Safe Speed Forums

I agree with this. As someone who has to visit lots of cities that I'm unfamiliar with, I find the satnav positively calming, and I'm sure that I'm a lot safer following voice instructions than looking around for street names etc in unfamiliar traffic flows.

So you are saying that somebody who has SatNav will never glance at the display to....
See how fast they are really going
See how long they have left on the journey
Physically look at the displayed map
etc, etc

_________________
What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

Fair point. Maybe I need to re-phrase it slightly. It's many times less distracting than being lost and trying to look at a map in a busy place with no places to stop (e.g. urban dual carriage ways).

I travel thousands of miles with the satnav on and really don't find it a distraction. It probably was a distraction for the first few miles until the novelty wore off but that's not really any worse than when you drive a different vehicle for the first time.

Overall I still reckon it's safer if you drive to lots off places you have never been before or only rarely visit.

Phones: And I'm going to be shot down in flames here.....have the potential to distract in certain circumstances with certain drivers.

Sat Nav: No idea haven't invested yet and haven't seen the need (bit of prep with multimap and road atlas seems to work for me) but we'll see...i'll probably end up getting it.

I can't say I actually recall seeing a driver on his phone driving badly but I've seen plenty of muppets who need no assistance to drive like idiots, mainly well below the posted limit.

I would say it's that a lot more young people are driving now than before, and also there are probably more people on drugs than before and a lot of serious accidents are probably caused by drug-influence.

I need to check my facts, but we had a birth rate slump ~20 - 25 years ago that means fewer young people available to start driving in the period in question.

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

And they've also supposedly made the tests harder but that doesn't mean there can't be more of them.

It's a culture thing. I didn't take my test until I was nearly 21 and that was 20 years ago.

It wasn't so bad back then not having a car, at least in London. Not because the transport was so great albeit it was relatively cheaper, but for one I had at least 2 local cinemas (I don't now, not within easy walking distance anyway) and I also think that our generation was less spoilt about such things.

OK. I found this:
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/ ... /PT107.pdf

which contains this:


The cliff fall from 1968 to 1977 equates to reducing numbers of 18 year olds from 1986 to 1995.
The rise from 1977 to 1991 equates to increasing numbers of 18 year olds from 1995 to 2009.

So there are increasing numbers of 18 year olds and it is possible that larger numbers of young drivers are having an effect. Next we need to find (somehow) the data about test passes by age by year.

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

Interesting. It's hard to be sure what it means (without in depth analysis) but it's impossible to exclude the possibility that it is significant.

Interesting? Yep.
Impossible to exclude? For now.
Likely? Nah.

The next places to look are the young driver crash stats and test passes.

But suppose speed cameras had no effect (either way). The loss of trend in the fatality rate is worth ~1,200 lives a year at present.

As far as I can remember, young driver crashes are have always been responsible for 20 to 25% of roads fatalities.

But if young drivers caused the entire loss of trend in the fatality rate we'd now have the 20%+ that we always had PLUS the difference required to cause the loss of trend. So we'd now have ~50% of roads fatalities caused by young drivers. This sort of change would be massively noticable.

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

Of course the Safe Speed case is that bad policy is making drivers worse.

Confirmation of sorts arrived last year (2005) in TRL Report 629, which contains:

"The proportion of fatal and serious accidents that involve 'loss of control', 'behaviour - careless, throughtless, reckless', and 'aggressive driving' has increased since 1999. This suggests that, at a time when improving car technology had been expected to reduce the number of car occupant fatalities, this trend has been offset by a decline in the driving standards of some car drivers."

So - drivers are getting worse - well, of course they are. We're putting them under pressure and telling them lies.

edited to add: btw, I can't find TRL629 currently available as a 'free download' from the TRL web site. It used to be there, and the usual rule is that DfT reports are freely available (and it is a DfT funded report).

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