On the road, as in other travels in life, freedom+responsibility+education=empowerment. Most traffic regulation disempowers us, upsets our relationships with other road-users. If policymakers used instead of abused our social instinct for cooperation, things could be so simple. But the lords of misrule who populate traffic authorities make things needlessly difficult. They should face abuse or corporate manslaughter charges. With an apostrophe and a space, the term corporate manslaughter becomes corporate man’s laughter. They fuck us up, the engineers; they may not mean to, but they do. (It’s not exclusively engineers, of course, but that’s the only term that scans in the rhythm of Larkin’s poem.)
