Mod wrote:
Most crashes happen at about 5mph
and
Mod wrote:
However, it is almost impossible to know what speed most accidents happen at.
Either you know or you don't, so one of these statements appears to be untrue or at the very least somewhat ambiguous.
Mod wrote:
The frequency with which people tell me they were travelling at 27mph before the accident assures me that a good deal of those people were speeding
Or simply that they've been force-fed the "speed kills" message so often that they seem to think it'd be a good idea to claim a speed just below that magic 30 figure which the government tells us will guarantee a safe passage along our nations highways?
Alternatively, maybe they genuinely don't know the precise speed they were doing, but are pretty sure they were legal, so just put down "speed limit - 10%" as a generic response? Chances are I'd do the same, if I was being pushed into providing a specific figure rather than a more general answer - most of the time when I'm driving I can't state with absolute certainty what my speed is, but experience and observation is sufficient to let me know if it's varied by any significant degree since the last routine speedo check. So I might have been doing 30, I might have been doing 29, 28, 31, 27, 32... If I were absolutely certain that I wasn't deliberately exceeding the limit, and if the accident hadn't occurred at or immediately after a speedo check, then yeah, I'd probably give limit-10% as my answer if asked what speed I was doing.
Mod wrote:
combined with the large number of people which assure me that the other person was going far too fast.
Does that actually imply that people are speeding, or merely that most people find it difficult to judge with any great accuracy the speed of another moving object? If I'm behind the wheel, I have a pretty good idea what 30MPH feels like, but if I'm watching another vehicle drive past, I sometimes think 30 looks more like 40 - and since this sometimes occurs next to an active Gatso in a 30 limit, I know that these vehicles definitely aren't doing 40...
Mod wrote:
The government has set a maximum possible speed on all roads that conform to certain types with certain situations (schools, elderly people's homes etc).
Which local authorities are then free to meddle with as they see fit, resulting in comparable stretches of road in different counties having completely different limits.
Mod wrote:
In essence, you would create more speed limits, which are confusing and strange.
Exactly. Which is precisely what's happening in reality.
Mod wrote:
You would prefer then to have a variable speed limits? Speed limits which depended on the conditions of the road? Would you have two speed limits for each zone perhaps, an on-peak and an off-peak?
Why not? We already have variable limits on the M25, and it's my gut feeling that if we gave drivers the opportunity to travel at higher speeds in quieter times, they'd be more likely to respect the lower limits that applied when they were genuinely necessary. Having a low limit applied 24/7 because of a hazard which occurs for maybe 2 hours a day, Mon-Fri, school terms only, makes those drivers who use the road outside of these times resentful of the limit and more likely to treat it with contempt.
Mod wrote:
Would this not be confusing? The rules of the road in Bristol should be knowable if you are from Manchester.
No more confusing than travelling from one city which has 24/7 bus lanes to one which has time-limited lanes. Or travelling from one county which applies 30 limits only in the immediate vicinity of a village, to the next county which stretches those limits right out into the open countryside surrounding the village. Provided the limits are signed appropriately and drivers are made aware that the limits can and do vary according to time of day and road conditions, then they should be no more confusing than the fixed limits we have at present. If anything, they might even be less confusing if, as a result of going to variable limits, we end up replacing all the faded, badly sited, or missing signs that litter our roads at present, with clear new signs placed in accordance with the guidelines.