Im not sure it proves that.
UK speed camera tolerances revealed (Somewhat).
- Thread starter empip
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Im not sure it proves that.
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No, the speed limit is already 30mph. My point is, nobody goes at that speed. Faster is dangerous, only yesterday some daft woman seemed not to comprehend that people living in the houses might actually want to slow down before turning into their drives. Crossing the road is a death wish at rush hour. My point is speed limits need to be policed better to be effective - and they really are needed in some areas.
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Are you sure? According to this list we're 5th (although maybe 3 of those are exceptional!). But it's a good point - we have speed limits for good reason.
Rank Country Road traffic death rate (per 100 000 population) in 2013
1 Monaco 0.0
2 Micronesia 1.9
3 Sweden 2.8
4 Kiribati 2.9
5 United Kingdom 2.9
6 San Marino 3.2
7 Switzerland 3.3
8 Netherlands 3.4
9 Denmark 3.5
10 Maldives 3.5
Two people I know have been killed on the roads for no fault of their own. One was crossing the road I live on, on a zebra crossing, and a speeding motoring ran him over and killed him.
The other was on a good, mostly straight A road doing 50-60, and somebody coming the other way veered into his lane when on blind hill (probably looking at phone). Both killed almost instantly.
The second case highlights the importance of adjusting your driving for the conditions of the road. The first, just don't speed because it bloody well kills people.You might get away with speeding your whole life, and your mates might as well, but for every group (no idea of numbers) of people that get away with it, somebody will not, and they will kill somebody. The government didn't pluck speed limits out of thin air and apply them at random.
Generally slower is safer.
The problem is that an appropriate speed for the conditions is a fluid speed and its important to adapt continuously.
The government have to set some form of speed limit, but of course its a best average judgement for each road -each driver has to make a judhement on the safe speed as they drive along.
I have to be honest, I take little notice of speed limits, although I dont drive very fast and always leave big gaps to the car in front.
I dont like driving with my constant attention on speed signs and find it a bit irritating when people exactly at 30, then where the markers change, the drive exactly at 40.
Over the last 15 years Ive driven the same route to work, about 10 miles, smallish semi rural roads. Its amazing how many accidents Ive encountered or where the roads been closed over that time. At rush hour too many people drive too fast, too aggressively and ignore poor weather conditions -sections of the road suffer surface water run off from fields and often get slippery in the winter -its amazing how cars you see in dithes, up trees or admiring the view from a farmeds field
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Thanks for the advice! If you knew what I did for a living, you might feel a bit self-conscious about "educating me" but then again....
Not if you can't be identified / traced....
Well, as you were willing to give me some kind advice on the correlation between speed and fuel consumption, I guess it would only be fair for me to reciprocate and advise you to "try getting a better adblocker" or "try enrolling in a PC literacy evening class"? You don't have to sign up or register or anything. If you get the popup inviting you to do so, just hit the cross in the top right hand corner and it goes away. The link worked fine for me and no, the graphic was quite clearly labelled "transport ACCIDENTS". ("respiratory disorders" are a separate and much larger cause of death - and before you say it, no, they're NOT all caused by cars although cars are a major contributor. By all means let's have a debate on how we improve emissions performance but just sticking to the failed dogma of more and more draconian speed limit enforcement and when that fails, lower and lower limits, ISN'T the answer). But returning to the point though, the Boeing problem is very different. Now I'm glad you raised this, because there are very interesting parallels to be drawn. First of all, when a plane goes down, there is a very methodical investigation to determine the precise cause(s) of the accident. None of this hysterical, knee-jerk presumption that it can all be fixed by harsher speed limit enforcement or lower limits. Secondly, having done that, we can then see where the improvements in safety actually NEED to be made in order to save lives. In this case, there's a problem with the plane. Now you can be pretty darned certain that if a similar problem with a CAR was found, there would be a recall. Now, I ask you (and this is a serious point), Notch7 in Post#33, has already quoted the top 10 causes of road accidents from the STATS 19 database. It's pretty plain for all to see, that "driver exceeding the speed limit" is quite a way down the list. So when the medicine (harsher enforcement and lower limits) isn't working, WHY do you (and many like you) persist in clamouring for more of the same? YOU have blood on your hands. If you look at the road deaths since the War in the UK, they've been declining steadily for decades. Curiously, right up until we got fixated on speed as the root of all evil and started relying on cameras to do the job that trained traffic police used to do. Amazingly, since that happened, the improvements have started to flatline. Do you think there might be a connection? One thing is certain. Properly trained traffic police COST money to run, whereas cameras MAKE money (and plenty of it). I'll just leave you with that thought...
So you've already said.
I already find they're very rare. Try driving with a bit more care and attention if you have a problem with bird strikes?
I think you're putting words in my mouth there? I said nothing about vehicle speed when cycling. I said (and yes, I DO speak as a cyclist on rural roads) that the noise of an approaching car (at any speed) is a valuable safety aid for me. Electric vehicles, in particular, are near-silent at low speeds and they can get a lot closer behind me before I'm aware of them.
One day, Teacher told the class that she wanted them to go home and do a scientific experiment. The following day, the various kids demonstrated their findings. Little Timmy's turn came up. He came up to the front of the class and pulled a matchbox from his pocket and took out a spider. He put it on the desk, and to the amazement of the class and the teacher, he gave it various commands and like a well-trained dog, it would sit, beg and roll over. He then took his pen knife out and cut the spider's legs off. After that, he repeated his commands. The spider just stayed where it was.
