Here is a graphic first hand account from a speeding motorist who attended a TTC speed awareness course in the hope that it might make others think twice.

"I FELT like a criminal. There I was sitting in a room full of 20 strangers asked to introduce ourselves to each other with our first name only.

I’ve never been, but it’s how I imagine an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. This meeting, held in Barrow earlier this month, was for speeders. Shame and guilt were my overriding emotions.

Others looked similarly sheepish about why they had ended up spending four hours on a Monday afternoon in a room at Forum 28.

We were ‘prisoners’ for the afternoon. Not in the true sense of the word. We could walk up and leave if we wanted.

But if we did, we’d be marked down as failing the course, we’d be fined in the usual way and three points would be added to our licence. That was the deal you see.

Attend, and complete, the course run by TTC 2000 on behalf of Cumbria Constabulary, avoid the points.
It might a sound as if it’s a softly, softly approach from the authorities. Far from it.

Four hours of self-analysis in a room with two middle-aged, firm but fair, TTC 2000 male trainers, and you were ready to pledge to yourself to be honest about your speed.

And that’s perhaps the biggest motivator of all, when it comes to easing your foot back off that
accelerator pedal.

Plus, we were the lesser end of the scale, those who have transgressed by only a few miles an hour.
“The others don’t get this opportunity,” said Terry (not our trainer’s real name). They end up going through the courts.

But what we were to learn over the next four hours was that we are just as big a menace.

If you think we were a room full of baseball-cap wearing boy racers, think again.

The average age and grey nodding heads and the odd revelation about VW Lupos and Nissan Micras meant this audience was more in tune with the sedate pleasures of Antiques Roadshow than revving up souped-up wheels to blasting X-Factor’s sounds.

We were new to transgressing the law. In our midst were representatives of the church and the emergency services.

And the audience is part of the problem. This is the ‘it doesn’t apply to us’ brigade, the complacent generation brought up, like me, to think it’s fine to go ‘a bit over 30mph’.

Who haven’t looked at their Highway Codes since the day they passed their test.

It’s the same generation who used to think nothing driving home from friends after ‘a few drinks’ before drink-driving laws were introduced.

But just as drink-driving has become, quite rightly, completely socially unacceptable, so now speeding is, and should, become just as much frowned upon by society, and more importantly for its effects, your friends, family and peers.

That’s why we were in that room. To be educated. And to, in turn, to educate our own friends and families and those we can influence.

There was much education needed. We were all starting from a low base level. Only two out of 20 of us could correctly draw a Stop and Give Way sign off the top of our heads (try it, it’s not as easy as you think!).

So having got us out of our complacency, and shaken us from our comfort zone, here came the big messages from our trainers.

l Hit a pedestrian at 20mph there’s a 97 per cent % chance that pedestrian will survive.
l 30mph, there’s a 80 per cent survival rate.
l 35mph, only a 50/50 chance of survival.
l 40mph, an 80 per cent chance the pedestrian will die.

By the end of the course and all the training and education, we were shown a video of a real-life traffic situation outside a primary school at the end of a school day in winter.

Each and every one of us when asked what speed would we consider it safe to drive past that school in those conditions, answered – “20mph”.

Yet when they ran the real data from a speeding survey of real drivers outside that school, only a tiny majority had past at that speed, the vast majority had driven by at over 30mph.

One or two, to gasps of disbelief from our new evangelical non-speeding Messiahs that we had all now become, drove by at over 60mph.

But we hadn’t yet learned our big lesson.

That was that we should be just as outraged at those driving by between 30mph and 40mph, because that’s where the survival rates differ so dramatically.

That’s really why we, the 30-something-mph-drivers, were there.

I’d walked into that room, aged 42, after 20 years of driving with no previous problems or points, never so much as one speed camera having flashed at me, believing deep down in my own complacent mind why that I didn’t really deserve to be there.

My crime? I’d gone into work in Barrow at 5am one day to catch up on some paperwork before the start of the working day at 6am.

At 5.50am I’d gone back out to pick up a colleague who struggles to get into work at that time because of the lack of public transport.

It was 5.55am, there was nothing on the road, weather conditions were good, and at Salthouse Road, Barrow, a speed camera flashed. I was doing 36mph.

Am I a speeder? Should I have faced the options of a £60 fine and three points on my licence, or a £70 charge to go on the course and no points on my licence (an offer that now won’t be open to me if I am caught speeding again until 2013)?

No was my answer before the course. Yes, is my answer now.

So what changed?

Learning the life-and-death issues behind the slogan ‘It’s 30mph for a reason’.

Just imagine that someone had stepped out in the road in front of me. Just imagine they had been killed.

It would destroy my life, as well as theirs, forever, whatever.

But what if, added to that, I knew there was something that I could have done differently, which would have meant they didn’t die.

That if I had been doing 30mph or under that they would have survived.

That it was doing that extra six miles an hour (for each 1mph extra accident frequency is increased by 5five per cent) that meant they died, instead of lived, I could’t live with myself.

The same goes for mobile phones, texting, changing over CDs in your car. When you’ve done this course, when you’ve witnessed all the horrific videos, seen the statistics, been advised how all those accidents could have been avoided, you want to make sure you do everything in your power to ensure you, and others, are never in that situation.

That’s why it’s not a softly, softly option.

That’s why of those who do the course only three per cent re-offend.

It’s heavy-duty, soul searching and introspection which ends with you pledging in your own words, what you are going to do to change your driving habits.

And writing those words yourself is one of the most powerful motivators of all. If you cheat on that, you are only cheating yourself.

So ask yourself this, how could you change your driving habits right now to ensure you don’t ruin lives, your own, as well as others later today or at anytime in the future?

Write it down. And stick to it. Take it from me, and all those who did the course. It works."

Published courtesy of the North West Evening Mail

First published at 10:23, Tuesday, 02 February 2010
Published by http://www.nwemail.co.uk