Safe Speed Forums

It's amazing the inconvenience people will put themseves through to stop a few cars in the rush hour.

- putting in gates on your drive
- going out horse riding at funny times
- farmers wasting valuable tilling time
- moving cows for no reason

Why expend all this effort; life is too short. Anyway, most of these ideas will inconvenience you, the villagers, more than anyone else.

There can't be "alternative fast roads / main routes available to motorists" as they would use them. What's the real reason for the traffic volume in your area?

_________________
Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

There are surely too opposing possibilities here - not entirely clear which is being advocated.

1. There are so many signs these days that they can either cause a distraction in themselves or make motorists too confident, leading to errors - I can quite see that removing the white lines from a road of marginal width could be helpful in ensuring people are aware of its narrowness.

2. Let's make life more difficult for drivers - deliberately obscuring visibility with fences etc, making bends tighter while reducing signage is surely a recipe for disaster.

I'd go for 1. but 2. could well be what they're after.

By the way things like getting horseriders, flocks, pedestrians on the roads at peak times is perfectly sensible in my view and should make the roads safer rather than less as drivers will become more aware - and might just take the edge of the rat run aspects. Putting trees in the road, speed traps etc. I'm not so keen on.

Ian

I am sure that people living in the village who want to get to work on time in the morning or home promptly in the "rush hour" after a hard day's work will appreciate this.

_________________
Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

Especially if they happen to have an accident with one of them

_________________
Prepare to be Judged

Groove could be straight off league of gentlemen!! "This is a local village! For local people" - grumpy **** springs to mind after reading his post about the non-locals ruin his precious peice and quiet by having the cheek to drive. on roads! how dare they!

Thank you to everyone who responded.

The action being taken is not being put into place without any thought and has the agreement of locals who are more than willing to be put out a bit. Also every driver in this village has agreed to drive here at no more than 25mph.

If drivers were to cut through and respect the environment they are in, I doubt if there would be a problem. But the majority DO NOT. They speed, they use mobile phones and discard their litter. They scare pedestrians, horse-riders, dog walkers, mothers with push-chairs and children. They speed around the narrow roads and blind corners, endangering other drivers.

Local people are being bullied into using their own cars (therefore adding to the problem) or not going out at all. On a daily basis we witness cars passing road users way over the speed limit who do not have the courtesy to either slow down or allow space. I remind you - we have no pavements. There have been accidents, near misses and constant complaints of traffic "brushing" those on foot. There is no need or excuse for this behaviour and although the Police and council appear to tolerate it WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH.

We have identified the sources of the offending traffic - where it is travelling to and from. We have established that the short cuts through the village, on average, save these drivers around 5minutes. We have carried out test runs and on some occasions the main A route has been proved to be faster than the rat run. We intend to force these drivers back onto the main A roads with the "alternative" measures described in my previous post. Additional and completely legal measures that I am not prepared to discuss on here are planned and will make life even more difficult and unpleasant for rat runners. The Council have already indicated that they will not give our roads priority when it comes to repairs - bring on the pot holes!

In response to those claiming it is their right to use these roads, we disagree. It is not your right to speed, use phones or discard litter. But it is your duty to drive within the law and safely. These are residential roads that are completely unsuitable for the heavy traffic they carry during peak hours. Why do drivers use these roads? Because they are selfish and deluded and so desperate to get to their unimportant jobs on time they are willing to compromise the safety of those around them. At least two appropriate routes are available to them.

In response to the post about how would we feel if a motorist knocked down someone as a result of someone stepping out from behind a tree planted to obscure a clear road. We would feel exactly the same as if a motorist knocked down someone because he was speeding or on the phone. This site constantly bangs on about driving to the conditions, so one would assume that faced with poor visibility and trees obscuring the road ahead, drivers would drive according to the conditions and with caution.

To give you an example of the success we have had - the journey time along a three-quarter mile stretch of a particular lane that normally takes 5 minutes has been increased to 35 minutes simply by using four horse riders at the evening peak. With heavy traffic in both directions they are simply impossible to overtake! This is just the start and is no problem for those involved. We are amazed at the lengths drivers will go to save a few minutes.

We will reclaim our village and hope that when our full plan is in place, other villages will follow our bold example.

Watch out - Captain Gatso's opposite has arrived and will triumph over evil!

_________________
GROOVE ARM

Dear God, the insanity!

Making life difficult and unpleasant for other road users eh? You sound like a valuable member of society!

People don't rat-run because they want to come and encroach on the web-toed lifestyles of the "local folk", they do so because there is insufficient road capacity elsewhere. Had it ever occurred to you that you could maintain well-kept and easy-to-negotiate roads in your neighborhood if the route the "outsiders" are trying to avoid was improved?

Try to look beyond your own blinkered colloquial paradigm, and understand that everyone who wishes to use the road is on the same 'team'. There are no locals vs. outsiders, everyone wants to use the roads safely and with a minimum of delay.

Your "additional measures" sound somewhat sinister, and I hope that any obstructive or dangerous practices you choose to put into play are reported to, and appropriately dealt with by, the police.

I hope the horse riders, who you said yourself have been scared by the traffic, fully appreciate the risks their little game puts them under and that, if the horses share their disquiet at being used as rolling roadblocks, and decide to shed their burdens, they are not too badly injured!

I am sure that absolutely noone from your little Pleasantville ever speeds, uses their mobiles, or discards litter in anyone else's neighborhood!

