Safe Speed Forums

Could you take the Socialist Worker, Loony Left khakis off for a minute George.

The point MM was making is that a jobsworth 'rules is rules and if you break them you deserve to be punished' brainless unthinking drone doesn't bother to realise that a consultant is parked in a hospital car park because he is there to save patients' lives and deserves to be a 'special case'. If you disagree with that then I hope it's you waiting for a life-saving op while your consultant drives round looking for a space or has to wait for a late bus/train/tram because his place of work has anti-car policies.

Not at all..... not offended in the slightest. The only things likely to upset me are use of a certain word which rhyme slangs with something much more seedy.....and one other one..... as they are uncalled for.

And no - not safe in the hospital car park..... and this is my place of work too. Do know that we have to keep spaces flowing for patients and visitors - and arguably couple of quid for 24 hours is good value (which takes into account length of time you wait to see us - and even then you may end up having to feed the machine ) - except that people visiting sick relatives do not pay pro rata .... and couple of quid for 40 minutes is a bit severe from their point of view.....

We are supposed to get passes from administration to place in windscreen so that the "little Hitlers" they hire to patrol the hospital car parks know that we are staff. We have to pay out for those as well - which is jolly unfair on our juniors, nurses and ancillaries. I gather they can claim this back later - but fact is - they have to shell out first and then wait for payroll to re-imburse. Consultants like me do not get ours refunded. Grrrrr! Wish I knew why....


So - we work and beaver away on the wards and when the ticket expires - we forget to go and get a new one. Those nasty little jobsworthies prowl around and even if it expired a half hour ago - they clamp us! Grrrrrrr! I am certain they get commission for this .....

This means war! I make fullest use of my purchases from the DIY store

George,

This doesn't stem from a specific post of yours, but rather from an accumulation of reading your stuff over a couple of days.

It seems to me that you think the only way to improve road safety (or maybe the most important way) is by some system of punishment.

Don't you think that our best chance of improving road safety is with encouragement and better information? Did we earn ourselves the safest roads in the world by having the worst punishments? I don't think so!

I'd be very interested in your thoughts on the matter.

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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

Delighted to reply and thank you for the invitation.

Of course I agree with you - education is important and should be expanded - at the road users expense of course. But supporting education (which you campaign for admirably) shouldn't mean you oppose the punitive and detection measures in force. They too should be increased.

By this two-pronged attack we can reduce the annual carnage on the roads.

Remember I was amongst the highest trained drivers in the world and am also a passed out tram driver. I choose now to drive nothing more powerful than a bicycle. It is for non-drivers I campaign.

We do try to put sensible pointers on here Geroge. I hope this van driver reads this site and the pistonheads site - where a lot of fellow BiBs reside.

I have set off a little thread on cornering in the "Improve Your Driving Forum" - where this guy (if he is a lurker) and others may learn some useful tips and techniques from the us all in discussion.

Mad Doc's wife is very active on PH site... but I think the Mad Cats may be off line for a couple of days as latest news from the other side of the A66 is that Wildy is now in labour - so new petrolhead is now under way....shall of course let you know soon after I know what is happening in the mad household ...

:shock: That sounds like it could have been nasty mate. Similar thing in Melbourne, where to avoid the problem of cars and trams colliding in the city centre some junctions require what's know as the Melbourne Hook Turn. Basically at certain junctions if you want to turn ight you have to pull over to the left and hope you don't block anyone behind you who actually wants to turn left. Sounded so bizarre we used the trams in preference to hiring a car (presumably the rtram drivers all know what to do, right?). Besides, most trams there are cheap and one is free.

You've got a point there. But let's look at it from another perspective. Car drivers, especially the inattentive ones which you grind your personal axe on (not without reason IMO), are at risk in areas where they may come into confilct with trams in much the same way that inattentive cyclists are at risk around cars (which as you know is where I'm grinding my personal axe a bit at the moment). It's a two way thing - road users of all types need to get better at looking out for each other and at simple self preservation. You'd think the latter would be pretty automatic, but some things do make you wonder.

