How a National Speed Awareness Course took my ‘optimism bias’ down a peg

Driving a couple of miles-per-hour over the speed limit isn’t going to cause any real problem, is it? So thought David Barnett before he was caught, and attended a speed awareness course

Barnett says you rapidly learn that there are no excuses for speeding that will wash with anyone on these courses (iStock)

Outside a corner shop across the road from the Carlisle Business Centre in Bradford, West Yorkshire, a billboard for the local newspaper proclaims “Thousands sent on ‘bad driving’ courses”.

Reader, I am one of those thousands. In fact, the story was published in the Telegraph & Argus on the very day that I attended one myself. But, please – National Speed Awareness Course. There were 24 of us in the four-hour session, and not one of us went in thinking we were “bad drivers”.

Who hasn’t crept above the speed limit now and again? We all had our excuses ready. We weren’t sure of the speed limit on the stretch of road we were caught on. We were late for something. It was dark. Somebody was driving up really close behind us. For me, I smugly thought I had a cast-iron excuse for getting caught by a speed camera doing 36 in a 30mph zone. I was rushing to hospital to take my wife to see her mother, who had been admitted by ambulance an hour or so earlier.