Safe Speed Forums

You've said before that changing the speed limit doesn't have a significant effect on the speeds chosen by drivers.

it's guaranteed. You've got the 40mph everywhere idiots now that are hard enough to overtake with no limiters. With a limiter in place overtaking would be so dangerous as to be impossible.

As a rule of thumb changing a speed limit causes a change in average speed of about 10% of the change in limit. You can get bigger effect with heavyweight enforcement.

But how's that 10% delivered? I think it's mostly the inexperienced minority driving to the new limit. That can be pretty bad...

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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

It did very much seem that one consequence of limiting maximum speed quite strictly was bunching. I'd read about this before but hadn't seen it in practice, so I'm not so sure that it's an unknown, although I don't know of any research into it. It should certainly be possible to get a computer model to illustrate it. I keep meaning to try.

I think the problem is that speedometers (and limiters too) will never be perfectly accurate, so gradual coalescing is possible, but difficult to undo.

Slowing down to get space doesn't seem to work too often for me. Occasionally, on the M6 between Manchester and Birmingham I'll sit in lane 1 at about 60, and leave the folk in lane 3 to their merry 65mph tailgating.



Well, I’m not so sure. Physical pain, which is perhaps one of the roots of the concept of harm, does not appear to have a strong social component. It would seem odd to suggest that painful things hurt because people generally agree that they are painful. They just are. Painful. Harmful acts are deemed harmful because they cause pain. Grief too. Grief, although it may seem a more social, agreed-upon thing than pain, probably isn’t.

I think Law comes down to trying to ensure that everyone who requires Justice is able to get it, while hoping that most people will never require it. The Law encodes certain fairly fundamental human concerns. Social norms, I feel, should have very little to do with it.

But what if the standards were continually being revised (downwards) to the detriment of profitability.

And the automated tool kept causing people to lose their job for programming efficiently in an attempt to keep the company in work?

(Though, of course, you would allow them to campaign for their job back).

No it can't - as soon as you come to a hill the lorry carring 40 tonnes will slow a bit more than the one carrying 38 tonnes (or whatever), the lorries bunch, the 2 mile overtakes start, and pretty soon an empty motorway is full of traffic all jostling for space.

In the pre-limiter days lorry drivers used to read the road a lot more, even on motorways. Quite apart from keeping them wider awake this also prevented congestion. For instance, lorry A knows a hill is coming up but can see there is an empty stretch of road before it, so he deliberately picks up an extra 15mph so that he can lose it again on the way up and come over the top at his original cruising speed instead of creating a rolling road-block. Meanwhile, the empty lorry B behind (who would otherwise have spent two miles creeping past) stays behind as he has knows he can maintain his speed up the hill. He happily watches A pull a gap out and then closes it again.

Instead of that, we now have A's limiter set to 56.5 and B's to 55.5, so on the way up B spends 3 miles in Lane 2 overtaking A, then on the way down the other side A retakes B at a 1mph differential.

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An earlier post introduced the concept of the "spirit" of the law. I'd go further, I'd talk about the "purpose" of the law.

Now let's look at that coding example again:

Developers working in a team (should) have coding standards to work to. The purpose of the standards are to ensure that everyone's work is compatible. That is why (as was observed) it doesn't actually matter what standards are imposed - the very imposition of them in itself serves it's purpose.

So what is the purpose of a speed limit? I think we can all agree that it is to prevent accidents. So if a particular speed limit at a particular time is not serving any accident-saving purpose, what exactly is the problem with exceeding it?

If I'm driving down an empty motorway at 2am in a reasonably high performance car, then my risk of causing an accident is virtually unaffected by exceeding the 70mph limit, indeed it could well be argued that the increased stimulus may even reduce the risk of one. What purpose would a 70mph limiter serve in this instance?

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

Why on earth would anyone do that?


Why would people who program efficiently lose their job?

I don't have a problem with it other than that I consider it more helpful to society to abide by it, even if you don't agree with the rule. At work, it's not that uncommon to get processes imposed on us which are badly thought out and are going to cause problems, even though they may be introduced with good intentions. If persuasion doesn't work, because the person introducing it doesn't agree with the problems it will cause, then by far the quickest way to get the bad process changed is for everyone to religiously follow it so that the problems quickly become visible to everyone.

There are other ways to make the problem visible, such as prosecuting that councillor in that 30mph limit that has since been made 40mph, but let's face it, it would have happened a lot sooner if they'd been forced to drive along it at 30. Because everyone felt free to break the limit, the bad limit was kept until it caused someone a problem via enforcement, because a bad limit that everyone can ignore isn't generally seen as a problem (by those who want to drive faster), however I do see it as a problem. And in any case, it may be much harder for people to see the prosecution as a problem, it has only worked in that case because the person being prosecuted could influence the changing of it, otherwise the perceived problem may well have been that the limit was being ignored, rather than that the limit was too low.

IMO thats about the most cogent argument yet for the introduction of mandatory ISA.
Although I'd be happier if the pros and cons were thrashed out on a theoretical level.

