Safe Speed Forums

I agree. It is therefore odd that, when I (a few weks ago) offered "Drive Safely Within the Speed Limit" as a simple mantra for safe driving, you responded...



Safe either needs defining or it doesn't...which is it?

I'm guessing here but I suppose someone, somewhere needs to decide what is an acceptable number of fatalities on any given road, hence that road will then be considered "safe".

Wouldn't fancy that job myself.

Oh you are kidding aren't you?

"Safe" is a perfectly good, useful and simple word especially when used sensibly in a relative context.

"Safe driving" is all sorts of stuff that demands analysis and definition if it is going to be achieved.

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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

No actually I'm not kidding, just because the way I think and the way you want to see things differs, doesn't mean I'm pulling your leg, being deliberately obtuse or similar.

To me, safe driving is what we learn when we embark on our driving careers and believe most drivers would know or understand what it means. You believe it is too simple..OK I'll live with that but I think you're playing semantics and over-complicating the expression.

Similarly, Basingwerk sees a flaw in the expression 'maximum safe speed', yet you believe he is trying to unecessarily complicate things.

I make no apologies for pointing out the apparent duplicity; but this unfortunately is where we end up going when we make an isue of picking holes in straightforward messages.

God What have i started??? Some other poor git got flashed on the way to work yesterday by the same gatso. I just hope to god that the bloody thing was out of film. I got three points about 4 months ago driving to work on the rugeley road on staffs. I never even saw the f&%$ing flash. The first i knew of it was the nip. i worked out from the time of the offence that i was heading to work and found which cam it was. I was one just like this one. Hidden behind a 30mph sign dropping out of a 60mhp. My wife has offered to take the points on her licence should i get a nip. If there is no other reason for these gatso cameras other than road safety then why is so easy to pass the points onto someone else. Whats the saying that the law likes to use...inocent to proven guilty? Well thats like guilt to proven inocent. If it was a murder then you wouldn`t be able to pass the blame. i recon that every one should fail to return the nips then the system would fall down.

I'm afraid I agree with basingwerk, there isn't and never will be 'safe driving'. As long as you are propelling a tonne of metal down the road this can never, ever, be called 'safe'. Safety conscious yes, but never 'safe'.

And what do you mean when you say 'stuff'?????

Actually if you think about it the word 'safe' can be quite dangerous. Take, for example, a loon driving through a village at 60mph one night. 'Well officer as it is late at night I thought that driving through the village at this speed is safe because there aren't many people around'.

If we will start picking holes in things you will find that the word safe is actually quite a dangerous little number, and safety is not at all easy to define.

How clear is the 30mph sign and do you get any warning signs that the speeds are dropping?? There are a few villages near me in Lincs where you go round a corner at NSL and all of a sudden a 30mph is on you. Surely these speed limits need more warning signs a few hundred yards up the road??

If it is clear to you that a 30mph is approaching, do you realise that 30mph starts where the signs are. Its no good slowing down in the 30, you need to slow down beforehand.

That's exactly what I mean. Constructive ambiguity is all very well in Irish politics, but in engineering, it's a fudge. It seems that, to get a simple message, we have to use a poorly defined one! Such as 'Speed Kills' or 'Safe Speed'. You can't pick and choose when to be precise and when to be slack, or you will send out a bad message anyway.

For example, a lot of people who come here are just slackers trying to get off with an offence, not to learn about safety. What message does that send out? The right message, which I send out to everybody, is that the best way to avoid a ticket is to obey the limit in the first place. And it also happens to be a decent way of making the roads safer!

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Perhaps it's the very ambiguity of the term "safe speed" that makes it such a useful measure!

We know that we can precisely define "legal speed" to whatever degree of accuracy we choose, it is simply a mechanical process of measurement.

But by introducing the term "safe speed", which is clearly subjective, we force the driver to consider a whole range of important issues that "legal speed" ignores. You don't need to consider road conditions, weather conditions, vehicle performance, visibility, hazard density, time of day in order to choose the "legal speed" at which to drive. But if we choose to drive at a "safe speed" we need to consider all these important issues and more.

That's why choosing to drive at a "safe speed" will reduce our risk of causing an accident far more than simply choosing to drive at a "legal speed", and why even the simple act of considering what is a safe speed inherently delivers huge benefit.

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

But the meteorite would be breaking the speed limit!

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I have no problem with the idea of a "safe speed", as long as those choosing to drive at a "safe speed" choose something within the limit.

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But the scammers don't want you to slow down. They even prosecuted a Hampshire pensioner for telling others to slow down by means of a warning sign, as he was affecting revenue.

So you think that driving legally matters more than driving safely?

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

But what if the limit has been tampered with by people with no experience of road safety or physics? This could sometimes include limits being too high as well.

There is an alleged speed limit in my college car park of 5mph! Do you really think people drive slower than that? They would be unable to overtake people walking, which is probably itself an offence (intimiadtion, threatening behaviour, maybe kerb crawling), and they would certainly appear to an observer to be drunk or asleep at the wheel.

If the limit is the physical safe speed for a road, then if the road hasn't changed then by definition the limit cannot be changed either, since the laws of physics don't change. The only workable position is that the limit is not the magic number it's made out to be, and drivers must use their own discretion.

Great in principle, but sadly useless if the limit is unrealistic as an increasing number seem to be. I'm sure it would never happen, but imagine if the m-way limit was 30 - now choose a safe motorway speed within that limit. See? The principle is okay but it absolutely has to have realistic limits or human nature will see to it that it simply never happens.

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

No - safe driving should be legal, and legal driving should be safe. If you are driving safely but illegally, then you may get a ticket. In that case, tough luck. If there is any time when it is not safe to drive legally, you should stop and get the train. If you are unsafe and illegal, bring back the birch!

PS: I'm not saying it is not possible to drive legally but unsafely - I'm just saying you should not drive legally but unsafely.

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And the human nature of pedestrians will make sure that offedners are fined.

PS: sorry, you are right that speed limits should be set properly.

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Collisions at 5 mph result in damageof between $500 to almost $2,000. Jags are the very worst. I have also heard of pedestrians getting very severe leg injuries in low speed impacts. 5 mph might be slow, but cars are heavy!

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What? What's that got to do with anything? I said that your principle of driving at a safe speed within the limit will naturally fail if limits are unrealistic. I can't see that the human nature of pedestrians has got anything to do with it at all, unless you believe that pedstrians are the source of unrealistically low limits. There might be some truth in that, which means we're pitting a reasonable demand of one group against the unreasonable demands of another, further complicated by the fact that most people actually belong to both groups and are indulging in a bit of needless NIMBYism. Personally I think the stupidity of local politicians might have more to do with it.

Actually basingwerk, that's got me thinking along a different track. When the Helen Lovejoy types complain about speeding cars and demanding that something be done, are the cars really speeding? It's not easy to judge the speed of a vehicle coming almost directly at you after all. From the pavement I don't think I could sort them into much better than ridiculously slow, slow, so-so, seems okay, a bit fast, fast, clearly too fast and hell he's going to kill someone. But without something to measure speed I'd not have a prayer of saying what it is in mph, even though I'd have a good idea if I was the driver. So, if I'm demanding a camera how do you know that it's because the traffic is really speeding rather than me being just being windy?

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

I added a PS to say I'm sorry. The speed limits should be set properly. I know that. But speed limits are political - there are many stakeholders in the process.

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