Safe Speed Forums

I have started to do a bit of research into the causes of fatal crashes on motorways in France and one of the major causes is bad driving. I think we need to try to change the way people think about (or don't think) about why they don't change lanes! People stay in the outside/middle lane because they know that if they pull in (as they do in Europe and USA) they won't be able to pull back out to overtake when they encounter a slower vehicle.
What do others think and how do we change the way people drive?

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Suehm

I agree. Education is always a good, positive way forward.
A high percentage of accidents are due to lack of attention and inabilty to judge road conditions as well as inabilty to judge when they are driving within their own driving skills. There are bad drivers out there. And these are the drivers that are getting away with dangerous driving because of the lack of traffic police, who are fast being replaced with cameras to catch the motorist who, although maybe driving above the posted speed limit, may also be a very skilled, responsible driver.

But then....cameras generate MONEY!!

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Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

But, by the law of averages, is much more likely to be a simple headed dim-wit, like most of us.



which lowers my taxes! Now, who knows a way to get law breakers to pay more of my my taxes?

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So basingwerk, you would presumably be happy to cough up £60 for each and every occasion when you have ever exceeded the speed limit?

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Imagine how much your taxes would be lowered if traffic cops were about to catch more of the dangerous drivers, drunk drivers, drivers without licences, insurance, etc! These are not being caught by the cameras, are they?

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Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

I think of it more as (potentially) saving £60 for each occasion that I don't exceed the speed limit, and of gaining £60 when anyone else is caught at it. With respect to the original question, lane hogging - this is related to game theory. Considering only you (as an individual), the best policy is to lane hog, so you don't have to bother changing lanes and waiting for a gap and so on. Considering the best thing for all road using stakeholders as a whole, the best policy is to release your lane when possible, to allow access to others. These two considerations are opposed, hence the conflict. It is basically a deadlock situation.

One answer is to release the reason for the opposing game theory positions. One way to do that is to have equal lane priorities. Another way is to monitor usage and charge extra for using the fast lane etc. etc. Another way is to appeal to people’s common sense/education and other psychological solutions. If you use this, you have to keep it up, because drivers will soon slide back to their old habits out of laziness.

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You haven't answered my question! Would you like to be automatically charged £60 on every single occasion you exceed the speed limit?


Idea 1 has some mileage, but it would need better driver education in order to be workable and to avoid further conflict and / or danger. Theory 2 simply creates a class-based motoring system, whereby those that can afford to pay can avoid the congestion - bit like they used to do in Russia! Do you really want that? Third one requires education, possibly combined with sensible, carefully targeted enforcement.

So what we really need is better driver education and intelligent policing. Maybe our opinions are closer than first appears...

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CSCP Latin for beginners...
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You are like Paxman! I would never like to be charged £60. If I were automatically and infallibly charged £60 on every occasion I exceed the speed limit, I would drive such that I never exceed the speed limit. This might mean a simple monitor (like the seat-belt reminders in the States) to tell me to slow down, or I could get pinged.



This is the situation in California. Basically, drivers are too laid back to worry about lane priorities and checking if there is room etc., so every lane moves equally, and people (generally) stay in their lanes.



Cash is the standard way to deal with limited supply. We have a class based system of houses, cars, watches, gadgets, health care, jewellery, restaurants, insurance, holidays resorts, etc. etc. so why not deal with the shortage of road space with cash? That is how the M6 bypass at Birmingham works. If that is unpalatable, another idea is to ration space in lane 3, i.e. you can spend 10 seconds per mile in lane 3. Go over that, and it costs you etc. etc.



As this depends on game theory, what we need is a society that is less greedy and less selfish. That means political cooperation, and we are very short on that, now that we are in the ME generation.



If education doesn’t work, hit them where it hurts - in the pocket!

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But no such technology exists, nor indeed is it likely to. Or at least not unless you really believe that the purpose of the current speed camera enforcement is to keep drivers within limits, rather than to charge them for exceeding them.

If cameras continue to proliferate the likely truth is that we will all simply get fined more and more often, whilst spending an ever increasing amount of our driving time distracted by attempting to stay within ever more devious speed limits. The more distractions the more crashes, and the more crashes the more cameras we get.

Is this the future you want?

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And the more cameras we get, the more points are dished out, the more people are banned and the fewer drivers there are on the road to cause congestion.
Suddenly, it all makes sense....
Pity about the massive loss of revenue from all those people that have lost their jobs and arent paying income tax, road tax and fuel duty anymore.

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The police ARE the law, not ABOVE it!!!

Ah, my favourite topic! I understand from posters on his site that Audi have already introduced technology that helps in this respect. Speed cameras detectors are also in the same domain. When SPECS are everywhere, ie. distance averaged speed monitoring, a low level beep on a limit transition (30,40,50,60,70) would be indispensable, with different tones for various levels, and a tone for going in and going out of a band. Or heads-up displays, with satellite position monitoring to negate the need to roadside RF. The list goes on and the technology will be ubiquitous, I reckon. For now, I admit I have to rely on the speedo.



