Safe Speed Forums

I really can't believe I'm reading this.

Most drivers drive at the appropriate speed for the conditions.

NOT "Most drivers drive at the appropriate speed for the conditions" assuming that the road is running between continuous armco barrier, walled off, through a desert, with no humans or other animate, or even inanimate but valuable, elements on the planet.

They drive according the junctions, residences, driveways, pavements, verges, pedestrians, pets, animals, children, crossings, schools, shops, etc, etc, etc.

As I'm sure you've been told innumerable times:

Slow does NOT mean safe.

Also slow does NOT mean quiet or pollution free or even energy conserving.

In fact it usually means you are clogging up the road with a continuous stream of noisy, smokey gas guzzling vehicles when they could be whispering past cleanly and efficiently.

If you want to halve the traffic past your door, and its "harmful" effects: get it to double its speed!

Are you one of those people who believe that cars should always stop for pedestrians because you can't figure out that it takes twice as long for them to stop as to drive past, and it generates noise, wastes fuel, produces pollution, wears out gearboxes and clutches as well as even more safety critical items such as brakes and tyres, and means that you have to cross in front of, rather than safely behind, a car.

Are you sure you can drive?

Or are you just judging the rest of us by your own driving standards?!

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http://www.itsyourduty.org.uk

So, you've finally realised that all those reports about the environmental and health hazards caused by "traffic", despite the government advertising them over a clip of a smokey car exhaust, were actually blamed on buses and the power stations that fuel trams and trains.

And that a concurrent report for the NHS said that there were neither health nor environmental reasons for curbing car use.

You're quite right: as trains and trams, and to a lesser extent buses, can't steer or stop, instead of having them hurting past at 186mph, Twenty's much more then Plenty for them.


Who are these drivers?

Oh, and are youi talking about a minor road through a village?

Or a village on a major road?

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http://www.itsyourduty.org.uk

Did someone mention arse about face?

Try totting up the cost to the economy of all the anti- car lobby domination. And then work out the loss to society that causes!


Halleluja!

At last, you've got it!

Move the risk to pedestrians and you'll find that accidents to all road users fall, the economy booms, and we all live happily ever after.

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http://www.itsyourduty.org.uk

Any reason why you chose to selectively "quote":




Apologies.

Well spotted.

You are right for once:

I should have said drivers of course.

Or, more specifically, trained, tested, licensed, experienced drivers with a combined experience of millions of years and billions of miles of driving.

Who also are pedestrians, and quite often cyclists



Again, you're right!

Presumably because you are refering to the pedestrians without the age, experience, life and technical skills to become trained, tested, licensed, experienced drivers with a combined experience of millions of years and billions of miles of driving.



Tells us all we need to know about the world you want to live in.

You would seem to be one of those people who aren't satisfied with wanting, say, safer operations, but insist on patients telling surgeons exactly how to operate more safely.

No doubt if you were to ever risk going aloft in a great big noisy smelly speeding airplane you would insist that a committee of unqualified passengers not only insisted that the pilot flew the plans safely and considerately, but actuall took the controls from the pilot and showed him how he should be doing it.



Wot?

Drivers rights on the Highway?

On the car-riageway?


Good to see that I haven't wasted all this time trying to have a sensible and reasoned discussion with someone who's got their own agenda then.

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http://www.itsyourduty.org.uk

This post of yours is a real splatter gun approach - more emotion than rational argument, with loads of embedded and prejudicially worded questions. It'd simply take to long to answer every individual point, but I'm going to pick two (emboldened).

Speed and safety are very much related because if you are going too fast you will crash every single time. Clearly the speedlimit is an absolutely useless definition of "too fast" because:

1) crashes caused or contributed to by exceeding it are extremely rare events.
2) exceeding the speed limit is extremely commonplace
3) most crashes that involve "excessive speed" do not also involve exceeding a speed limit.
4) as we all know the safety of a speed is dictated by constantly changing conditions, yet the speed limit doesn't change at all.

You show your true colours when you say "cars are not nice". Funny then that "nice car" produces over a quater of a million google hits. Clearly many folk disagree with your opinion!

Irrespective of whether or not one considers cars to be "nice" we still have to deal with road safety issues in a positive, effective, economic, well-researched, well reasoned and socially acceptable way. The speed camera programme fails to meet ALL of these criteria.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

It's accounted for by the fact that the locals use the road. If they want a really low limit all they need to do is to bring the 85th %ile down by doing a lot of 1st gear driving all over their own neighbourhod. If they don't want to do that I guess they can't want the low limit that badly.
The worry I have with the local stakeholder stuff you mention is that it's fine in principle, but in practice people are likely to behave like people. If you believe that drivers are selfish, basingwerk, as I'm sureyou've said more than once and I've agreed with, then you must realise that they same people are going to be selfish when they get out of the car and go inside theri house. That means that they'll want to stop people driving too fast (in their view) on local roads bvut will expect that not to apply to themselves.
I'm all for local views being considered, but if it's the be-all and end-all then we're just chucking any pretence at objectiveity down the swanny.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

All in the eye of the beholder.

