Fifty percent of drivers in the UK admit to breaking traffic laws, which means that the other fifty percent are lying. Everybody breaks traffic laws, it is what they are there for.
Have you ever been on a motorway? Have you ever been on a motorway and driven at the 70 mile an hour speed limit? If so, were you the slowest person on that particular stretch of road for as far as the eye could see? Of course you were.
Drivers flash past motorists doing 70 like they haven't untied their date from the bedposts, just nipped out for some whipped cream and their mother called to say she's popping round and will let herself in.
Nobody at all obeys the speed limit on a motorway unless they are caught in one of those interminable average speed sections that accompany roadworks. These are doubly annoying because never in recorded history has any actual work been going on behind the ribbon of cones that have robbed the motorway of one of its lanes.
The cones are there for health and safety reasons, so that if a workman does show up and you can't see him in his eye-shrivellingly luminous yellow jacket, you will at least hear the sound of plastic flying off your bumper before you sail into him. This will help to prevent accidents, as the one thing that drivers are not doing while going through an average speed camera trap is looking out of the windscreen. They have their eyes permanently locked onto their speedometer to ensure that they are doing exactly the posted speed limit and not 0.1% less than that because if they don't, the driver behind them will have a fit of rage you could see from space.
While it is not technically a law, it is at least in the Highway Code that you should be courteous to other road users at all times. You may remember once seeing a driver act courteously but that was probably because they were exiting the driveway of a nunnery, on the way to a beatification.
There is something about being behind the wheel of a car, or commenting in anonymity on the internet that makes perfectly reasonable people become what is known in the trade as a*****les.
How many times have you seen a person screaming at someone who has just walked in front of them on the pavement and delayed their progress by milliseconds? Even if it were an Olympic discipline that would not be acceptable behaviour, yet drivers do it all the time.
They honk their horns like their hands have been superglued to them and each honker is telling the honkee that they think they are a complete moron, of questionable parentage and they wish them a speedy death, which they would be experiencing at that second if the car the honker was driving came with forward mounted missile launchers.
If cars came with the sort of gadgets that James Bond has at his disposal, then councils across the land would be re-purposing snow ploughs to hose the blood off the streets.
You could solve much of the stress that we place ourselves under if people in cars were as courteous in their driving life as they are in their real life.
In real life, you do not walk behind someone so close that they can feel your nostril breath on the back of their necks. You do not put your arm up to stop someone coming out of a shop because you are walking by on the pavement. Nobody screams at someone who starts to walk left and then changes their mind and turns right. At most, you might tut under your breath, you do not shout and swear and wish unpleasant diseases on them.
If drivers were courteous, they would not wait until you are crossing a yellow box junction, then nip past you and nab the space beyond it that you were aiming for, leaving you stranded and fined in the no-stop zone.
If drivers were courteous, they would not go berserk if the driver ahead of them takes more than a millisecond to set off after the lights turn green, or stops while the lights are on orange, before they turn red.
If drivers were courteous, the roads would not be such a nerve-stretchingly tense place to travel. The only reason that most of us are not on the edge of our seats while behind the wheel is that our seat belts won't allow it.
So, be as kind and gentle and considerate while you are breaking the law while driving your cars as you are while walking the streets because if you don't, I will flip the switch on some 007 modifications that I have been installing behind my front bumper.
You have been warned. Consider this a polite honking.