Safe Speed Forums

You have a well-paying job as an IT Consultant. Your job requires you to drive and if you lose your licence your job is history.

Thanks to speed cameras and your high annual business mileage, you're on 9 points.

You're doing a perfectly safe 60mph in the outside lane of an urban dual carriageway, so is a car following closely behind you.

Suddenly you spot a Camera Van up ahead. There are no speed limit repeater signs and in your panic you're not sure what the speed limit is.

What would you do?

This is a tricky one. Much as I'd like to be able to say I'd decelerate slowly and safely and nuts to job etc, I think on 9 points in that split second I'd be keener on making dead sure my licence is safe. That said, with someone that close behind I certainly wouldn't slam the anchors on either. In reality when someone is tailgating me I look for the earliest opportunity to let 'em go off and do it to someone else, so I'd have probably got into the inside lane before he got close enough for it to be a problem. Maybe bad luck would mean I spot the Talivan just as he gets close enough to make hard braking an iffy prospect, in which case I'd still go for lane 1. What I'd do if there was no gap in lane 1 for me to get into I don't know. Probabaly s**t myself for the next fortnight waiting for a NIP to arrive.

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

Ah yes. The nightmare scenario. Or rather one of the camera-induced nightmare scenarios.

I can't answer the question. The only good practice answer is to avoid being tailgated in the first place and to have excellent speed limit awareness - but in the real world, it's quite possible that one could get caught out like this.

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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

If I was at that stage and in that position, I'd be fitting a laser jammer to my car, and/or somehow obscuring my plates. Only £30 and no points for the plate offence, and no-one has ever been successfully prosecuted for using a laser jammer (excepting where they pleaded guilty).

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Carl Prescott

Very tricky situation this one, especially as you probably missed the speed limits signs because they were placed right on the exit of that last roundabout when you were obviously concentrating on driving.

I voted to pull in, but this is assuming that it is safe to do so. In fact according to the way speeding rules are applied, you are supposed to pull in even if it is not safe to do so - this is how I got caught last time: getting out of the way of a tailgater and having to accellerate because the vehicle to the left was matching my speed to prevent me pulling across safely.

It is one of those Catch 22 situations where there is no right answer - either way you lose. I have now cleared all my points, and I find it incredible that anybody gets caught by fixed cameras such as Gatsos for anything other than genuine misunderstanding about what the speed limit is, because lets face it, you have to be either an idiot or be not concentrating on driving (which also makes you an idiot) to be caught by those things; but mobile traps are another thing altogether.

If you are paranoid enough, and observant enough, you can spot every type of camera trap out there, and every unmarked Police car too, but at what cost in terms of concentration on the real dangers?

...and speeding presumeably

....wheres the keep driving at 60 option?

its DC, no repeaters visible, the only indication it may not be NSL is thats it's urban.

All it needs is street lights - it could be NSL, 60, 50, 40 or even 30, the repeaters will not necessarily be regularly placed, and you might have missed the last few due to a lorry between you and the post. You can't rely on the speed of other vehicles as if there are no camera positions the traffic speed will tend towards what drivers think is safe...

So back to the question: Safe 60 on urban DC, you haven't seen repeaters and the limit could be anything. Ignore the car behind if you want, but what will keep you in employment if you guess the wrong speed?

In this situation you would, at the very least, ease off the gas. So choose this option....



There's no repeater signs visible. You may have missed a speed limit sign earlier, you don't know. You're in a strange town and not familiar with the road....

Yes, although only by a small margin, on roads with their speed limit set too low...

Moving right behind someone in lane 1 isn't necessarily a safe option. What if he panic brakes?

I had a simallar(ish) problem.
I was driving west at about 20:00.
I had my tursty road angel with me, and knew the road,the road turned slightly, and all i could see was sun.
I could not see the camrea, speedo, nor could I see the road angle speed read out . For a second a was effectively blind- with only the beeps of the RA to help.
lukly there was no one behind me, still not too sure if the thing flashed or the speed i was going at .

Now I wait

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Oct 11 Birmingham Half Marathon. I am running for the British Heart Foundation.
http://www.justgiving.com/Rob-Taylor

If I had 9 points on my licence, and was doing a lot of driving on unfamiliar roads I would:

• invest in a Road Angel or similar to inform me of the current limit
• aim to drive around or below the prevailing limit unless I was confident that there was no enforcement on the road in question
• become very obsessive about noticing speed limit signs

Even if you drive a lot on unfamilar roads, most of your mileage will be on roads you know.

In the specific circumstances you describe, on an urban dual carriageway, you should look at side turnings. If there are 30 signs, the road you're on will be a 40 or above. If there are no limit signs, it's a 30

If there are no side turnings, it's virtually certainly to be a 40 or higher. But wait for a repeater before you do any speed above that.

If you take driving, observation and risk assessment seriously, you won't get a totting-up ban, even in today's draconian climate.

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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

Ditto...Only I would do it at 6 points...

I would also try and plan a route that has the minimum number of cameras.

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Speed camera policy Kills

Vote: none of the above.

Having (back in my mis-spent youth, before the advent of speed cameras) had 10 points on my licence I can say from experience.

I would make damn sure I knew the limit and was not exceeding it in the first place.

It didn't make me any safer though, in fact during the two years between reaching 10 points and the first 3 expiring I had my worst accident record.

Does the Road Angel constantly display the current speed limit for the road you're on, regardless of whether there's a registered camera location ahead or not?

I have an Origin B2, and this only displays the speed limit when there's a fixed camera up ahead.

Road angel displays your speed(which is undated every second) not the limit of the road

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Oct 11 Birmingham Half Marathon. I am running for the British Heart Foundation.
http://www.justgiving.com/Rob-Taylor

you might.... i wouldn't... especially not whilst being tailgated.

i take great pleasure in staying on the throttle going through speed cameras when i know i'm in the right.... whilst the surrounding muppets have a mini-coronary.

Well, you'll be half-expecting him to, and your foot will probably already be on the brake - so it may not be all that bad

Cheers
Peter

Well, thanks to everyone for their feedback.

Obviously the only winning solution to this nightmare situation is to avoid being in it in the first place.

For the high-milage business driver, this is not as easy as it sounds. Totting up bans are (like stamp duty, inheritance tax and the 40% income tax bracket) something originally intended only for the minority, now increasingly threatening the mainstream.

"Just don't speed" is something that is very easy to say. However, in practice, keeping a constant check on frequently changing (and often illogically set) speed limits, cross referencing your speedo and looking out for hidden cameras, on top of all the hazards you have to look out for and anticipate anyway, has made business driving a more concentration-intensive experience than it used to be.

From a safety perspective, surely it would be better to REDUCE the concentration requirement for driving, thereby increasing the margin for concentration loss due to unavoidable everyday distractions (Navigation, tiredness, "things on your mind" etc etc). Momentary information overload on the brain of a driver can have fatal consequences.

Any safety advantage we gain from lower average speeds on our roads we will lose due to the added burden on drivers' concentration that the speed cameras produce. For this reason alone, I honestly believe that there is no net road safety improvement to be had from blanket speed enforcement.