Instructor hangs up L-plates

A driving instructor says she is giving up her job because of the bad tempers and poor driving of other motorists.

Zena Hamilton of the A to Zee Driving School in Sunderland is not taking on any more pupils after her current students pass their tests.

Ms Hamilton claims there has been a big drop in standards over the last four years with the number of impatient and poor drivers on the roads now "intolerable".

The instructor said speeding was routine and weaving in and out of lanes without signals is commonplace.

Driver intimidation

But Nigel Humphries, from the Association of British Drivers', said it was the fault of government transport policy and not road users.

He said: "They [the government] are basically using road safety as an excuse to introduce more and more draconian laws, in terms of speed limits in particular, which they then rigidly enforce using cameras.

"They take away the police traffic patrols off the roads who should be dealing with the bad driving, and they sit them in lay-bys with radar guns on a road where the speed limit is 15mph or 20mph below what it should be.

"That demoralises people, it makes them angry and it actually penalises them for when they are driving safely according to the conditions, because it criminalises their safe behaviour and intimidates and bullies them."