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Fixed ideas are like cramp, for instance in the foot, yet the best remedy is to step on them.

Ian

you obviously haven't done any SOx compliance then.

Yes you did, look.



So what you seem to be saying is it doesn’t matter what the law is, if anyone amount of people are breaking it then that is all that is needed for the government to then leap into action and pass new legislative. There seems to be very little from you on now it effects the rest of the law abiding population, or how extreme the law goes, just as long as every person follows it zealously then that’s fine.
This doesn’t strike me as acting for the greater good of the people, infact it just went flying out of the window.

I also don’t quite see how your example in developing computer software is even remotely relevant to the case in hand of speed compliance.
In your job, I assume every person is a reasonable fellow, whom all have every wish to respect authority since they want to keep their job. They are all also working to achieve one goal and are willing to compromise somewhere along the line.

I dont believe this is representative of motorists throughout the country at all.

you forgot the most important point. For the most part, those working as programmers are COMPETENT. You wouldn't hire a programmer who didn't know what a "FOR NEXT" loop is (and yes, I've met one) and yet we let people on the road who can't even hold a steering wheel correctly, let alone manage to turn a corner.

Coding standards are there to help ensure readability, maintainability, testability and portability of code.
Any half-decent programmer should have no difficulty conforming to coding standards, unless they're positively anal, and most will naturally conform to them.
However, if strict adherence to coding standards would compromise safety-critical or performance-critical systems then it's normally sufficient justification to dispense with them. To be fair, such critical code undergoes far more rigorous testing etc than run-of-the-mill stuff.

Cheers
Peter

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

No, what he seems to be saying is that there is a reason for the recent spate of new legislation addressing, say, perceived social ills. He doesn't necessarily appear to be advocating this strategy as such, mereyl offering a suggestion as to why it happens.
However, I'd certainly agree that passing raft after raft of new laws which don't really attack the core of the problem they were drafted to address, rather they penalise those who have something to lose, is not the way to go. Its a 'got to be seen to be doing something' policy from a floundering governement.

They wouldn't.

Because it would harm efficiency and profitability.

But local authorities do it all the time to maximise sCamera Partnership profits.

Regardless of the fact it damages the country's efficiency and profits.



They wouldn't.

But people who drive efficiently do because they are breaking the lowered standards.


OK.

You've convinced me:

Your coding analogy has no relevance to the debate.

I rest my case.

Exactly, my original point was that individual citizens with a particular attitude to their role in society are the problem. The email spammers, the eBay scammers, people in general who don't give a stuff about people's attempts to get them to behave in a reasonable manner and will try to find a way round anything that is put in place to attempt to prevent undesirable behaviour. I don't like having more and more legislation, but what else do you expect the people in power to do when faced with people who simply won't act in the way the rest of society wants them to? I would prefer it if everyone could behave reasonably and respect their fellow citizens.

But the other point that I still seem to be having difficulty getting across is the non-absolute nature of harm. Glider did understand the point, and attempted to describe a framework for viewing harm as an absolute, but to extend his thinking:

1: Physical pain. Yes, most actions that inflict physical pain on another person are illegal. Though it's all a bit confused - you can't punch someone with their consent, it's assault whether they consent or not. But you can coach an athlete and tell them to do things that will result in physical pain, and here the consent appears to make it okay. Or there are legal contact sports where pain is inflicted in a manner that would be illegal outside the sports. So it's not as clear cut as it might seem.

2: Emotional pain. Glider called this grief. I think my original description of it simply being an act that people don't like is adequate and not made incorrect by this. We're getting to the stage where even simple rudeness can be deemed anti-social behaviour. After all, a breach of the peace can be caused by simply causing another person to be "alarmed".

So we come back to who decides what constitutes harm? The answer surely has to be that it is our legislators who are empowered with this task. Once we say that each individual should be allowed to break any law they want, provided that individual believes no harm will be caused, you are on a very slippery slope. Most people on this forum might be happy to isolate the exception to obeying of speed limits. And perhaps red lights when an emergency vehicle is behind them. But perhaps on a burglar's forum, we might find a unanimous view that burglary doesn't harm anyone, because the homeowner can claim on their insurance. Mental anguish from being burgled - they'd probably think such people should stop moaning, that their complaints are ridiculous. Just like the people on this forum have no time for the 90 year old woman in a village who is too scared to cross the road because the speeding motorists think nobody is being harmed by their ignoring of a technical numerical speed limit.

Yep. We're here because they have failed in their duty. Too many resources directed at the wrong target. Missed opportunities to hit the right target. More people dead as a consequence.



Bloody hell Steve! We're all about appropriate speed. If a '90 year old woman' is afraid then either:

a) Inappropriate speeds are a problem in the location
b) She's been scared witless by dumb road safety policy telling lies about driver behaviour
c) She's become nervous and she's scared of the TV, scared of the cat, scared of the meals on wheels people as well as the traffic.

Whatever combination of the above exists, it's really very unlikely that speed enforcement will make a blind bit of difference.

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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