Safe Speed Forums

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... way125.xml

I was going north on the M1 once, I managed to avoid the policeman picking the exhaust out of L3, and so did everybody else, but some had to make some crazy manouvres to do so.

Sure, do 80 on the motorway, but you have decided to break the law.

Speed limits are aggressive/outdated/irrelevant/unreaasonable?

Actiually - you'll find this sort of "manipulation" exists since speed cams appeared.

It's why my ex guv and my current guv have kept up a fair and visible RPU here.


We advertiuse where the cam van is likely to be.

We advertise our presence by being seen in clearly marked cars.

We do not keep the unmarked lurkiung on our stretch of the A1 a big secret either.

We cop above average on careless to dangerous to drunk - but fewere speeding. We have a below average KSI statistic (remaining constant more of less) - which we think to be "no accident"

Obviously - we'd like this to be lower - but .. sadly accidents will always occur as no one can eveer claim to be accident-proof or immortal. We are not at all like the cheer-leader in "Heroes"

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Take with a chuckle or a grain of salt
Drive without COAST and it's all your own fault!

A SMILE is a curve that sets everything straight (P Diller).

A Smiley Per post
FINES USfor our COAST!

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon - but driving with a smile and a COAST calm mind.

depends on the road - but some are lowered because there are perhaps plans to make them "more built-up".

But having said that - there sure are some weird anomalies as regards some speed limits - and the DfT are supposed to be having a full nationwide audit on them.

Where do we target? Roads on which we identify there to be a problem.. roads which people complain about and we will audit and lurk accordingly

Do we always prosecute? Always on what we judge to be careless to criminally dangerous - but can and will apply - cough - discretion as and when apporopriate as improvements work best if punishment is seen as the last resort - especially in the marginal "slip" type errors.

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Take with a chuckle or a grain of salt
Drive without COAST and it's all your own fault!

A SMILE is a curve that sets everything straight (P Diller).

A Smiley Per post
FINES USfor our COAST!

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon - but driving with a smile and a COAST calm mind.

I said 'an', this is a singular; it does not imply a general case.
So to answer the rather pointless question, no - but some indeed are.


The problem there is one of tailgating - drivers not leaving adequate room too see ahead and brake if necessary, probably exacerbated by another type of aggressive driving known as lane hogging.


No doubt, I have already said that - but so what? How is it aggressive? Don’t simply say that it is – again, say how!

Do you agree your previous example was a strawman? If not then why not?

But then again - even CC Dick's lads will drive at high speed if they have to if on legit shout. Roads ain't empty. Crimes and accidents don't happen when the roads happen to be empty. It's why we have to train when the public are about as we have to be able to keep them as well as ourselves safe when we are in a "bit of an 'urry to catchee young criminal "at it" )

Med will have had the training - and very likely he was not driving dangerously - but licking the envelope a bit too robustly. Like anyone else - he's not above the law - but folk have expectations of someone who happens to be the the spokesman on road safety and who claims rhe cams stop speeding.

what stops folk from speeding or manipulating a speed limit by cheeky to downright outrageous margins is the knowledge that a policeman can appear suddenly and from nowhere at any time and may or may not apply - cough - discretion.

Professional judgement is always applied and based on what was observed, common sense and outcomes are always the result of this professional judgement - whether the officer decides to warn and let go .. or decides to chuck away the key to the cell door

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Take with a chuckle or a grain of salt
Drive without COAST and it's all your own fault!

A SMILE is a curve that sets everything straight (P Diller).

A Smiley Per post
FINES USfor our COAST!

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon - but driving with a smile and a COAST calm mind.

Um ./.. we prosecute such people for this here as well. In fact if you do an FOI - you'll - er - um - find that we do take action as appropriate against all who cause affray or danger to others. - whatever they are doing and however they are travelling at the time - but always with our professional judgement and - er - using common sense (or discretion if you prefer )

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Take with a chuckle or a grain of salt
Drive without COAST and it's all your own fault!

A SMILE is a curve that sets everything straight (P Diller).

A Smiley Per post
FINES USfor our COAST!

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon - but driving with a smile and a COAST calm mind.

Based on your selective quoting I would have agreed, but looking at the full text of the post "Obviously someone doing 90 in a 60 knows what he is doing, but is the typical driver doing an indicated 35 (probably an actual 32-33) in a 30 really committing a deliberate, aggressive act?" (my bold) casts the quoted text in an entirely a different light IMO.

I wonder if you have misunderstood what In Gear was trying to say (either that or I have).

I'm very suprised this didn't get challenged by the anti speed camera posters here.

Good to know that its working though.

Frankly if you catch people speeding with clear police presence around that means they going too fast to have noticed it I imagine, or are fiddling with their radio, or just not paying attention, which is quite scary in itself.

I was just challenging PeterE's apparent assertion that anybody doing 90 in a 60 "knows what they are doing", i.e. trained to drive at such limits, but yes, I might've got that wrong.

Did he mean they know they were going at 90, like they know they were doing 90, or did he mean they know what they are doing?

The former I think, you're right, I misread that.

As said - we tend to go for careless to dangerous - and not payng attention rather fits neatly


We let the odd blipper off - sometimes pull if testing our tolerance margin - which usually results in our lads/lasses telling them about why they should COAST


Our real headaches are around the normal " rough-ish so-called sink estates" and our born again bikers who really push their luck in our rural backdrops. (We are beginning to win that one now.. after years of fairly "bloody" hard work. These idiots make up most of our KSI stats and we are trying our darndest to stop them. )

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Take with a chuckle or a grain of salt
Drive without COAST and it's all your own fault!

