Safe Speed Forums

Hello all, long time lurker but driven (scuse the pun) to post after witnessing a couple of insidents that the current camera policy wont fix.

A bit about myself, i love driving and some times in correct conditions at above legal speed. I drive a lotus elise that has also been breathed on by a motor sports group. I currently have a full clean driving liecence and its not because im a heavy breaker either.

anyway after what i have seen this week i feel compled to post.

1/ two lane 40mph limit road, two cars a breast (me behind the two) travling down this road at just under forty so their safe hey? well no way! rite under the camera (on the white lines infact) making this road SAFE, the car on the left, desides he wants the right lane, so without looking or indication starts to pull out into the right hand lane, the car in the right hand lane toots to avoid accident, but he oviously got angry about near miss and counters this near miss by driving at the car in the left lane forcing the car in the left hand lane to take avoiding action and mount the curb. but ofcourse as it was all done under forty perfectly safe!!!????

2/ this morning long wide road almost deviod of traffic, 30mph because its a urban area, i get up behind a car doing 20mph, i stay behind for about 1/4 mile hoping for him to speed up (i wanst forceing him to speed up, i kept my distance, my car beeing so low i have to so he can see me and i can see whats infront of him). anyway i decide as the road is clear and wide, ill slip past him. He oviously took a dislike to me and as i strated my manovour he looked in his rear mirror and just as i pulled up to his rear quater he disided that im oviously unsafe and needs to be taught a lesson so he indcates right (while im mid manovour???), faced with two options break hard and pull back in to comform to his road saftey policies or hit the gas a bit more and drift further out to the right. as soon as i passed him he turned his right indicator off.

so my gripe is that niether of these numptys would have been court by a camera but both are dangerous, the second more so because he belives that the only danger on the road is speed and oviously belives all the hype that speed is the only issue and if he can slow somone down hes done a good job.

please excuse any spelling mistakes, written english not brilliant.

Cheers
Glen

Glen, you have all my sympathy.
If we just had police patrolling the streets rather than sitting in vans taking pictures...
I would not mind having police patrols at roundabouts for example.
Why don't they do that?

I think most should will agree by now:

Nothing will replace a well trained, sensible copper in a patrol car being out on the roads. No matter how fancy the technology!

The ironic thing is, if in incident no2 I had to go above the speed limit to get past the fool safely, and we were passing a camera, who would get the ticket for dangerous driving and who was actually being dangerous?

This is the thing. Basically, you cannot expect a piece of software to form an opinion on unpradictable human behaviour. You need human jugement to take all aspects into account and act accordingly.

Imagine the scenario that a police officer had seen the second incident. He may be powerless to do anything about the other driver - he only indicated and could argue that he was mistaken about where he was turning off or accidently knocked his indicator stalk. However, If you were doing 32mph in a 30, you've crossed the line - you could be prossecuted.