Ooooo nononono. Trot out a sentence like that in many areas of life these days and you'll be called prejudiced for selecting only one group. How about this?
All road users show due respect for other persons.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

I'm sure you are correct, but this fact alone isn't going to prevent people from perceiving the threat to be greater than it is.
Parents who engage in the 'school run' will regularly cite fears over traffic and how unsafe it is for pedestrians to walk in their neighbourhood. Yet, when in their car they may also curse the fixed speed camera down the road, and blame jaywalking pedestrians for creating their own problems. That they can carry these two entirely contradictory viewpoints around in their heads suggests either that they arrogantly blame other drivers (not themselves) for being carless speeders, or that something more subtle is going on. It's all to do with Cognitive Dissonance.

Heck, safespeed, "nice day" brings up 1.5 mil, but does that mean that everybody is having a nice day! I mean, "bad day" brings up 1.7 mil! Look, we only have 10,000 days left if we carry on like this. People will have plenty of time to disagee with me when they are dead. And it won't be long, judging by this report on CO2. And tailpipes are only one of the things wrong with cars.

You talk of my true colours, and you use safety talk, but somehow I can't rid myself of the notion that, underneath all this, the goal is faster driving.

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I stole this .sig

Yes, I can dig that idea. But in reality, children pedestrians do not have equal power of death as drivers, and are not encased in steel.

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I stole this .sig

Two reasons. First, it is all in the posts above, and second, to spotlight your "cognitive dissonance" distraction.

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I stole this .sig

Don't matter. It's not about equal power over whoever or whatever. It's about equal responsibility.

FWIW I don't consider that my repsonsibility for my actions changes at all when I'm a pedestrian from when I'm a driver. I am ultimately repsonsible for my personal safety in all respects and at all times. That means I choose not to walk on the road when there's a pavement, I choose not to cut up artics on roundabouts when i'm driving, and so on. (Not just about roads either, just about everything I do in my waking life I take responsibility for.) There are also thing s i positively do do to make my life safer. I look where I'm going and watch out for others who may cross my path... and that's just in the supermarket. Guess what, same thing on the road, but it's easier than Tescos as trolleys aren't expected to stay on the left down the veg ailse.

See what I mean? Personal responsibility for self preservation. I don't exepct you to prtoect me on the roads anymore than I expect it of you anwhere else. My safety is ultimately down to me, legislation notwithstanding. Sure, we could pass a law that makes my safety your responsibility, but it'll be crap and we all know it. What are you going to do? Turn the gravity off if I walk off a cliff? course not. My safety is ulatimately down to me. It can be no other way.

Okay, children and other peple who are not fully responsible for their actions are an exception, and an emotive one at that. First let's lose the emotion though, as it doesn't affect the principle of it. It's really not much more complicated. Parents whose kids are too young to understand the dangers should not expose them to the danger. It's that simple. If your child is not yet capable of understanding that sticking a biro up a doberman's nose is likely to result in being bitten, don't let him play with the bloody dog. The same principle applies to the roads. If they aren't yet old enough to act safely by the roads, keep 'em in the garden or stay with them. Whatever, just don't let 'em play in the traffic on their own. Ditto anyone who is similarly incapable. If I end up with some degenerative mental disaease i hope that someone will be about to prevent me wandering off to the motorway. If that should happen it's certainly not the fault of the drivers who happen to be there at the time.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

Children cannot called to account for accidents that have happened to them. All walkers are interested in self preservation, whereas all drivers are not necessarily that interested in walkers' preservation, because they don't have to be. It is time to either make them interested or change the system so it doesn’t matter.



Yes, they [i]should/i] and most do. When they don't, the responsibility suddenly becomes ours, and I hope we are going slowly enough to stop when it happens.

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I stole this .sig

Yeah, that's sort of what I said isn't it? Thing is though, where the chid cannot a responsible adult should be present. I don't think that's stretching parenting skills a great deal. When they're ready, fine, in the meantime keep by your side, on reins, whatever.

