A WORD please to all councillors, their officers and people who can't see any further than a hump in the road.

No-one is more anti-speeding than I am and no-one is more concerned about needless death and injury on our roads. I have spent my life dealing with such incidents and am now a driver educator.

One or two comments I have read recently need clarification: Traffic-calming does not cause accidents. Drivers cause accidents because either they disregard or cannot cope with traffic-calming measures.

Roads are not dangerous. Drivers are dangerous. Fog does not cause an accident. Drivers, having little or no regard for what's in the fog, cause accidents.

Speed by itself does not kill. Only when it's in the wrong place and/or by the wrong person is it a killer.

Drivers kill but do so mainly out of ignorance and/or arrogance and/or indifference and/or bad manners and/or criminality. It's obviously OK to travel at 750mph in the Nevada Desert, but outside a school, 8.30am or 3.30pm, even 20 mph can be far too fast.

I'll keep saying this over and over again until the message sticks. Only when the problem of lack of driver education is addressed will road safety be really improved. Everything else is just a 'knee jerk' reaction. In response to an accident (incident) in Huncoat recently, a local councillor was quoted as saying: "We blocked off the road to get measures installed because the road was a death trap with the speed some drivers were going. Even now they belt down Bolton Avenue and they are going so fast you can't even get their numbers."

My reaction to this comment is: "Really! Well knock me down with a feather! Perhaps we should put a hump on top of a hump!"

A driver education programme, backed up by a firm law and order policy - including cameras, is the only real way forward.

The measures the councils are carrying out at the moment are ill thought-out in many ways and a waste of money - money which could be far better spent. They should get down to the real problem - drivers. Get the idiots off the road. Educate them.

A SHURMER, Lyndon Avenue, Great Harwood.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.