Life in the Fast Lane: The Johnson Guide to Cars. Boris Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ to their stock of viable cars far faster than they are adding to the number of indigenous British people.

      We have, in other words, a car population boom. We have a crisis in car demography that some believe is as serious as the boom in the number of pensioners and the change in the dependency ratio. We seem to have more cars than our roads can support.

      When I was at Oxford, you could get to London in little more than an hour; these days the traffic can start at junction six of the M40. I remember once being stuck in the Italian Stallion—a car with all the torque of a bath chair—and realising that I had 18 minutes to get from the traffic lights at Hillingdon (as they were) to a vital job interview in Mayfair, yet somehow we did it, me and the Fiat, in broad daylight, in mid-morning, and in conformity with the laws of the road. And where did I park?

      In the last hundred years the car has

      done more for human freedom, I

      venture to suggest, than the aeroplane,

      penicillin, the telephone and the

      contraceptive pill put together.

      Right outside, of course: slap bang outside the headquarters of GEC, because those were the days before traffic wardens all became bonus-hungry maniacs and, although the Italian Stallion was already showing signs of the terrible wasting disease that finished it off, although it could only go up steep hills in reverse (reverse being for some reason the most powerful gear), and although by now a horrible green fluid leaked from the radiator, those were the days when it was still cool and rare for a student to own any kind of car at all, and I will always be grateful to Ken Livingstone and the Inner London Education Authority for the maximum grant that enabled me to keep the Italian Stallion on the road, because it made me one of a tiny minority, and because I was one of a tiny minority I would park it all over the place.

      My favourite parking spot was on the yellow lines by the squash courts in Jowett Walk and sometimes, it is true, I got a ticket. But what did I care? The Italian Stallion had a James Bond feature that enabled me to beat the fuzz. As a means of eluding the law, it was far better than a gadget that squirted the road with oil or tintacks, or rear-firing cannon mounted by the exhaust. The Stallion had Belgian plates.

      What were the poor parkies going to do? Contact Interpol? Ring up the Belgian police and ask them to track down my father’s squash partner Sue? Ha. I snapped my fingers at the parking tickets. I let them pile in drifts against the windscreen until—for these were the days before they were even sheathed in plastic—the fines just disintegrated in the rain.

      Before you get stroppy, let me hasten to say that I have more than made up for it since. With the many thousands of pounds I have paid to the parking enforcement departments of Islington, Camden and Oxfordshire, I wouldn’t be surprised if I have contributed enough, over the years, to pay for a full-time teacher’s salary, although if I know Islington the cash has probably gone on more traffic wardens, or the endless abstract creation and destruction of road humps.

      There was an amazing optimism, in those days, about parking, a prelapsarian innocence, a belief that even on a double yellow you would probably get away with it for an hour or so. It is with incredulity that I look back at my happy-go-lucky parking style—because even in that Elysium, in 1983, a terrible new plague had just come ashore.

      It had been invented thirty years earlier by one Frank Marugg, a musician with the Denver Symphony Orchestra and a good friend of the sheriff, and it was designed to scare the pants off ticket-dodging swine like me. The first horrific sighting was in Pont Street, lovingly clamped round the wheel of a black Golf belonging to a record producer. From then on the yellow scourge spread like ragwort in our streets.

      I remember in the mid-1980s rounding the corner of St James’s, where the Stallion was as usual stationed in defiance of all bylaws, and when I saw that evil metal gin about its forequarters I felt a sudden constriction in the throat: a spasm of rage and amazement.

      How could they do this? By what right could the state take away my freedom of movement? Except that it wasn’t the state that had clamped my car, but a hireling of the state, a ruthless cowboy, and I was lucky compared to some.

      In 25 years of tears, wails and ruined mornings, the clampers have immobilised a hearse with a corpse in the back, a Royal Mail van and a Good Samaritan who had stopped to help the victim of a hit-and-run driver. A disabled man of 82 was clamped in a pub car park because he walked out of the pub to post a letter before buying his usual half pint. The gangsters told him to pay £240 or see the fine increased even further. The other day they clamped the mayor of Middlesbrough while he opened a nursery.

      If I sound bitter, it is because I am; yet the ruthlessness of the clampers is nothing next to the rapacity of their accomplices, the tow-truck operatives. An Englishman’s car used to be his castle, or at least his mobile fort. I mean it was unthinkable that some public authority could simply move it. Yet time and again I would arrive at my Spectator office in Holborn, park the car, go in and ask my then assistant Ann Sindall for some cash to put in the meter, and while she was rustling around in the desk I would look out of the window and—blow me down!—there it would be: my car towed ignominiously past with its rear in the air, and without so much as a by-your-leave.

      Which left me with that bleached-out beaten feeling you get when you have succumbed to the might of the state, and then in my dejection I would remember the logic of what they were doing and I would see the other side of the story.

      I mentioned that cars were rare at university in 1983, even a Belgian-registered rust bucket. Nowadays students at Oxford Brookes University have so many cars that they park them all over the adjacent village of Holton, causing a grade A problem for yours truly, the local MP. You may wonder how students can afford so many cars, with the top-up fees and the debt and all. The answer is that car prices have risen very slowly, so cars are relatively cheap these days and more plentiful, with the result that the very person who spends his morning hurling oaths at a tow-truck operative may then recover his car and spend the afternoon in a traffic jam sobbing with incontinent rage because someone else has parked in a selfish place.

      Cars make two-faced monsters of us all, and as the number of cars continues to rise, our hypocrisy will grow. More and more households have two or three cars, but then think of all the people in Liverpool or Manchester, where 48 per cent of the population still do not have a car. How will the government prove that they have been ‘lifted out of poverty’? When they have a set of wheels, of course.

      The more cars there are, the slower we all go, and although our machines are capable of ever more breakneck speeds, we are statistically less and less likely to break our necks. The current motorway speed limit is 70mph, which is a joke since the average—the average—speed on a motorway is 71mph, and 19 per cent of cars travel at more than 80mph. Yet in spite of the colossal increase in the number of these whizzing steel projectiles, the number of serious traffic accidents declined from 25,124 in 1992 to 18,728 in 2002 and the number of fatalities from 1,978 in 1992 to 1,795 in 1997.

      If we keep going like this, in fact, we will reach levels of safety unheard of since the origins of the car. In 1914 there were only 132,015 cars on the road, compared to 30.6 million today. But in 1914 the total number of road fatalities—in England, not Flanders—was a stonking 1,328. What does that tell us? It tells us how much safer our cars have become.

      Not that you’d ever guess, to judge by the way the Liberal Democrats of Islington go around installing these pyramids, these exhaust-scraping flat-top ziggurats, in the middle of the road. Sleeping policemen have multiplied 10 times in the last five years, says the AA. Across the country the ramps, pyramids and corrugations have become one of the divisive issues of our times: dividing communities, dividing us individually. СКАЧАТЬ