Safe Speed Forums

Taken from another thread:



This is typical of the dangerous and woolly-headed thinking which is a direct spin-off of the 'speed kills' mindset.

You cannot improve road safety by making roads more dangerous.

Where and when there are no hazards then one cannot collide with anything because there's nothing to collide with - so speed (or anything else) is largely inconsequential.

Deliberately introducing hazards where or when none existed makes collisions possible, and these may or may not be prevented / mitigated by lower speeds. There are no guarantees.

And to use children as pawns in their dangerous game is utterly despicable.

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Only when ideology, prejudice and dogma are set aside does the truth emerge - Kepler

It's from the same mindset that advocates planting trees in the middle of roundabouts so you can't see what's coming round. This will slow you down, and thus make the roundabout safer, obviously.

Reminds me of the A33/A339 roundabout in Basingstoke. If you're heading south on the A33, the road is a dual carriageway... and as you get to the roundabout there's a strategically placed solid wooden fence on the central reservation, angled towards you, that prevents you from seeing what's on the roundabout until you're right on top of it.

There was a topic on this here

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Useless laws weaken necessary laws.

Yep, there's loads of 'em round Swindon too - there is one in particular that's on the main ring road where visibility is so bad that if someone IS coming round from your right, you can't see them until the point that its impossible to get out of the way in time - its impossible to enter it safely without cutting someone up.

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Science won over religion when they started installing lightning rods on churches.

Sounds like blagrove roundabout - take your life in your hands on that one

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"Are you sh**ing me?"
"John Spartan, you are fined one credit for a violation of the verbal morality statute."

Have encountered lots of roundabouts where complete visability is poor.
I don't understand it, as I thought the *point* of a roundabout is to keep things moving.

Ah, but movement implies speed - [council moron] speed bad, speed kill, must stop, no kill when stop, me no like, me want gatso, he fixum good. I plant tree & big fence. Make crash, then me get Scamera friend.[/council moron]

I have to remember to take a camera next time I go to Croydon. On the a232 there's a roundabout and they've got planter boxes all the way up to the dotted lines so you essentially have to move into the roundabout to be able to see what's coming. There's also a left turn that bypasses the roundabout that's obscured by plants as well so that you can't just turn left you have to go up to the line and stop before you can see if anyone's come off the roundabout.

LOL Hobbes.
Yep, at first I thought, how lovely, lots of nice trees and plants on roundabouts - how environmentally thoughtful. ...IS IT because of the amount of cars slowing down/stopping/braking? hehe.

What is clear is that the illusion of danger does make people act in a safer manner. This is a trick that has often been used to make something safer. One common example is on fairground rides, where the rides may appear to be dangerous, but in fact they have a very good safety record, notably at fixed sites.

Actually making it more dangerous, on the other hand, is counterproductive, although I believe that in many cases it doesn't actually make it any worse, as most people will adjust their behaviour accordingly.

I totally agree with Pete317. Encouraging children to play near roads doesn't fit into that category. If they're not there, they can't be involved in an accident, no matter what speed a driver is doing.

I have no problem with trees, shrubs etc on the approach to a roundabout - this naturally does slow the drivers down because they cannot see traffic approaching.

What I do take major issue to are these stupid great built up roundabouts (we have a fair few in Swindon) that stop you seeing what is coming round the roundabout.

A prime case in point is Blagrove roundabout next to J16 of the M4 in Swindon. Its a fast roundabout, and I think this is due at least in part to the high build of the roundabout on a tight radius, with fast road approaches and a high traffic volume.

What happens is that because you cannot see traffic approaching, and it approaches very fast, you have to accelerate quickly onto the roundabout to minimise your risk of an offside impact. This then means that every driver is carrying perhaps a higher speed whilst on the roundabout, thus compounding the issue for everyone else. Perpetual motion in action!

At the above mentioned roundabout, you really do have to boot it to get out during rush hour which is inherantly dangerous in itself as your observation time is reduced. On the flip side if you didn't acclerate hard out, you would either:
A. Be sat there at bed time.
B. Have a car imbedded next to your earhole.

I hope that makes sense and I would appreciate other views on this - am I talking rubbish or have others observed this type of roundabout in action

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"Are you sh**ing me?"
"John Spartan, you are fined one credit for a violation of the verbal morality statute."

Even the heavily biased Scamera Partnerships only ever claimed that one third of accidents were caused by speeding.

So even if we go by their 33% figure (which has little basis in fact anyway), the above approach still purposely leaves children vulnerable to accidents resulting from the other 66% of causes.

I'm lost for words.

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“For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.” - H. L. Mencken