On Saturday, June 16, The Times reported: "Young motorist claims 'institutionalised' abuse at ADT. An 18-year-old, who is being asked to return his driving licence after being found guilty of paying a driving examiner to obtain it, yesterday filed a judicial protest claiming discrimination."

It goes on to say, "like hundreds of other people, he had paid an ADT official to obtain his driving licence, otherwise, like all his friends, he would never have passed the test".

What knowledge does this man have of numbers, and why has he not quoted his friends' names? I am incandescent with rage. At worst the whole thing may be a fabrication. At best it is very, very damaging reporting.

If this man is still 18 years old as reported, the current batch of eight men and one woman, eight of whom have either worked as examiners for a year or less, and are still working, must come under suspicion.

I worked as an examiner from June 2006 till the end of September, and must, as the only person to leave the job, be the prime suspect, if, and only if, he is really still 18 years old, or took the confounded driving exam after June 15, 2006, when two of us moved in, followed at regular intervals by another three, and finally another four.

I would wager on the honesty of the whole crew and, frankly, if I had still been working, I would have downed tools until the ADT had clarified matters with a total retraction of the suspicions that have been pointed at all of us.

As it is, my degree of incandescence rises daily as I get the 'Mickey' taken out of me by the many people I meet who know that I did a stint as an examiner. But why, in the name of common courtesy, has no-one from either the ministry or the ADT has dropped me and the other, working examiners a line, assuring us that the current claims were against the earlier crew of driving examiners, five of the six who were parted from the job under a definite cloud, is a revoltingly annoying mystery.

For the record, towards the end of a year's contract as a consultant within the ADT, I volunteered, at the tender age of 68, to help out as an examiner, when I found that the relevant department was in chaos having just lost five of the six examiners.

In fact, I resigned 15, or so, days before the end of the contract as it made little sense to go on into the early days of October 2006 once the Prime Minister's Office had declared war on elderly pensioners continuing as consultants, so frankly my time was, in any case, up.

In the same way, time and co-operation seems to have run out for the CEO who, in fact, will be sorely missed. But he appears to have finally had enough and has wisely, in my opinion, 'walked' before his health was put in jeopardy by the daily 'grind' of trying to ensure that people who were paid to do a job actually did what they were paid for, and that politicians acted through their civil servants and stopped interfering with the running of what should be an autonomous authority on an almost daily basis.

Speed cameras

Some time ago I read that the speed/safety camera was being reinstalled on Xemxija Hill.

I also read that the speed limit would be rationalised, inasmuch as I presume the experts in the ADT have finally realised that an impossible-to-read (except in cars with a digital readout) 45 km/h could helpfully be raised to 50 km/h, a speed that all drivers must surely be able to judge as it is the 'normal' in town maximum.

At the time of writing (June 20) the camera is covered with black plastic rubbish bags and the 45 km/h speed limits are still in force.

In effect, from observations being made on all those roads that have one of these cameras installed, motorists panic and slow down to an immoderate degree.

Cameras with 70 km/h see most vehicles plodding through at less than 60 km/h (stay on the Burmarrad road or the Zebbug road, and see for yourselves). Even the infamous camera on the Mriehel bypass has most motorists scared down to a speed closer to 65 km/h rather than 75, which would still be safe as the camera is accurately set at 80 km/h.

Then, of course, we have the entirely correct camera in Attard. Against some councillors' wishes, it was placed at the in-town speed of 50 km/h. There was a noisy proclamation that this was too high a speed for this road. However, this is an important arterial road that must surely maintain a sensible traffic flow if it is to remain a proper thoroughfare.

On the hundreds of occasions that I have used this road the speed approaching the confounded camera barely touches 40 km/h. However, the residents seem to collectively have 'one bolt short of a dozen' as they can be observed happily reversing their vehicles from their driveways into this busy arterial road.

Common sense, if nothing else, would dictate that they reverse into the driveway so that they can join the main road going forward in far more safety.

Interestingly, a nephew who was a Metropolitan 'cop' based in his car on the M25 before shoving off and doing the same job in Canada, assures me that police abroad would book any residents for driving without due care and attention, at least, if they were to cause an accident by reversing into a main road.

Our own Highway Code has this to say in Paragraph 201. "Do not reverse from a side road into a main road, unless it is unavoidable." Arguably, and quite reasonably in this context, the driveway is the side road, and if it's possible to drive in and reverse out, it must be possible for any competent driver to reverse in and drive out.

Will someone please explain to thousands of mystified motorists why the downhill section of the Bahar ic-Çaghaq road has the approach to the speed camera restricted to 70 km/h when 20 metres beyond the camera the speed has been dropped to 60 km/h?

This causes many motorists to panic and slam on their brakes to go through the camera at a lot less than 60 km/h. Not a clever infliction on drivers at this potentially dangerous spot, especially as the hill is really quite steep. However, we really must congratulate the chief warden, responsible for speed cameras, to have at last made the camera housing on this busy road clearly more visible.

To ESC or not to ESC

I read that Malta is at the bottom of the list of EU countries that import vehicles equipped with Electronic Stability Control (ESC).

Over the past 35 years I have test driven and written about hundreds of newly imported cars, and in truth when driving at our interestingly slow 80 km/h (50 mph) maximum speed have never found myself in a position where ESC would have helped me in any way at all.

Of the three cars that I actually own, including one sports saloon from the mid-Fifties, one delightful Fiat X 1/9 from 1980, and a somewhat modified Ford Ka, the first two have neither power steering, nor power-assisted brakes, or any other gubbins likely to help the 'pilot' get out of trouble, other than steering, clutch and brakes, and the Ka doesn't even have ABS, let alone ESC.

If you drive very fast, drive too fast on slippery surfaces, or take no pride in your own ability to control a car, ESC, which helps get you out of trouble if a skid is about to occur, or if one of the driven wheels tries to spin, may well be of enormous use.

However, any driver who has only driven vehicles equipped with ABS, assisted brakes and the full Electronic Stability Control package, and then relies on them rather than their own skills to keep them out of trouble, may well get into the most serious pickle when, or if, they find themselves behind the wheel of a vehicle that doesn't do the thinking for them.

More often than not, when testing a car on our roads, I switch off the ESC and actually enjoy the full freedom of the car's suspension, brakes and steering.

At low speeds any driver who holds a 'full' licence should have no trouble in controlling a car, even in slippery conditions, and as most of our accidents are caused by bad driving habits at speeds well below 80 km/h ESC would be yet another expensive addition, as electronic gadgets have an unfortunate ability to go wrong, break down, cease to function, and then the replacement costs are most annoyingly high.

In Maltese conditions my best advice is to concentrate on driving well, enjoy driving, think of your car as a friendly, inanimate object, and never rely on electronic gadgetry to keep you out of trouble.

Learn about skidding; oversteer and understeer; and, most importantly of all, learn to read the tell-tale signs of slippery, or uneven patches on the road many metres ahead of your car, and take action appropriate to what you see.

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