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

Glad you found it interesting. Our patch does not plan to have any fixed cams at all. As you may have read from one of my responses to Soren and mattsta - our patch use normal patrols, lark around in side streets and slip roads on our dual carriageways, make use of unmarked cars, we target some 15/20 sites where speed has contributed to the severity of the outcome.

Fixed cams would not really help us - not really area which would benefit overly much - and we do educate at same time as "punish".

Yes - judgement and discretion are used as well - but if punishments in form of penalty points and fine are deserved - then they are dished out.

The guy pulled for 30 in 30 - did not do him for speeding - but did him for an undue care because the driving was dangerous under the set of cirumstances. Poor visibility, slippery conditions, and he nearly hit a cyclist... and compounded by calling me rude names....

Aware some people may think we were a bit harsh here - but the driving standard was so awful that we had to do something. The mags agreed and he did go on a driver improvement as well.



That is another problem for some forces - who have let traf pol numbers dwindle and concentrated on cameras to catch drivers who speed - and not necessarily our hard core of recidivist blatant idiots.

Our serious crime squad do not catch that many serial murderers either - they only discover one exists after a patren build up over many months - even years ...... ....

And our Miliitary Intelligence guys did not do that great a job on finding Saddam's weapons either - even with powerful satellite cameras trained all over Iraq....

I also admit to not liking traffic wardens overly much either...... they do nothing to make the public like my uniform any better either..

But back to the nitty gritty George. Don't wish to brag about our lads up here .... but we have made a significant in-road into boy racer reduction, drunk driver reduction and had a clampdown on defective vehicles - by a constant programme of specifically patrolling and targetting these.

Admit - we cannot be everywhere - nor can cams be everywhere.

Now I know basingwerk will pipe up again with his "spy in car black box" .....

Well... completely ignoring the privacy aspect.(which is problem in itself).... let us look at something as daft as the "Big Brother" programme where the contestants began to misbehave once they had got used to the omnipresent camera. (OK - so they may have played up to it as well as it was the telly - but even so.)

Wildy came across an article in her local paper about a local school and its two way mirror. Once the pupils had forgotten about the mirror - the observers noted the tendency to day dream and not work in class.

This may indeed happen with the black box and accident rates will still remain high and petrolheads will still be campaigning against..the draconian measures .... and my job will still be difficult....

I campaign for safer more efficient use of the roads - I don't favour any group. But back to the education and punishment thing. we have a great spread of drivers with differing attitudes and abilities. If we rank them on a graph by driver quality (in terms of crash avoidance skills) we get something like this:



At the low end we have two sorts of dreadful drivers. Those whose skills are inadequate and those whose attitudes are inadequate. They need attention urgently, and I'd guess that half need the attentions of the law and half need to be trained. (yes, at their own expense).

But then there's the vast bulk - the middle section and above. Mostly they are responsible people making a fair fist of driving as part of their busy lives. Mostly they have an awful lot left to learn about driving, but their accident rates are at least as good as any large group in the World. It's this middle group that needs good information and incentivized training to improve. For the large part they don't need the attentions of the law, yet they all break the speed limit frequently.

And that's the problem. Automated speed enforcement is nicking the wrong people. It's disaffecting EXACTLY the group we should be embracing and encouraging. And that's one of the reasons that speed cameras aren't working to make the roads safer.

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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

here we go with another fancy assumed graph.

Lets consider this though, add in the excess speed at which the good driver (or those who think they are and in that class this would be about 98% of them) would be travelling at.

The red line for the crash risk then becomes a U shape and would cross the green line at the average/good driver boundry.

That's what I'm assuming and you can't deny that it's just as good an assumption as yours.

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It's Champion Man

Back to the start of this thread and if the van driver observed the speed limits instead of assuming he was a good enough driver to drive to the conditions the chap at the subject of the discussion would still have his foot.
Turn thet red line into a U Mr Smith, your assumption misses the "I'm a good driver, therefore I will use a speed of my choice factor"

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It's Champion Man

Are you absolutely sure he could have gone through that particular bend at the speed limit?

