Safe Speed Forums

So now you're grouping all drivers with 'a knife thrower who kill 10 every night'

By your logic, nothing in this world can be considered ‘safe’, even getting out of bed! The word 'safe' should be removed from the dictionary as it cannot be applied anywhere!

To get to the point: "safest" are those who (for whatever reason) have the least “crash involvement rate”

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

Sorry, what I meant is that Safespeed didn't come up with it.

If you're going to draw analogies, make sure you're not more than a few orders of magnitude out.
Using your analogy properly, the average knife-thrower would kill one assistant in every 700 years, and the safest knife-thrower would do even better.

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Only when ideology, prejudice and dogma are set aside does the truth emerge - Kepler

But that “crash involvement rate” might be so high that it would be perverse to describe those drivers as safe. A semantic point, but important.

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

Sorry, you've lost me slightly.

Are you saying the safest group may still be not remotely safe enough?

In which case, fair enough point. But one could argue that if they only differ from a less safe group in one respect, then that one respect is a 'signpost towards safety' - if that makes sense.
I.E. in terms of crash involvement, they may be bad but they're the best of a bad bunch.

So in the case of the 85th %ile, the assertion is that going fairly quickly, but not very quickly, is the safest way to proceed, relative to other positions on the distribution curve.

My bold!
Don't tell us that, we didn't bring it up; Weepej did for apparently no reason at all.
The original phrase (and intent) was about "safest"

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

Yes. But other measures, such as road engineering or driver education, might push the peak of the accident v speed curve downwards.

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

It might also push it upwards

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

No, he's the safER of the two!

This goes beyond grammatical semantics too. The example is meaningless because the sample size is so small. "Safest" needs more than two and, of course, ought to be as many as possible to have any real meaning. If not, you end up with the ridiculous kind of statistic that I saw in some "research" recently, in which the "safest" driver age group was the 12-14 year old drivers. Clearly these shouldn't have been on the road at all, but they were the safest age group! Why? Because there were only a tiny number of accidents involving 12-14 year olds!

- and if you get a minute, I'd be interested in your views /answers to the points at the top of P5 of this thread.

What makes you think that there's such a thing as an accident v speed curve?

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Only when ideology, prejudice and dogma are set aside does the truth emerge - Kepler

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

Your second link shows an accident v speed distribution curve, which I have little problem with. It's not an accident v absolute speed curve.
The less said about the contents of your first link, the better. It's difficult to know where to start to describe what's wrong with the referenced 'research'

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Only when ideology, prejudice and dogma are set aside does the truth emerge - Kepler

They might do, but why is that relevant? Surely the priority is to reduce absolute numbers of serious accidents, not what speed they happen at?

so here,s my take on this subject ,i have been driving now for 30 years, car,s motorcycles,trucks,and even the odd tractor ,and in that 30 years[touch wood]i have never had an accident ,i partly put this down to the fact that i ride a motorcycle and i am a lot more aware of the road conditions and the idiots that are out there,,[ that you know are going to say when they pull out in front of you i didnt see him officer and get a slap on the wrist ,],now my point to all this is that it,s not speed that kills its the bloody idiot behind the wheel as most of us know ,so this is why we need the funding srapped for the scp and put back into more policing of the roads as someone said earlier you never know were the police are going to be,,

Pushing the peak of the curve down reduces the area under the graph. That area is the total number of casualties. I trust that that comment is relevant and "on track"

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

Why can you assume that moving the peak reduces the area under the curve, without knowing more about the variables that create (and modify) the curve.

And this time, yes, you're bang on topic.

I am assuming that the shape of the curve remains Gaussian. If you are saying that we have no knowledge of the shape of the curve the discussion becomes futile.

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

In case it's not clear, he's talking about moving the peak downwards, i.e. reducing the maximum number of accidents, not moving it downwards in terms of speed.

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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

I can think of no reason to believe that it wouldn't be Gaussian, which does to my mind reveal a huge flaw in the whole automated enforcement policy!

I get you. I was thinking exactly what you thought I was.

But then - now I know what everyone else is talking about - why would lowering the number of accidents at a given point on the speed distribution curve lead to an equal volume under the curve being maintained?