It reduces our tax bill and keeps drivers within absolute top speed limits.



Not me. If we double the risk of getting pinged, the risk is still zero if I obey the law.



Roadside RF, Satellite Tracking, real-time, infallible speed monitoring, and Internal Warnings is the way to go. That way, nobody has an excuse, especially if we can get the law breakers to pay for it.



No, I want less cameras and total monitoring via roadside RF, with a 100% detection rate.

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It has occured to me that, if there is too little room on the roads, the drivers we should flush are the law breakers. If they so poor at driving that they get banned and can't drive to work, it also creates opportunities for local people to fill thier jobs.

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And what do you do if the locals are not qualified to do those jobs?

Apart from that areas such as Durham, Cumbria, Northumberland, Wales and other historic, rural and seaside towns rely on tourists for their trade. If all these people were banned from driving - mass unemployment in leisure industry as well.

Besides - I like the idea of keeping policemen on the roads ..... job gets done properly!

Well if there is a need to "cull" some drivers from the roads, I'd rather we culled the dangerous ones rather than the law-breakers. There was a time when the two things were synonymous, but not any more.

But is this really such a reasonable solution? If the problem is insufficient road capacity then this is a very strange way of going about fixing the problem. Surely a less Machiavellian solution would be either to improve the road network in order to cope with the demand, offer viable cost-effective alternatives to tempt people away from the roads. Your solution is like solving a famine by making it illegal to eat!

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CSCP Latin for beginners...
Ticketo ergo sum : I scam therefore I am!

Well, it is a Malthusian problem, and resource shortage does not have to be met by increasing supply, but by reducing demand. As driving is hugely less important than eating for survival, very poor performing drivers are good canidates. I'm talking about drivers who are so 'thumb in bum, mind in neutral' that they get banned after three chances. Surely we can afford to consign dead-beats like this to the buses?

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No! I know of too many good drivers who have collected speeding points, and too many bad drivers who haven't for me to consider this a fair system. But in any case I don't agree with the principle. We should reserve driving bans solely for those that pose a clear danger to other road users, not as a means of pursuing a political agenda to force people into using inadequate and under-funded public transport.

I don't see how it can ever be considered reasonable for the Government to use this mechanism to shirk its responsibility to provide an acceptable road network, given that motorists have funded such a network many times over through the specific motoring taxes they are forced to pay (of which speeding fines are rapidly becoming another). To continue my previous famine analogy, consider that you have paid for your food to eat but the Government has chosen to squander the money elsewhere, and then tells you that "for your own good" you can't have any!

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CSCP Latin for beginners...
Ticketo ergo sum : I scam therefore I am!

How many of the good drivers who collected speeding points continued their speed game and wound up on the bus? If most have wised up, the feedback they received from the cameras has worked.



Then we would have to wait for speeders to cause a crash. It's better to give them a warning (i.e. a small fine and a few points) first, second and third times. After that, who cares?



But if there were loads of them, it would become adequate and funded! I am (partly) joking. I agree that the main reason for limiting speeders should be for noise, safety and pollution reasons, but if it has beneficial side effects such as freeing up more road space, I wouldn't scoff at it.



It's a Malthusian problem. Usage expands to fit whatever new resources are provided. One answer is to limit usage by raising costs, not lowering them. Of course, the revenue generated helps other causes, so it is closed loop (i.e. we get the money back anyway).

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Okay, assuming there will be an increase in usage (and there probably will be some) surely there is going to be a limit. Sooner or later there would be more capacity than vehicles available to use it unless we find a way of driving two cars at the same time, or unless the population of the country grows to supply the number of drivers needed to choke the larger road network. I'm not saying that increased capacity is the answer, or that it's necessarily preferable to reducing the demand on the network. But while the alternatives are either impractical, unattractive, or in places just plain absent, we're going to struggle to reduce the desire to drive. By the looks of things the efforts to get people onto public transport by making driving expensive and unpleasant are failing, possibly because it's not significantly cheaper and is often even more unpleasant.
As for solving the problem with bans for the dozy and the dangerous... Well, we have to assume that the dozy wouldn't learn their lesson, and I think they probably would if they got tugged and lectured by someone in a flourescent jacket, and failing that a compulsory DriveTech course or similar. We'd also have to assume that the dangerous drivers, and here I'm thinking of the real nutters, would meekly submit to their bans, which would be a hell of a change as many of them don't seem to give a damn at the moment and are quite happy to drive while disqualified.

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

This is not true. Motorway usage has gone up 1% in the past 12 months. This is due to the influx of European road freight. Car ownership has not increased. Congestion is down to poor road maintenance and misguided traffic calming and speed cameras creating rat runs and causing artificial congestion on trunk roads.

Raising costs does not limit usage. Motorists generate £60billion per year of which less than 10% goes into the road network. The only reason Motoring keeps getting hammered is because it continues to be the best cash-cow any government could ever have.

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Speed camera policy Kills