Banned wagon
A weekly survey of the things our rulers want to prohibit ACCIDENT prevention is a noble enough aim. Unfortunately, as the many organisations working in this field have long since discovered, the surest way to achieve success is simply to ban the activ- ity which causes the accidents. Where once authorities would not move to ban anything unless there was evidence of carnage, now a single death appears to provide sufficient reason for doing so.
Last month a nine-year-old Liverpool boy died after being hit by a taxi while riding on his `micro-scooter', a fashion- able version of the familiar children's scooter, which has become a craze since the summer. Though he is the only per- son to have died in such a way, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) has been quick to weigh in.
`Children and adults should not ride these scooters in the road, under any circumstances,' said spokesman Roger Vincent. 'They should not cross the road on them, as motorists do not expect to find them on the road and can easily be surprised.' Micro-scooter incidents in the USA, he added, have risen by 700 per cent since May hardly surprising, perhaps, given that the scooters have only become popular since then.
Scooter-related incidents would cer- tainly fall if the scooters were banned, therefore fulfilling the society's aim, but whatever happened to the concept of the Queen's Highway, open to all sub- jects irrespective of their means of trans- port? The only reason why fewer children die on the roads than before is that the safety lobby has progressively driven them off the streets where they used to play. For those children — in town and country — who do not live near parks or playgrounds, the result has been imprisonment indoors. Are they any safer there? 'More people are injured in their own homes than any- where else,' hectors the RoSPA website.
Ross Clark
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