Actually, that's just made me wonder about something. I'm sure we all rememver when Jamie Bulger was murdered, and within a very short time Mothercare and the rest were selling out of kiddie reins and wrist leads. I wonder what the stats were like for deaths and injuries of young children around that time. How quickly those reins and leads were forgotten about! Haven't seen an ankle biter on reins for ages, and this morning I saw on Ceefax that some 5 year old kid found his way out of schol and into tescos where he was stopped from buying a trolley full of cakes only because he had no means of paying. Case in point... had the kid been run over whose fault would that have been? Many would instinctively blame the driver, but the real culprit is whoever was so crimnally negligent as to have allowed him out in the first place.

I am far from convinced that some walkers are in fact interested in self preservation. Go to Wimbledon and drive past the station around 8 to 8.30am. You'll soon see what I mean.

The fact that some feel that their safety is the responsibility of others suggests to me that they are not in fact fulfilling the requirements of self preservation. I'm sure they think they are, but in practice they are not. The very term means that it is the responsibility of each of us as individuals to avoid danger. It is not self preservation as long as we isist on passing the buck. Agreed that not all drivers are interested in walker's safety, but then the prime responsibility for that is not drivers at all, but the walkers themselves. That's what self preservation means. If someone else is meant to do the preserving (which is inherently unreliable IMO) it's not self anymore is it?

No, I don't see thqat at all. The responsibility never changes. As a driver I have a responsibility to drive safely. That fulfills both self preservation and what we might call the secondary responsibility for the safety of others. As a pedestrian its the same but the other way round. Even if I thorw caution to the wind and enter the road with out looking, nobody's responsibility changes. I cannot reasonably expect drivers to take primary responsibility for my safety. It's quite impossible. They have a secondary responsibility in that they should see me walking along, perhaps anticipate likely behaviour, and react correctly if I do something irrational. But, and it's a biggie, by neglecting my primary responsibility for my safety I can easily overwhelm the the ability of a driver to fulfill their secondary responsibility.

I think you and I look at the hazards on the road in very different ways. You look at it as an entirely man made situation, and therefore those that creat it should be responsible for modifying it. On a very large scale i can see merit in that argument. Put simply, if we as a society want cars then society as a whole should work towards ensuring their safe use. I can't imagine either of us would disagree with that sentence. However, I think where we differ is how we look at it on a smaller scale - that of small groups or individuals.

As far as I'm concerened roads and cars are a like natural hazard (the word "natural" being very loosly used - perhaps "consequent hazard of modern life" is better). I treat them in much the same way I would treat a really natural hazard. To reuse an anlogy I've trotted out more than once, say I covered myself in offal and went for a swim in waters I knew contained sharks. Would you blame the sharks for hat happened next? Or would you blame that maniac Gatsobait for doing something so obviously dangerous that it guranateed he'd be recycled as shark shit? Obvious answer, eh. I have, with very little practical knowledge of sharks, gone for 35 years without ever being eaten by one. In reality I don't need to now a great deal about them. They live in water, I don't. If I'm careful about going in the ater they won't get me. Same thing with the roads. I've never seen a car driving along the pavement, although unlike sharks it is at least physically possible for this to happen, and on rare occasions it does. very rare though. Broadly I'm safe when I'm on the pavement. And just like avoiding sharks by being carful when entering the water, if I exerise proper care when entering the road i'm highly unlikely to be hit by a car.

Now I know one response to this is "what if someone doesn't exercise proper care when crossing the road". Well, sounds a bit cruel, but tough shit. Refer to the sharks. If the same person failed to exercise proper care when getting into the water, as a result of which he had an arm torn off, we would never in a million years think to blame the shark. The real responsibility is always going to be that of the person who put themselves in that situation, whether it be busy road or Bond villain style shark tank. I honestly believe that if pedestrians were to treat cars as if they were sharks they'd be a lot safer.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

That's right. The great giveaway is that you cannot walk anywhere on the streets without stopping, looking right and left, and giving way to cars when crossing roads. Get that - the pavements do not cross the roads, do they? The roads chop through the pavements, straight through, unimpeded by the possible passage of walkers. Walkers MUST wait! Walkers wait because they have given up their authority on the streets, and cars processed unimpeded by walkways, because they have been allowed to claim that authority. They have been allowed to do that because they are dangerous and walkers have given them a wide berth, and in doing so, they have lost their rights to walk. Now, finally, the doors of perception are open and, in city centres and towns, cars are finally having their priority stripped away from them, and not before time. Yes, finally we might have equal responsibly and equal rights.

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I stole this .sig

But it's not just tough shit, though, is it? It's Camera time! It's Pelican Crossing time! It's Hump time! It's Close One Lane and Make The Other One Way time! It's Put In Trams time! In other words, it's tough shit for everybody.

