Free-D

I took advantage of the fiesta on Wednesday and took my children to the sierra. I’m a navigation retard and took the stupidest route. In the meantime my children kindly but firmly informed me that if I allowed my hands to dance on the steering wheel, that we would surely crash. Then they told me I was driving too fast. I have always joked that in Britain I felt like the worst driver in the world but in Spain I felt at home. But last week it finally dawned on me that the situation here was changing rapidly. I was sent a photo through the post of the back of my van, and a kind letter which informed me I had been driving 143 km/h, liable to a fine of 100 euros. I was incredulous. It would have been a reasonable accusation if I had been driving on an ordinary road, through a village, but this was on the dual carriageway from Valladolid.

Come on, officer! That’s like fining someone because they’re just a glass or two over the limit, or for not wearing a belt in town, or overtaking on the inside lane, or talking on the moby… I’d always figured that with the cars I drive I would never, ever, get fined on a motorway. There is always a temptation to treat the rules as mere guidelines and judge more your own faith in your abilities. But this is a serious business. Between last Friday and the fiesta on Wednesday, the mid-term operación retorno, there were 41 accidents and 60 deaths. These are statistics which don’t really do justice to the nightmare of families being wiped out in one fell swoop – like the parents and two children that died in Pontevedra last week when their car collided with a lorry. Over 40% of the fines dished out are for speeding, and it’s hard to deny that this is the largest common denominator in the catalogue of accidents. And as with other areas of concern like smoking Spain is dragging itself kicking and screaming to the levels of most northern European countries who’s accident statistics are well ahead. For instance, in 2004, the UK had just over 100 accidents per million inhabitants, while Spain had over 200. It’s easy to cite differences in the national psyche and I always baulk slightly at the trend towards European becoming equally “civilised” which more often than not comes down to being rather anally retentive.

But – and despite the fact, or maybe because I’ve been caught myself – I’m pretty well convinced that the speed camera will completely revolutionise traffic safety in Spain, just as the point system on driving licenses has already proven to be an overnight success. That is because there is an inherent anti-authoritarian instinct here – generally healthy in my mind – that mistrusts human authority and therefore flauts the law whenever possible and sees its imposition by, say, the Guardia Civil as nothing short of oppression. The flipside of this was that people with money saw the system of fines as a kind of inconvenient toll that one had to pay out if caught. I know people like this, and they are highly intelligent, decent human beings, like me… and yet like me, they have become been conditioned into a culture that sees the tragedies on our roads as a necessary evil… it isn’t.