mpaton2004 wrote:
Unfortunately, you are never going to get it with youths in Subarus or louts on Sunday rides on their GSXRs. This is one of the reasons I'm pro vehicle speed limiters. If there's no reason to show off, then they won't bother.
Limiting vehicles to 100 isn't going to stop the numpties who think it's clever to race around doing probably between 25 (around the corners) and 40 (on the straights), but doing so on residential 30mph side streets, with parked cars both sides, tight right-angled corners with limited visibility, even more potholes, patches of eroded surfacing, gaping seams between adjacent concrete slabs where the filler material has long since been worn away etc. etc., where any sane driver would deem doing more than 20 to be a bit risky. Note that at some points during their exhibitions of uber-pratness, they're actually driving WITHIN the legal limit, and at no time do they get anywhere close to exceeding this 100mph limit, so what good would slapping a 100mph limiter on their cars do? Nothing is what.
Having someone glide past me on a free-flowing bit of M-way at 100+ when I'm happily cruising along at a speed a bit less than that, is no big deal
if they do so with consideration for me and others on the road at the time. By and large, the majority of drivers who do get past me when I'm not hanging around on the M-ways ARE considerate - I find myself being far more hacked off by the prats who slalom in and out of traffic, carve across the entire carriageway in one fell swoop at (or in some cases, just after) the last moment to reach the off-slip, drive 6 inches off the back end of the vehicle in front, have their fogs/mainbeams blazing away when not required, don't have their fogs/dipped beams blazing away when they ARE required, and generally behave in ways which really do increase the risk of an accident for everyone unfortunate enough to be sharing the same stretch of road as them. I'm not saying every single 100+ driver is safe, but if I could remove just one type of driver from the roads in an attempt to improve safety, they'd be second to last on my list...
And let's assume all those prats dutifully line up at the nearest government-sanctioned fitting centre to get their limiters installed. This, in itself, is quite a bit assumption - some of these prats are already happy to trigger scameras knowing they'll (almost certainly) never be traced, so what makes us think they'll turn into model citizens and submit their vehicles for neutering? But even if they do go along with the plans, what then? Limiting them to 100 just means they won't be able to accelerate as hard as before for as long as before, it won't stop them from being able to accelerate as hard as before for however long it takes to reach 100... Unless the plans for the limiters ALSO include plans to limit acceleration/peak power output (and that would be an even bigger mistake), then the numpty brigade will still be able to race around, trying to out-accelerate each other, out-corner each other, out-brake each other. That they won't be able to do so at speeds above 100 is no big deal, because pretty much most of the time they're not doing that now anyway.
Limiting speed is not the answer. Limiting the ability of idiots to cause mayhem on the roads is. We won't be able to achieve that just by slapping ever more technical hacks into the nations vehicles - all that achieves is ever growing profits for the companies contracted to build/install/operate the systems. What we need is better education, more trafpol so we can stop the idiots at the scene instead of relying on sending them a photo 14 days later to shake them out of their stupidity, and a government (both national and local) that looks at the bigger picture instead of focussing tightly on whichever aspect of road safety is the easiest to monitor and self-finance.
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