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I stole this .sig

Theoretically, yes. See my previosu post about Wimbledon station.

With the exception of foot bridges and tunnels which are completley unaffected by the road layout or what's currently using it. Arguably same can be said for pedestrian controlled lights.

And "chopping" thorugh is rather an inappropriate and emotive term don't you think. It's not like the norm is that pavements were pre-existing and ran perpendicular to where the road "chopped" thorugh it. The pavements have always been alongside roads. Not just modern roads either. Wheeled transport goes back to biblical times, and I'm sure that pedestrians walked to one side or other of the cart tracks rather than constantly crossing in front of them. Except of course where Wimbledon station stood about 3000 years ago where I'm certain some twat was run down by a yak because he was paying too much attention to his copy of the Daily Papyrus. Sorry, i digress. Point is roads do not chop through pavements, any more than they chop through other roads at junctions.

Sorry, do go on.

They need not do so necessarily. As i said above, in many places there are facilities for them to make their way over or under the road so avoiding any conflict with traffic. In many others they can press a button, and after a brief while they will have made the cars wait. Or at zebras, which are my least favourite for reasons of pedestrian safety, it is incumbent on drivers to give way - or in other words the mere presence of a pedestrian makes me wait while I'm in my car.

Stop acting like all this waiting goes only one way. It doesn't. Sometimes pedstrians wait for drivers. Sometimes drivers wait for pedestrians. And what's the big deal anyway? As i driver i don't get all bent out of shape when a pedestrian forces me to wait because he's changed the lights to red. No worries.

I'm a little worried about the idea of all these impatient pedestrians getting wound up with all this waiting we're making them do. perhaps they ought to get themselves into cars and learn a little patience.

What authority? Modern roas are designed for cars, not for pedestrians. The idea that pedestrians have given up rights or authority over modern roads is laughable - they never had it in the first place. Even if we were to talk about ancient roads and how it was mainly foot traffic back then, which we're not, they still never had any divine right to the road. Footpaths, yes. But roads have always been shared.

Allowed to do that? Lost their rights to walk? Again, this speaks of some divine right that never existed. Let's get this straight. Feet have indeed been around longer than wheels, and on those first paths made by feet for feet (or at least their decendants) we can rightly say that wheels don't have a place. Maybe that's why cycling on the pavement is a no-no. But then came the wheel, and roads came along shortly after to make life easier for the wheel users. And a good solution it was too. Much better for medeieval peasants to know that carts stick to certain routes instead of wandering all over the place. Not that different from today really.

I reiterate. Roads are for vehciles. Pavements are for walkers. The latter can use the roads too, but must do so carefully and responsibly.

Do what? We can attempt to legislate rights and responsibilities but life will have other ideas. Better that legislation reflects the harsh realities rather than ivory tower ideals. As for pedestrianising town centres, frankly I don't see what that's got to do with this at all. To use my earlier analogy, we're draining the waters that the sharks live in, reclaiming it as land and forcing the sharks to go elsewhere. That doesn't absolve swimmers of the responsibility to take care when swimming where the water remains. If they fail to take precautions they remain at risk of being eaten.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

And, Basingwerk, just to add to Gatsobait's excellent points...

Even if we decided to have a radical rethink about road as shared spaces and ban cars from many places, we'd STILL have to have a cooperative system for managing the remaining shared spaces.

In fact, the vast majority of spaces are going to be shared spaces for the foreseeable future. We have to manage behaviours in those shared spaces and that means expecting equal standards of responsibility from all classes of road user.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Very sorry. I think I put that point poorly. Allow me to expand a bit.

What I meant by it is that life will dole out it's own form of punishment to the unwary. We can put in whatever we want in the way of rules, or street funtiure, or traffic calming, or signs, or loaded insurance premiums. It won't change a thing where it matters most, and that is that if i walk out in front of a car it's going to bloody hurt. My error of judgement, my lapse of concentration... my responsibility for the consequences... my pain and suffering, perhaps even my death. That's the harsh reality. We can pass a law that makes the driver to blame, but it would be entirely artifiical and really reduces fault to liability. In such a situation my own neglignece would have been the cause, and Life itself will become judge and jury. If my sentence is suspension of breathing rights, that's tough shit.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

But CO2 only absorbs particular wavelengths of radiated heat.

And CO2 is already absorbing all of those already.

So how is any increase in CO2 going to cause any more warming?


Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

You talk about safety, but somehow I can't rid myself of the notion that, underneath all this talk about reducing CO2, there has to be a real goal that no one is admitting to.

Fancy giving us a clue as to what the true agenda is?

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http://www.itsyourduty.org.uk