‘Drivers who get fined by ANPR plans in town centre will deserve it’

Getting caught going over the speed limit is annoying – but, let’s face it, you should have known better.

Getting a ticket when using a car park for 10 minutes and thinking no one would notice? Well, it was always going to be a risk, wasn’t it? (And I speak from bitter experience).

Motorists, on the whole, are a funny bunch. We expect luck to go our way at all times; confident in the belief that we are fabulous drivers and it’s everyone else on the road who is a buffoon; rule enforcers just out to spoil our fun.

Don’t pull away from the lights with the sort of anticipatory skills of an F1 driver? You’ll risk getting beeped from the driver in the vehicle behind whose blood pressure is accelerating at the thought of their journey taking an extra second or two because they can’t.

Overtaking someone on the motorway but toeing the 70mph limit? For reasons unfathomable, that BMW coming up behind you at 100mph will cling about an inch from your bumper until you get out of its way. Don’t you realise that faster cars get to break limits when they fancy it?

In other words, very many of us expect to be able to behave like morons, regardless of the Highway Code or the laws of the land.

And, should we find ourselves punished in any way for breaching them, it highlights only the injustice of the nanny state and cash-desperate local authorities who only want to make money from the poor old motorist.

Take the uproar in Maidstone this week with news that ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) is to be deployed in the town centre.

They’re being switched on to tackle that age-old issue of bus lanes being abused by car drivers desperate to get from A to B fractionally quicker, and folk parking where doing so causes a headache and delays for everyone else.

Plus, to prevent folk entering box junctions with no clear exit and thus jamming up the junction for everyone.

Get caught when they go live in the autumn and you’ll be hit with a £35 fine from Kent County Council which is behind the rule-tightening.

Quite reasonable, you might argue.

Yet local Tory councillors have hit out at the plans. “To put it simply,” they say, “this is not Maidstone-on-Thames.”

Oh dear.

“Maidstone residents,” they add, “want to see more investment in genuine infrastructure improvements and technological innovations that improve traffic flow.”

Er, isn’t stopping people from using bus lanes, jamming the road through dim-witted parking and threatening them with a fine if they block junctions doing precisely that?

Defending the motorist is the easiest and cheapest political tool in the box.

But criticising efforts to stop selfish drivers causing delays for everyone else makes not one jot of sense.