Where you used to be able to use driving without due care and attention or a momentary lapse in concentration as something of an excuse for a driving offence, these themselves are now driving offences.

Organisations such as MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) have been lobbying for this change in the law for a long time and now different parts of the country have varying levels of punishments for the offences depending on the severity of the results of the careless driving.

What is somewhat surprising is that people dont seem to take this offence very seriously. In fact, people seem more willing to offer advice about how to avoid the charge than anything else! On an online discussion forum, we came across a man who had been charged with driving carelessly because he had been spinning his wheels on gravel by revving the car very high. The police officer that charged him said in his report that there was an open petrol pump nearby and so could have caused large scale damage and potential injuries to many people. The question he put forward on the forum was that if he could prove that the petrol pump was closed, would that help his case? And to our surprise, around fifty people had replied to him with advice about how to avoid punishment saying that if he could prove something in the officers report wrong then hed have a better case etc.

Each year negligent driving is the cause of tens of thousands of people either being killed or seriously injured and we dont really take much notice of it. Thousands of people lose their driving licence each year (at least temporarily) because of careless driving and quite often they simply get back behind the wheel the next day without a valid licence. A lot of the time, the people living in the surrounding areas usually know when someone is doing this and dont pull them up on it, this is why we have a lot of the road accidents we have in the country.

Driving without due care and attention is not as serious as drunk driving or cell-phone-driving in the eyes of most people, and in some cases even the police, however it is one of the leading causes of accidents on out roads and so it should be addressed with more seriousness and authority.