I couldn't quite believe it myself! L&B chief moving on says his biggest regret is the number of road deaths.
"3. What has been your biggest disappointment in the post?
Despite the reduction of road casualties being a key operational priority for the force, and despite all the hard work we put in with local authorities and other partners, nearly 200 people have died on the roads of Lothian and Borders over the past five years, nine of them children and two of them my colleagues; over 2,350 people have been seriously injured in the same period. The indescribable pain, loss and cost to wider society can hardly be overstated yet we, as a society, continue to appear to regard these dreadful statistics as just an unfortunate cost of access to individual transport. The Evening News would rightly devote many column inches to such loss if it arose from violence but these crashes often merit no more than a paragraph or two on an inner page.
I have sat with bereaved families in the immediate aftermath of such tragedies and sometimes wish that the self-styled ‘law-abiding and tax-paying motorists’ who write to me to complain that they have been caught speeding by a mobile safety camera van that was positioned ‘unfairly’, or who treat my road policing colleagues to the glib question ‘shouldn’t you be catching real criminals?’ could see the outcome of the circumstances that come together to cause death on our roads.
If more time were spent on learning advanced driving skills rather than composing letters as to why speed in itself does not kill (no, but impact does and it is a matter of physics rather than opinion that a heavy metal object will create more damage the higher the speed at which it impacts with another object) then our roads would be safer. It is quite plain from the standard of driving that I and my colleagues see on our roads on a daily basis that far too many people have not improved since their initial driving test; that speed limits, braking distances and the need for a clear view before overtaking do not apply to them; that very few have even the sketchiest idea of the physical forces acting on a vehicle in motion and still fewer seem to think it matters.
I have often read in your letters pages that some people feel that ‘the police should not be able to choose the laws they enforce’. Well, the same is true for obedience to road traffic law. If you don’t want to be caught for speeding, driving while using a mobile phone, drink driving… Don’t do it."
Also has a go at the chipwrapper's resident commenters!
"Nothing is ever perfect and we can all find things in our lives or surroundings that we would change for the better but I confess that I do sometimes find myself baffled by the somewhat gloomy contributions of your webchat columns in your online edition. Edinburgh is a fantastic city and the whole area of Lothian and Borders offers a tremendous range of history, scenic beauty, cultural achievement and a quality of life to rival any in the UK. Perhaps it takes an outsider to see things from a different perspective but I would ask any of Edinburgh’s detractors, if not here then in which other city in the UK do you think you would enjoy a safer and richer environment?"
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