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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

Come, come. You must admit he would have stood a much better chance of doing so.

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It's Champion Man

Chumps

Have placed thread on cornering on the "Improvement Forum"

Please let us have the benefit of your expertise on this skill...


As for the van driver - do not know which road in Lancs it was. But would like to bet that bend may have had a lower advisory limit in any case....

The speed cam was servicing the straight by all accounts anyway and we have no guarantee that the cam would have made this particular driver read a bend correctly either. Would have preferred it if court had given him a place on the driver improvement in addition to his punishment in this particular case .... because it is not 100% certain this twit learned from his mistake.

One would hope though - that if he claims to be a "supporter of this site" he takes note of what we are saying here

Chap clearly falls into category of our Paulie's dreadfuls...

Perhaps he was driving too slow to be fully alert!

You don't need too much advanced driver skills or knowledge to know that the sharper the bend the slower the speed required to negotiate it, no matter what technique you use to increase the rate at which any bend is negotiated.

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It's Champion Man

Nobody in this thread has asked so far how it came to be known that the driver in question "was a supporter of a well known site that advocates the raising of speed limits".

Do we know it's SafeSpeed anyway? I would have thought the key theme of SafeSpeed was methods of speed enforcement, and it doesn't in general advocate the raising of speed limits.

How would it look to say "I'm a supporter of a well known site that advocates the correct application of official guidelines to speed limit setting"?

And why should someone bring that up in court in their defence?

It all sounds somewhat fishy to me.

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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

I think your U shaped crash risk curve would appear on a slightly different graph. If the X axis was "Driver's eniterely subjective opinion of own ability" a U shape curve would be expected as there'd be plenty of Michael Schumacher wannabees over on the right hand side of the graph who aren't remotely as good as they'd like to think.

As it is the X axis label just says "Driver quality", which suggests an objective measurement. Also, the implication is that all drivers are included so it must also include what you call the "I'm a good driver, therefore I will use a speed of my choice" factor. But that factor may often be the hallmark of very low driver quality, right? I'm sure you'd agree that there's plenty of people who tell you in the pub that they're great drivers, but who are really only great inside their heads and are a blodody liability on the road. So, if it was possible to measure driver quality objectively and absolutely that red curve seems ok - best quality drivers (measured objectively, remember) would crash rarely (and if it makes you happier they will probably speed rarely as well, at least within rational limits). Then the not quite so good will crash slightly more often, then "better than most" will crash a little more often than that, and so on down to the prize idiots who keep insurance premiums nice and high by crashing once a year or so. It seems likely that quite a few of those who are on the ascending right hand side of your U shaped "driver's subjective opinion of own ability" graph would end up on the left of an objectively plotted "Driver quality" one.

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

I think your comprehension has failed you. Gatsobait has also pointed out the error.

As it still says above, the graph shows: "If we rank them on a graph by driver quality (in terms of crash avoidance skills)". Clearly I intended this to mean actual crash avoidance skills, not imagined crash avoidance skills.

However, perhaps it would have been clearer if I'd stated that the drivers were ranked by crash risk. On this basis it becomes crystal clear that the red curve is the correct shape.

No assumption is required to make the graph - it is correct by definition.

I'd very much like to have the data to put numbers on the scales however.

[edited for typos]

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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

In Gear - I note that you don't have speed cameras in your patch. How do the numbers of road deaths per ..... stack up in your patch compared to the national average? Is this figure reducing at the same rate in both aforementioned sample areas?

With local random and demographic variations it's hard to come to a clear conclusion based on the figures for any one or two counties.

A better method is to create baskets of counties and compare their performance - this tends to smooth out the random and demographic variations simply by having a larger sample size.

I ranked counties by number of speeding fines issued by camera and found a correlation between high camera counties and increases in road deaths. See this PR:

http://www.safespeed.org.uk/pr129.html

I tried various basket sizes and got matching results. I give you my word that there was absolutely no "cherry picking" of stats to get these results.

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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

Can I please hear the answer from the officer without the spin being put in place first?