A pointless waste of time

A significant percentage of drivers are idiots and you don’t need a PhD to realise it. They go too fast in bad weather and dick about with mobile phones when they should be paying attention to the road ahead. They also drive too close to the car in front and are forced to jab the brakes hard when they finally spot it has slowed. That action dominos its way back down a busy carriageway and creates ‘phantom jams’, the official name for a hold-up caused by nothing of substance. Some clever people at the University of Tokyo think there might be a PhD in studying this phenomenon. They’ve developed world-first technology which monitors acceleration and deceleration patterns to determine whether a person’s driving pattern is likely to create congestion. Good for them. Here’s what I think. Get motorists to believe that answering texts or updating their Facebook status while moving is socially unacceptable, just like drink-driving has become. If they kept back like they were taught – whatever happened to ‘only a fool breaks the two-second rule’? – we wouldn’t have phantom jams.