"Well that's a pretty grizzly experiment Timmy!" said the teacher, "but what have you learned from your experiment?"
"Please Miss", said Timmy. "I've proved that when you cut a spider's legs off, it goes deaf".
But as I keep telling you, "the safer the car is".... right?
There's no reason why you can't do both. Audible warning is a valuable addition. All the time you're looking over your shoulder, you're not looking ahead.
There's a village called "Ings", here in Cumbria. It has the misfortune to be pretty much cut in half by the A591. Not unreasonably, the speed limit through the village is reduced to 40. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was widely ignored. Eventually, campaigns by the villagers resulted in the installation of speed cameras. As you might expect, these had the desired effect. They were well signed and highly visible, so the traffic all slowed down. Unfortunately, there was an unintended consequence too. When the speed limits were being ignored, (not by all drivers, of course, but by some) you got a significant speed differential. This caused "bunching" of traffic, where you'd get a few fast ones, and then a gap because there was one sticking to the limit, then a few fast ones again, and so on. What the villagers noticed, was that after the cameras were installed, the traffic flow smoothed-out, with the result that it too much longer to cross the road because they'd lost the natural gaps created by the speed differential between different vehicles!
Anyway, if you believe an existing speed limit is regularly being flouted, you can always get in touch with your local plod. This is a common situation up and down the land. You could even form a Community Speedwatch group if you (and enough of your fellow residents) felt strongly enough about it.
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LOL - I don't care what you do or did for a living, your persona is shining through very well.
what an unpleasant person you are coming over as -
Ah... I see you're better at dishing it out than taking it then? For some strange reason, it's fine for you to give out patronising and condescending advice on driving technique, but you're not quite so keen when you get the same back on IT matters. I'm afraid you'll find that people tend to treat you the way you treat them.
Anyway, as you might have guessed, I'm not really on here to seek your good opinion. If you want to come back on any of the substantive points and debate them, feel free.
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The problem with this subject is there are always two camps. Often those who've been impacted by road deaths, think the answer is to reduce speed. If only he'd been driving at 20 instead of 40 etc. They see speeding as the cause of everything. Speeding driver runs down person on zebra crossing: primary issue here is attitude and observation. Speeding driver misjudges bend: inability to adapt a speed for the conditions, speeding driver hits vehicle emerging from side roads: observation..Speeding driver, high as a kite.. speeding driver on the run from a robbery... Its easy to see speeding as the cause. Its also very easy for authorities to do things relating to speed. When they don't work, they try to do more.
You can't compare countries either. We have a huge concentration of vehicles in the SE and we have a lot of international traffic. Not something you see in Sweden for example with the vehicle density per mile closer to the north of Scotland, than Sussex or Surrey.
You can't compare countries either. We have a huge concentration of vehicles in the SE and we have a lot of international traffic. Not something you see in Sweden for example with the vehicle density per mile closer to the north of Scotland, than Sussex or Surrey.
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I'm in complete agreement. There seems to have been a shift in focus from motorways (which were always our safest roads per 100.000 vehicle-miles) to rural single carriageways - arguably our most dangerous, and this is where the points you've mentioned above, really come to the fore. Perhaps the single most common fatal accident, is the ill-judged overtake, closely followed by the "too fast for the conditions".
Sometimes, they try to remedy the first with increased use of solid white lines, but these are rarely a good solution - partly because we have nobody to enforce them, and partly because it then makes them inappropriate for lower speed overtakes (such as the all too common "car-passing-a-tractor" overtake. That's generally perfectly safe, whereas the "car-passing-another-car" overtake might not be, even though it's the same stretch of road. I do sometimes wonder whether safety could be improved by raising the limit to 50 for heavy goods vehicles along those roads, but until we can get over the "speed kills" mentality and actually start looking dispassionately at the problem, I doubt anyone will have the gonads to try it. They are running such a scheme on the A9 between Dunblane and Inverness, which has delivered excellent improvements in safety this last few years, but of course, they also put average speed cameras along it at the same time, so you can't see which of the measures made the difference. It goes without saying that the "speed kills" fraternity see it as a great endorsement of speed cameras though! Certainly, any measure that reduces the speed differential between vehicles will also reduce the desire to overtake. The other problem, is the nobody is taught how to overtake. The driving test has a variety of manoeuvres that one has to complete, but overtaking something safely isn't one of them. This strikes me as a glaring omission! Naturally, it's one of the more dangerous manoeuvres that we do on the roads, but I'm sure that more use could be made of simulators?
As for the "too fast for the conditions" accidents, again, these always bring out calls for reductions in speed limits. We had a young lad killed not far from me a few years ago, having lost control on a bend in a 60 limit. Naturally, there were knee-jerk calls for a 40 limit along that stretch of road - even though the police reckoned the lad was doing about 80 when he came off. Quite why those who were calling for a 40 limit thought he'd drive within that, but not a 60 limit, eludes me! In any case, such measures only work until someone kills themself in fog or snow (whilst still within the newly reduced speed limit).
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These speed cameras are so visible now that they are really catching people who are driving 'without due care and attention'. And that is what they should be prosecuted with instead of speeding. Speeding is bad enough but speeding whilst not concentrating should be automatic loss of licence. If you must speed then the bare minimum must be you give it 100% concentration.
So I would leave the highly visible cameras to get those off the road who should not be driving, and I would have hidden cameras to target those arrogant motorist who think their skills allow them to exceed the limits.
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