know what they are doing when they set out to boss motorists about with their prescriptive interference with the traffic flow.