Te Radar: Keep our roads safe with armoured cars

There is little that shrinks the sphincter tighter (triggering the involuntarily contraction of leg muscles, which lifts the foot from the accelerator) than a sign that says simply "Death Zone: Driving Fines Tripled!"

Reserved for only the most perilous pieces of road, this measure would provide a heady incentive to comply.

It is such a simple idea that I am optimistic enough to think that even the New Zealand Qualifications Authority could organise it.

Enforcing road rules is not rocket science, although it could be if the Army was drafted in to enforce good driving behaviour with their otherwise oddly impotent LAVs.

By turning the light armoured vehicles into "lucrative auto-taxation vehicles" they could free police up to do such vital tasks as patrolling golf courses to ensure that pro-duck activists don't continue to tarnish the greens.

Or it would if the Army could only find enough people able to crew the LAVs.

The problem with speed fines, though, is that they are not proportional to income. For some they are a trifling inconvenience, for others a major financial imposition.

But then again, those who earn more are assumed (generally by themselves) to be naturally better drivers than the poor.

This is as foolish a notion as George Hawkins stating that women are more concerned about being killed by a drunk driver than they are about being raped.

I am now highly anxious about being killed by a woman distracted by her concern about drunk drivers.

At least the fuel companies are doing their bit by ensuring the price of petrol remains at artificially inflated prices, thus making it uneconomic to travel.

That they are making record profits at the same time seems only fair. After all, they are merely trying to ration the amount of fuel used so that the Earth's limited resources will last longer.

Maybe if the Government insisted that we all drive electric cars we would then reduce both our reliance on oil and the road toll, as I defy anyone to be harmed in an accident involving an electric car. It would simply be too humiliating.

In matters of accident prevention we should take our lead from Waikato University earth scientist Dr Earl Bardsley, who suggested the way to avoid tsunami damage was to build away from the sea.

But he undid this clear-headedness by then suggesting that a mistake was made in moving the capital to Wellington, as it is located on a major fault line.

Given the levels of wrong-headedness emanating from Wellington this week, it seems that whoever made that decision was a patriotic visionary.

He clearly knew that the seat of government would eventually attract the vast majority of the country's bureaucrats, politicians, and associated toadies.

Eventually the sheer weight their combined numbers would trigger a cataclysmic seismic realignment, resulting in the submerging of most of them and their instruments of state meddling.