Safe Speed Forums

I think "brainstorming" is "digging for gold in a free exchange of ideas".

I agree that in an engineering context brainstorming is sometimes used to try to solve very well defined problems. (Perhpas our widget supplier has gone bust and production depends on widgets - how do we keep production running?)

But I think brainstorming has a wider application. It might be used in business to see if there are new markets to be discovered. It might be used in blue sky research to try to find an application for a new technology. It might be used in advertising to try to find new ways of expressing the benefit of a product or to find ways of minimising the effects of a limitation.

I'd like us to be able to use this forum to exchange ideas with no specific objective in mind. I think the best chance of deriving a benefit is in "spin-off" rather than in the original idea.

With these points in mind, I'd prefer to see positive contributions, but if there's a really fatal flaw that isn't obvious, I'd hate to think that anyone was denied the opportunity to point it out. So I reckon it's:

Try not to be negative unless necessary when responding in the brainstorming forum.

Any thoughts?

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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

My personal opinion is that brainstorming is a good forum for negative comments about any idea, as for it to have merit it really ought to stand up to close scrutiny - and here is a 'safe' place to test that.

No, you're missing the point there. The point about "brainstorming" is that people feel free to come up with half-formed or off the wall ideas which are then knocked around and developed in a generally positive spirit. These ideas won't be anything like fully-formed proposals.

If, whenever someone suggests something, a load of others wade in saying "nah, load of crap, never work", people will be deterred from making suggestions in the first place.

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"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

Oh, I get it now - although surely constructive criticism can be used to mould these ideas for the better?

Quite.

instead of saying 'i think your idea is cr4p',

you should say

'i think your idea wouldn't work for the following reasons, etc and if it was modified [thus], it could work for the following reasons.'

eg 'speed cameras are cr4p'

becomes

'speed cameras do not work because they are targeted to raise revenue and the number of deaths on uk roads over the last 10 years has not decreased. If the government really would like to reduce deaths on our roads they should improve driver training and increase numbers of traffic police to enforce offence other than just speeding'.

Or better yet...

Sure, speed cameras are crap in the way that they are used. But is there anyway that we could have used them so that they were actually useful to road safety?

We should be looking for new positives in any ideas expressed in here...

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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

Ok. Taking Paul's last statement litrerally, assuming speedXXXXX roadside cameras are digital and can be set to trigger retrospectrively (ie they are running like a movie camera all the time but can have a trigger sent to them to say "save the last X second's worth of pictures please"), could they be made to trigger from events often consistent with bad driving, eg, by the sound of a hooter, the sound of locked brakes, the signature of ABS, the impact of metal on metal, breaking glass... The passing of two vehicles in the same ditrection with less than, say, 0.6 sec gap... I could go on.

Its function would be to do what though? Its still the same idea unfortunately, ie, its taking a picture after something bad has happened in its field of view, rather than preventing it in the first place.

How about all cars having NO speedometer? Youd have to rely on the natural speed of the road and local conditions to set a safe speed then.
You know it makes sense.

On the question "can speed cameras play a useful role", should we not start by asking (and answering) the question "In what circumstances/locations is it NECESSARY for road safety to slow vehicles to a speed lower than the natural [x]th percentile speed?"