Auto Gossip

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32321, 12 June 1970, Page 15

Auto Gossip

by >

A.J.P.

v Clueless Driving “My heaven, did you see that? The young fool’s bound to kill someone sooner or later,” a woman waiting near me on the pavement exclaimed as the white Anglia delivery van shot round the Square with squealing tyres, missed a pedestrian, and roared off along Worcester Street. To be certain it was a bad bit of exhibitionist driving, but hardly unusual among young Christchurch delivery-van drivers. Not all these young men drive as badly, of course, but enough do to give all of them a bad name. I cannot help but wonder what the firms which employ them think of it, and what—-if anything—they do about it Were 1 a captain of commerce, 1

would not like to see one of my company’s vehicles, emblazoned “A.J.P., Ltd,” hurtling about the city in this manner, doing harm to my company’s publicimage. This would be even more so if my company happened to be engaged in the motor trade. Nor, for that matter, would I want to see my firm’s expensive vehicles placed at hazard by such clueless driving. Anonymous I would think that if I were driving a vehicle marked with a company’s name I would be a little more careful about my driving than might otherwise be the case, too, if only because the vehicle was so readily identifiable. Of course, this question of being identifiable has a great deal to do with the way we drive; in years gone by a Governor-General of New Zealand put his finger on it when he said that when one was encased, more or less anonymously, in 30cwt of steel and glass, it was very easy to be rude to another lump of steel and glass.

Bad Manners Another man put it a slightly different way: if he misjudged a U-turn, for example, and delayed other traffic, he might not be particularly worried, he said. Then he might notice that the car he had forced to brake was driven by a friend—and he would immediately feel his face turning red as the other recognised him. I think most of us have had this experience, to some degree. And many of us would never think of being as rude to a fellow pedestrian as we often are to a fellow-motorist. I suspect bad manners cause more accidents than most of us realise.