Safe Speed Forums

I live in a rural area.
Drivers of all vehicles are sadly lacking in road sense, or from what I see: Any sense.
They fail to appreciate that hedges mask oncoming vehicles/cyclists and pedestrians.
Pedestrians are much more at risk because there are frequently no footpaths and, far from slowing down on the approach to pedestrians/cyclists/horseriders, many drivers speed-up to try to make it to an overtaking point before any oncoming traffic.
We don't need lower speed limits, we need higher thinking limits or capabilities.
In short, a campaign to make drivers THINK would be nice...oh...we already have one...must be a moral there somewhere.

http://www.rospa.com/roadsafety/advice/highway/RuralRoads.htm

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

Just how plausable are those rospa figures?

The 2002 and 2005 figures are exactly the same..... They say that in 2005 twice as many people were killed on rural roads as urban BUT their figures for 2004 don't tally with the Dept for Transport figures...so how believable are these people?

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My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.

An obvious cock-up of format translation from the table given within the pdf.

I notice there is a lot of focus on child casualties ('Think of the Children'). Thanks to the DfT RCGB2007 table 4i, we know that most pedestrian casualties have pedestrian error as a contributory factor (85% for child casualties). I can't help but wonder if the problem can be better tackled by focussing education at the non-driving road users (the one time when we really should 'Think of the Children').

Then there is the possibility of risk homeostasis. Drop the limits and these relatively 'uneducated' road users will be further lulled into their false sense of security, so whatever errors they are already making will become more frequent. This is of course offset by a lesser chance of them dying (but apparently practically all still die at 50mph anyway), so which effect wins over?
It gets worse. Make a limit needlessly low and there is more chance someone will exceed it (deliberately and accidentally), which makes their behaviour less predictable to other road users.

I should also point out there is usually more than 1 contributory factor per casualty, which is higher for fatals (2.5 IIRC). Add to that, some casualties won't have a contributory factor associated with them (a few pedestrians, vehicle passengers), so those at fault will have even more contributory factors associated with them. Hence solving this 1 contributory factor (a relatively infrequent one) may not have prevented those few collisions where the speed was a factor (what good does it do to limits vehicles to 50 when one still fails to look? [don't forget risk homeostasis]).

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Views expressed are personal opinions and are not necessarily shared by the Safe Speed campaign

Good point about the children , Steve.

Rospa go on to say that rural children are at greater risk than urban children, although only 1372, child pedestrians were ksi's in rural settings, whilst a staggering 9874 were ksi's in urban settings and to my maths, that means you are about SEVEN times more likely to get injured as a child on urban roads and when you consider, that these urban children have pavements and crossings to help them stay safe, it does make you wonder where we are going wrong with our urban children.

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My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.

There are more children in urban settings than rural settings.
If you want to know where their figures came from, look at the bottom of the page in the url....

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

Ref: the original story. I wonder if the counties mentioned will notice the extra traffic levels caused by the same number of vehicles taking longer to travel along each section of road?

The issue here is of course one of exposure.
However, there is a logic that states we would achieve far better returns on investment by focussing much of our efforts on the large concentrated group (urban) instead on the smaller, widely distributed group (rural). However, all children go to school (except Abercrombie's apparently), so perhaps education via the curriculum is the best way forward for addressing both these groups in one, effective go?

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Views expressed are personal opinions and are not necessarily shared by the Safe Speed campaign

If you compare Rospa's figures with the Dept for Transport figures they are wildly out....did Rospa make these up?

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My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.

Like I said, I don't think you can compare the two settings.



It makes me wonder what's going wrong with our urban driving.

The kind of people that choose to live in cities, I'd say.

Eh?

More traffic, same number of vehicles?

Surely slower means they'll be closer together and actually have less impact, or does it even out?

How long does a bunch of 50 free flowing cars take to go past a fixed spot at 50mph vs 60mph?

fifty cars will travel a mile in 100 minutes if spaced a minute apart at 60MPH. At 50 MPH those fifty cars will take aprox 15 minutes longer.

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My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.

Er, yeah, but that's not what happens is it.

Do urban drivers go on the pavements round by you then?

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My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.

Well space them 10 second, 20 seconds apart but it is still going to take them that much longer to cover a measured mile.

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My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.

At a steady 60MPH, a car covers a mile in sixty seconds (minute) or sixty miles in a hour. At 50MPH that sixty mile journey is going to take approx 15 minutes longer (that's assuming no 40MPH crawler gets in your way and you maintain a steady 50MPH).

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My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.

The greater throughput due to speed is offset by the need for a larger gap. If we use HWC braking distance as our guide to the minimum gap, there is a factor of 5.3 difference between the gap required at 30 mph, versus the gap required at 70 mph. So, at 70, the cars use less road time, but should be spaced further apart, increasing the road space that they require. Net result: little or no benefit to overall max throughput by driving fast.

Imagine the guy doing an eight hour driving shift. He's going to be doing at best 80 miles less per day tha before. The difference between getting home and having to stop out overnight.

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My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.

<Sigh...> I know it's a simplification*, but

Take a mile of road.

Send a vehicle through at 60mph, it will take a minute.

Send a vehicle through every two seconds, there will be thirty vehicles in the mile section.

Send a vehicle through at 50mph, it will take 72 seconds.

Send a vehicle through every two seconds, there will be thirty six vehicles in the mile section.

I stumbled on this fact when the council lowered the limit on part of my commute and the traffic levels got worse overnight, so I have a theory and also observation of it.

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* This assumes everyone drives at the speed limit, and that vehicle spacing - in seconds - remains constant. IME, people tend to drive at a spacing determined by constant time rather than space. This calculation takes account of that.

This is what I find when having discussions with the "speed kills" brigade. They often dont travel very far themselves. They usually work in offices or schools within a couple of miles of their own homes and never drive further than the supermarket at the weekend. They don't appreciate the hardships it causes to people who regularly travel 200-300 miles a day. They live in their own little worlds, usually in large towns and go everywhere on public transport.

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My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.