Safe Speed Forums

I just had a phone call from Littlegoozle (forum member). He was driving North on the A9 between Newtonmore and Dalwhinny in his truck at 40mph when an ill judged overtake took place. The overtaker ran off the road to avoid a head on crash. he rang me as he was walking back to the scene of the crash about 10 minutes ago, so the crash took place at about 9:30 this morning.

He was 100% confident that the HGV40 speed limit caused the crash.

More news later.

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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

Well, no surprises there Paul, I hope the driver was all right.
I am surprised that I haven't seen anything like this myself seeing some of the crazy overtaking I am subject to every day.

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Semper in excreta, nur quantitat variat.

I too hope all ist OK. See a lot of daft overtakes which are unwise and ill-planned at times - but also some due to impatience as well from this this speed limit too. No reason why the vehicle would be unsage just that bit faster in any case... depends on the road, layout, conditions etc... Goes without saying.

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The HGV 40 limit may have contributed to it, but it doesn't sound like it caused it. It sounds like the cause was an impatient driver overtaking at an inappropriate time rather than calmly driving along at 40 mph.

I wholeheartedly agree. There are a lot of things in life that frustrate and annoy us, but they should not become the 'excuse' for irresponsible behaviour. People need to learn to exercise a little more self-discipline and control, unfortunately society seems too ready to accept feeble excuses for bad behaviour.

In an individual case you'll always be right.

However if we could look at national statistics another picture will be emerging. I'd feel comfortable calling the changes cause and effect.

In the real world we have real-world driver weaknesses and we should be running policies that minimise and manage the effects of real world driver weaknesses. We can't afford to base policy on the qualities of a mythical perfect driver.

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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

Perhaps, but we have to be careful here don't we? We equally cannot afford to cave in to bad behaviour simply because modern people are impatient. That won't work either.

An old adage springs to mind when overtaking

"Better to be late in this world than early in the next"

Be careful, though, that is dangerously close to being the opposite of the argument that shows speeding to not cause accidents. Speeding is very common, yet accidents very rare, so speeding cannot be said to cause accidents. HGVs adhering to the 40mph limit are very common, yet accidents are very rare, so HGVs travelling at 40mph cannot be said to cause accidents. Except you're saying they do, which would imply you would have to accept the same can be true for speeding. I'd rather go for the more obvious and direct cause which is an inappropriate overtaking move - I'd hazard a guess that such action leads to an accident in a far greater proportion of cases than the act of driving an HGV at 40mph.

However I totally agree with the pragmatic suggestion of creating an environment that is "error tolerant", and also inherently discourages behaviour that commonly leads to error. I'd also like to see drivers using simulators for training, to get them used to how it feels to have a car come the opposite way at the legal speed limit when they overtake, or perhaps even 10-15mph above the legal speed limit if we want to continue the theme of catering for real world behaviour. I'd be willing to bet that many people currently get away with overtaking at inappropriate times because a vehicle didn't happen to appear coming the other way at the worst possible moment, thus their bad habit is reinforced and they learn the false lesson that their overtaking move was safe.

I remember, as a child in the 'fifties, how my dad always used to complain about people being so impatient and in a hurry. He often used to yell at someone through the car window, "Where's the fire?"
So I don't think it's a particularly modern phenomenon.

Cheers
Peter

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

Perhaps you're right to highlight that 'speeding does not cause accidents' is fundamentally a weak argument. The way I see it, we should always be looking for policies where the (real world) benefits outweigh the disadvantages and side effects.

I am certain that the side effects of modern speed enforcement are far greater than the benefit (+potential benefits). I also think the side effects of HGV40 are far worse than the benefits.

Returning to the 'speeding does not cause accidents' statement, we're really looking at quantifying the small potential benefits of speed camera policy. This observation helps us to put the potential benefit in context. i.e. if few crashes have speeding as a cause or contributory factor then the potential benefit of eliminating speeding must be small.

Then there's the other thing we were talking about recently. We compared the large incidence of speeding in normal driving with the small incidence of excessive speed in crashes. I don't take the large ratio as lack of evidence of causation - rather I take the large ratio as evidence of different populations. (i.e. speeding does not take place where and when crashes are likely)

Bottom line: "speeding does not cause accidents" is a simplified argument.

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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

If we misjudge or recklessly overtake then it is our 'fault' if we come to grief of that there is no doubt.

However, if we are driven to reckless acts due to frustration, particularly when the cause of that frustration is artificially imposed then it should not be ignored.

Now I assume all of us on this forum are interested in reducing accients and deaths and not approtioning blame.

If that is the case then we have to go back to root causes. If the frustration causes the impatience that leads to the reckless act that leads to accident then we really to need to tackle the cause of the frustration. We are all humans and we are all conditioned and influenced by our environment.

I return to my safety at work hobby horse, we've moved on from simply bollocking lads for breaching safety dictats to looking at the reasons why they break them.

'wheres the fire' may not be new but then neither is the concept of tackling causes not symptoms.

The worring thing about overtaking is that you are not taught how to do it properly.
There is infroamtion and adivce in this forum, and in books- but is all theory.
While learning to dirve and during my pass plus, over taking was never discussed.

There was a discussion on these forums some months back, maybe even last year, where there was some speculation that it has only fairly recently become common for HGVs to stick to the 40 limit. In the days of discretionary enforcement an HGV driver might be prepared to break the limit and not hold up the cars behind if he knew he'd only get puled over if he was taking the piss. These days that sort of behaviour is likely to cost an HGV driver points, so there's a disincentive to speed up a bit to accomodate car drivers. How true that really is I have no idea. I'm not a truker and I don't know any personally.

Even if true I'm sure it's not the only thing at work here. Safe vertaking places are often getting screwed around with by local authorities, usually with the result that they stop being a sensible place to overtake. And there's more traffic about which further reduces overtaking opportunites. All in all I think that for several reasons frustation is becoming more commonplace, and inevitably that leads a few drivers to make bad decisions. Now there's basically two approaches to take to deal with this - either accept that people will want to get past slow moving vehicles and provide them with sufficient opportunities to do it safely, or try to persuade everyone to go no faster than the slowest thing on the road. I don't think we're going to get anywhere with the second one myself.

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

Absolutely.

I think they think that teaching overtaking would ultimately deliver more confidence than ability and danger would increase.

I fear they might be right. But I think the acid test (one acid test?) is to ask someone who's been trained in overtaking if they would give up those skills. I certainly wouldn't.

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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

If you were teaching overtaking and the pupil got it wrong, you could be sued, so it's left to you to teach yourself IMHO.
If you learn from a parent, at least you get years of observation on how to do it - just pray the parent is a better than average driver.

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

Nope, I don't buy that. You could say the same for teaching driving at anything over walking pace. Or teaching any number of other things.

I imagine the opportunity to teach overtaking rarely occurs during normal driving tuition since it tends to concentrate on urban driving and rarely takes place on fast, rural A roads where overtaking opportunities tend to occur.

I have just done RoSPA car test and during all my observed runs there was only one opportunity to overtake and that was a tractor, on the test there were none - did get stuck behind an HGV, but it was doing 56mph mostly and only opportunities to overtake safely would have meant exceeding limit.