Walthamstow crash: man charged

A MAN has been charged in connection with a crash in which a car mounted the pavement and hit two pedestrians.

The youths were seriously injured when a vehicle hit them as they walked along Blackhorse Road in Walthamstow just before midnight on Wednesday August 11.

The car then smashed into a bus stop and a house, badly damaging the building.

Now police have announced that Robert Lane, 27, of Tollington Park Road in Finsbury Park, will face court next week on a variety of charges relating to the incident.

He is accused of dangerous driving, driving with no insurance, failing to stop after a personal injury accident, driving not in accordance with a licence and failing to report a personal injury accident.

In other words, this driver was committing two offences even before he crashed. There is an epidemic of uninsured drivers in London but the Met isn't interested in catching them, even though automatic numberplate technology can identify them in an instant. When was the last time you saw traffic police in London?

The streets of Walthamstow are packed with drivers chatting on handheld mobile phones, jumping red lights, using bus lanes to undertake other drivers. I even recently saw an idiot in a BMW roar down Wood Street on the wrong side of the road in order to queue jump at the Forest Road junction, using the cycling Advanced Stop Line as a handy tool for his dangerous manoeuvre.

The Metropolitan police are the criminal driver’s best friend, since

the chances of getting caught are minimal, and getting lower: between 1980 and 2001 numbers of traffic police in London were reduced from 1063 to 646 and the coming cuts in police numbers are likely to diminish the total further. As a consequence of this decreased enforcement, prosecutions for careless driving in London declined from 13,829 in 1984 to 4,715 in 2004.