A SMILE is a curve that sets everything straight (P Diller).

A Smiley Per post
FINES USfor our COAST!

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon - but driving with a smile and a COAST calm mind.

I can imagine.

I don't mind a biker choosing to ride at a speed that's ultimately going to result in himself parting head from shoulders, fair enough as long as he doens't do anybody else in, but then again, it can't be nice for you guys having to mop that sort of stuff up.

Yes it is strange because I don't believe for one moment that most people on here would vote Green or for that sort of party, so let's get back to the traditional way of defining politics...

Simplistically, right-wingers are individualistic, believing that they should be able to act how they want, whereas left-wingers think about others more. Or to put it in terms of political parties, on the Left side are Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens, and on the Right side are the Tories, Ukip, and the BNP. What side would you say that you are on?

Now I say that Labour are on the Left side, but in reality the centre ground of politics has shifted markedly to the Right over the last 15 years, say. So although Labour have increased taxes, it probably hasn't been by as much as if we were still in the 60s or 70s, and as their priorites have been the NHS and education, I don't think there has been a lot more money for the police.

Couple that with the moan that we used to hear from speeding motorists before speed cameras came along, "Don't the police have anything better to do?", and that is perhaps why we have ended up with what was described as a "conspiracy to kill".

In other words, to get the most acceptable option of 'policing' the roads for the right-wingers on here, and of course everywhere else, we have ended up with speed cameras. So it isn't a conspiracy to kill.

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Before you moan about middle-lane hoggers, check that you yourself are obeying all the rules of the road.

I don't really understand this point - are you saying that above and beyond the cost of each individual speed camera there was also a cost, paid by the Government, to develop the technology? Otherwise, I can't accept that something that operates 24/7 is more expensive than police officers.



I didn't say that they were, but they are much better than nothing. The police have said themselves (I read it in The Times) that even if we got rid of speed cameras they still wouldn't be able to police the roads more.



No I completely disagree. What you're missing is that a lot of drivers, especially the young, but also middle-aged men driving powerful cars it seems, don't care about safety. You can have all the education you like but they will still drive at 50 in a 30.



Please note: the responses to this post have been split into a separate thread here.

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Before you moan about middle-lane hoggers, check that you yourself are obeying all the rules of the road.

That would be why a speeding vehicle is involved in a roads fatality once in 700 million miles.

(100 million miles per fatality * 1/(14%) of fatalities include a speeding vehicle.)

The idea that routine speeding is responsible for a significant proportion of death or injury is clearly falsified by Department for Transport's own statistics.

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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

They had a grant to cover the original set up costs. If they made gain on income (as in fines) over expenditure (costs of wages/running und operational costs - they got to keep this to buy more cams. Since these cams are rather expensive - this led to willy nilly pinging und operating outside the guidelines but only on the lucrative money spinning routes. Cams never where they should be.

If they did not break even - making a loss - the government topped this up.

Add to this that many of the Gatsos are "housing devices" with no scam... und the scams moved from one cash cow spot to another in some cases -it become a lottery as to whether a blatter got pinged.. whereas the blipper almost always did at each live site.

Thus they not as effective as policeman und basically a waste of time und money




But they are only at the same spots as police used to nab folk (when they lived on Mars und needed something in their pocket books to report back to "Sarge" - (lucrative where they know folk will blip over limit .. on wide roads.. downhills.. where folk pick up the extra speed without noticing immediately as it gradual pick-up.)

But even back then.. Panda patrols were more frequent und it was perhaps like back home.. the visible presence of any officer on routine which kept folk "more steady und toeing the line"






The young? Some will be daft - but they are so astute at spotting cams to extent they only look out for such hazards. The middle aged male who chase his youth perhaps likewise.

But that the whole danger ... as they still only look out for the scams.. hit brakes hard to be at perfect speed for the cam .. then accelerate again. So they do not then work v whereas any cop - be he or she trafpol or on normal patroller will see the full standard of the behaviour und act accordingly


Besides like the Pavlovdog element of the teach to look for the scam.. if folk can be trained to COAST properly.. the skills become as normal as skill in any profession .. along with that acceptance of continual learning to keep up with the job

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You seem to be going in all directions with your argument - appreciate you are having multiple debates, but your argument was about the danger of speed. Now you are talking about accident liability. The two are very different. You seem to be implying that those who drive above the speed limit are being deliberately aggressive, while those who chose to drive much slower than the limit 'the self appointed roads police' are not being aggressive. It doesn't make sense.

Interestingly you may be surprised to learn that driving too slowly was the cause of almost as many fatal accidents as emergency vehicles on call.

It's no picnic for those working in Rehab either I can tell you.

If they still have a pulse after the services have scraped them off the road or prised them out of the car I sometimes get to see them - and the effect it has on their friends and families.

That's why, like In Gear I believe, I'm infinitely more focused/interested in bad driving as opposed to just speeding.

BTW. You said you may 'drift' up to 33mph. I know a doctor at our place who was done at that speed. (The maniac!)

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The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not necessarily represent the views of Safe Speed.
You will be branded a threat to society by going over a speed limit where it is safe to do so, and suffer the consequences of your actions in a way criminals do not, more so than someone who is a real threat to our society.

There is a road I drive along on the way to work that has a 30 limit. It is a wide A road with wide grass verges either side, a footpath for pedestrians and open fields on both sides. The limit was dropped as part of Suffolk County Council's policy of putting 30 limits in all villages, regardless of whether it made sense. Before the 30 limit was introduced the slowest drivers were doing nearly 40mph, so why is it suddenly aggressive and dangerous to exceed 30mph?