I take it from this scathing denouncement of the careers of everyone who drives through your village, that your job is so important to society you don't even dare think about taking a day off work in case civilisation crumbles around you

_________________
Chris

So is it the volume of traffic or the traffic's behaviour you object to? If the drivers obeyed the speed limit, kept off the phone and stopped discarding litter, would you be satisfied?




There's a hell of a lot of busy roads around these days, my village is no different; the A30 goes through it.

Welcome to the 21st century: like the 20th, but they stopped adding to the capacity of the road network.



How dare you make such a sweeping statement about people you don't know? It just makes you sound a bit mad. I would suggest most people NEED to go to work, so their jobs are pretty important to them. If I could stay at home, I would save six villages I pass through from my presence, but my house would get repossessed and I'd become a tramp.



I take by far the most obvious route to work simply because the obvious way is a hell of lorrys and crawling queues behind lorries and school buses and tractors, and I'd rather drive a comparatively quiet route that only takes a couple of minutes more. Without knowing the area in which you live, I'm sure all the motorists that pass through your Elysian idyll have made similar choices. There must be a negative about the two "appropriate" routes you mention.

Are you sure some haven't said that simply to avoid being branded as child-murderers by you and your fellow social control enthusiasts?

And will they do that in every other similar village they come across on their travels?


Hmm, I wonder how long that will last, especially in the winter. And does it really improve your quality of life substituting a broiling, angry jam for free-flowing traffic?

It would be interesting for you to name the village in question - but I suspect you won't because it's all a figment of your imagination.

Edit: deliberately obstructing the road with slow-moving traffic undoubtedly violates Highway Code Rule 169 as well:

_________________
"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

And what you are doing will calm the situation?
You may well have a problem, but vigilante action (even if legal) is risking provocation and further problem. You have gone about the problem the wrong way, thinking only of yourselves and your own needs, that in itself is selfish. There could well have been an acceptable compromise.


So you never found an answer for why the so called ‘rat runners’ choose to take your village instead of the "alternative fast roads"?


Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face!


How misleading!
It IS everyone right to use ALL public roads. You have deprived the safe drivers of the route they wish to take.


I believe Safespeed does not support the actions of Captain Gatso.


The approach of your village is very antagonistic. Don’t be surprised if your village suffers a tragic consequence resulting from subsequent road rage.

_________________
Views expressed are personal opinions and are not necessarily shared by the Safe Speed campaign

Dear GrooveArm

I have no wish to use your village road and inconvenience you. In order for me to avoid it, I need to know to which road and village you are referring. Please could you tell me.

_________________
Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

Do the horses move out of the way when a village resident wants to get to his house at the end of the three-quarter mile stretch? If they don't you will very quickly antagonise the people that you believe are supporting you.

How would you feel if someone deliberatly delayed you for 30 minutes just because you were in 'their' village?

I read the type of things above and then I hear on the radio about the Green Belt possibly being used for affordable housing soon.

If people are this obsessive about a bit of road for a couple of hours per day, what are they going to do when 800 houses are planned to be built on the edge of the village? Well, the site is very convenient for access to the "fast roads / main routes available" nearby isn't it?

_________________
Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

Obstructing the Queen's Highway is a criminal offence, unless of course it all takes place in someone's twisted imagination.

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

Actually, that might not be the only reason. It is a good and unselfish thing to try and spread the peak traffic volume over ALL available road space. I live in a rural area too. We have an NSL main road right through the middle of our village. We have lots of single track roads around it. From an environmental and social perspective, there might be very good reasons for using some of the peripheral roads if it helps reduce the congestion (and resulting pollution) on the main road. IF the roads you are talking about were PRIVATE roads, I'd have more sympathy for your point of view but as they're PUBLIC roads maintained with PUBLIC funds, I don't see it as unreasonable for the PUBLIC to use them! You need to separate the two issues in your own mind. One is that there is too much traffic, the other is that some of the traffic drives dangerously (and illegally). THESE ARE TWO DIFFERENT PROBLEMS and the solutions are not necessarily going to be the same!



...only this time, you'd be partly to blame...

Grove,

you should familiarise yourself with the CPS Charging Standard
http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/section9/chapter_b.html#17 before participating in any scheme to deliberately obstruct other motorists.

Its against the law...
Careless driving and driving without due consideration - Section 3 RTA 1988

In particular the legal test includes...

unnecessarily slow driving or braking without good cause;

Not to mention the frustration you will cause to others which may trigger an amygdalic response resulting in a road rage incident, dangerous overtake or excessive speed further up the road to make up for your stupidity.

As for horses being used to create moving road blocks - have a thought as to the damage you will do to public opinion regarding the right of horse riders to use the road. They were recently voted in the top 5 menaces on the road in a poll which is deeply worrying when we all need to share the road space. Just as every head down, bum up, power ranger clad sports bike rider who speeds through a village with a loud can; damages the reputation of sensible motorcyclists. Your horse riders will be contributing to the bad PR that horse riders in general don't deserve.

Only if you go around them too quickly, so they're not dangerous per se, just made dangerous by people that, er, go around them too quickly.

That is actually a perfectly reasonable statement!

My own "rule" on windy roads with poor visibility is to drive at a speed that gives me a minimum of 4 seconds visibility (both sides of the road, I need to allow time for the other guy to stop too, just in case he hasn't!).

Try it some time. I bet most people will find that they are actually driving slower than they useually do. As an aside by following this rule you are "unlikly" to get into any skid situations either.

_________________
"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

I wish everybody was as sensible as you.

I get the feeling though that if I installed a concrete block around the corner of a hedged country lane 80% of people would simply plough into it, or have to swerve into oncoming traffic to avoid it.