The Greens’ 55mph motorway speed limit is an insult to us all

When I drive down to pick up my older son from the University of Sussex, there's a stretch of the M23 which feels like the wide-open road of a Kerouac novel (even if it's only in off-peak weekday hours, after the jams, lorries and tailgating fury of the M25 and Dartford Crossing). For half an hour, I remember that motoring can still be a visceral pleasure as I let my Ford Focus streak towards the undulations of the South Downs, while being careful - ahem! - not to overdo it.

Judicious use of cruise control keeps my naughtier tendencies in check. It's not an exaggeration to say my heart soars like a lark when any motorway clears.

But even such momentary bursts of freedom will be lost if Zack Polanski [1]'s Green Party has its way with speed limits.

A policy paper drawn up by the Greens includes a raft of tyrannical strategies to curb Britain's drivers, including restricting the top speed on our motorways to 55 miles per hour [2]. You don't need to be one of Top Gear's petrolheads to find this a monstrous restriction on drivers' ability to make common-sense judgements. Must I really pootle along like my late grandmother in her brown Austin Allegro when it's 3am and most drivers are in bed?

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This kind of rigid, young, puritanical thinking will surely have unintended consequences. I know that I'm at my most alert, prudent and bolt upright when travelling at speed - every single faculty engaged in noting other drivers and possible hazards. It's only when I'm in the slow lane that I relax, reach for crisps, steal glances out of the window, start talking back to bad-faith politicians on Radio 4's Any Questions, or play the Pet Shop Boys at full pelt.

Needless to say, these are exactly the conditions most likely to make me run into someone else's bumper.

I've also observed that when your average British motorist finds themselves curbed for no valid reason, they're frequently suffused with the kind of road rage that makes Jeremy Clarkson look like a dormouse. Many will be prepared to break the rules on any stretch of road without cameras, while zipping up the backside of more law-abiding citizens, honking and flashing their lights before executing the most egregious overtaking manoeuvres.

The most obvious examples of bad behaviour I've noted happen on stretches of urban roads which aren't residential streets, but have seen limits cut to a snail's pace. London is full of them.

Speed cameras get sabotaged, and obedient plodders are terrorised. How does this improve road safety or anyone's blood pressure? On what logic or global example is it based?

Even Denmark and Sweden, widely considered to be the greenest countries on the globe, don't have such stringent speed restrictions on drivers.

As for our neighbours over the Channel, the French have a racy sans-culotte limit of 80mph. But that's tame compared to the Germans, who have no limit at all on stretches of the autobahn outside urban areas. Advertisement

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But the UK's death rates on motorways must be ever so much less than those in reckless, thrill-happy, foot-down nations, right?

Er, I'm afraid not, based on a recent Transport Research Laboratory report for a parliamentary advisory council, which found we have "more deaths per unit length of motorway [3] than the average motorway in the EU".

These findings didn't surprise me. On trips to Los Angeles, where two-lane highways are limited to the equivalent of 55mph, I've been frozen in terror by the antics of frustrated drivers, swerving between lanes of traffic and cutting each other up. The US famously has among the worst road death figures in the developed world.

Traffic-calming measures work best where people believe they're actually needed and are happy to observe them.

It makes irrefutable good sense to reduce vehicles' speed through rural villages, town centres and on urban residential streets populated by families, cats and pensioners. In fact, if I had a superpower, the one I'd find most useful is the ability to telepathically freeze boy racers' vehicles on my road and burst all tyres before I delivered a middle-aged mother rant at their imbecilic behaviour.

But then the Greens' proposed measures aren't intended to improve conditions for road users. They're part of a campaign to "end the use of fossil fuel-burning cars and vans [4] on our roads from 2030".

Other joyous suggestions include increasing road taxes, reducing parking spaces and making motorists retake their driving test every five years, meaning petty sadists everywhere will retrain as DVSA examiners. The Green paper states, with near-magnificent pomposity, that "car driving is not a right, but a privilege [5]". Try telling that to a farmer, a publican, a vicar, a community midwife, or pretty much anyone who prefers to live near nature.

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You can bang the drum for electric cars as much as you like, but no one's explained how we're going to get around the problems of EV batteries having large carbon footprints because of imported components - let alone the ethics of using cobalt [6] from lethal, exploitative mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo [7].

But this is fantasy politics for disenfranchised young people, with access to public transport and, I'd wager, the car of mum and dad.

Realists will vote with their tyres.

References

^ Zack Polanski (www.telegraph.co.uk)
^ restricting the top speed on our motorways to 55 miles per hour (www.telegraph.co.uk)
^ more deaths per unit length of motorway (telegraph.co.uk)
^ fossil fuel-burning cars and vans (www.telegraph.co.uk)
^ not a right, but a privilege (www.telegraph.co.uk)
^ using cobalt (www.telegraph.co.uk)
^ Democratic Republic of the Congo (www.telegraph.co.uk)