Safe Speed Forums

Ha! Big number/little number statistics are for the fools. Look at it over a real driving lifetime, SafeSpeed, and it becomes 32m/11m. That’s 3 to 1 - odds that are twice as bad as Russian Roulette!

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I'm not going to play silly games. The reality is that injury crashes are extremely rare compared with - say - non crash days or non crash miles. Those are strengths we have to build upon. In other words, look at what works and do more of it.

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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

Now I realise this is probably not your personal opinion (Rigpig) on maintaining a constant speed. But, as it was there.....

I should move this to the 'Soapbox'! My pet hate. Various bodies recommending that we drive around town in third. FFS, if you can't hold a constant speed within 5mph regardless of what gear you prefer (with reference checks to your speedo) WTF are you on the road for! MOST modern cars with 5 speed boxes can happily sit in 4th or 5th at 30, maintaining more than a modicum of control over your speed as there is significantly less torque in these gears than in third. Honestly, I tried it for an experiment, 30 in 3rd. It just made driving unbearable - 2x the revs, nearly 2x fuel, MUCH more twitchy accelerator - more likely to blip up to 40 than creep up to 35.

What's the old adage, 'a bad workman blames his tools'. "Oh these new fangled cars, they make you go so fast." LOOB! If me, you and some newly passed learners can hold our speed relatively constant - it's a PP excuse.

Now I do realise, this 30 / 3rd for the IAMs out there is not specifically for the above purpose - more of a 'best gear for the job' / 'preparedness' which is why I believe some Police prefer a lower gear in urban areas. So I'm not having a dig - not this time anyway!

Why drivers speed....

I think we need to make the distinction between "excessive speed" (Where the driver knows full well that they are exceeding the speed limit, and possibly the safe limit for the conditions as well) and "excess of the speed limit" which can be comitted without the driver even knowing that they are doing anything wrong.

Many offences "snapped" by speed cameras fall into the second category, and this is the one that I explore here.

Cruise control aside, anyone who drives a car will know how difficult it is to stay at a constant speed, even in the absence of any other traffic. Hills, bends, wind and tiny differences in pressure exerted on the accelerator pedal all act to vary your speed constantly. Unless you are constantly checking your speedo, this happens without your knowledge. No conscious "decision" is being taken to drive faster/slower.

In reality, a driver should be allowed a +/-8mph "tolerance" in their speed to allow for these variations. Unrealistic speed limits, combined with excessive enforcement are denying them this.

Take the example of a rural road, with a camera enforced 30mph limit (implemented due to non-speed related accidents or purely as a "traffic calming" measure)....

Drive below 30mph, and you start annoying the drivers behind, who often then get too close and you risk being rear-ended if you have to brake for whatever reason.

Drive above 34mph and you are risking your licence.

That's a tolerance of +/- 4mph, which is not even enough to allow for the laws of physics, let alone varying one's speed according to the conditions

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“For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.” - H. L. Mencken

Fair enough, but the 3 to 1 odds are ones that you quoted, expressed over a driving lifetime.



Any activity that has 3 to 1 odds of being injured is rightly considered dangerous. It is good that motoring is considered a dangerous activity, and it would be wrong to try to make out that motoring is a safe activity – it is not inherently safe at all.

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I stole this .sig

Using a chopping knife is an inherently dangerous activity, but the best way to make it a low risk activity is to be aware of the dangers of improper use, not to blunten the blade completely. Of course, doing so might remove the risk of accidental or deliberate injury, but might also have starvation as an unfortunate side effect.

Lower speeds initiatives as a solution to road safety are the equivalent of blunt knives - theoretically 'safe' but in practice totally useless, with far more insidious side effects.

Activities with a more than 3 in 1 chance of injury in a lifetime's participation undoubted include:

* preparing vegtables
* All manner of sports
* playing cowboy and indians (or any other childhood game)

So you're just being silly. Anyway the question is not about the rate of risk, but how to reduce risk. Because risk is already at a low rate we should clearly be looking to the already successful factors for improvement.

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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

I've been shot down for this before, but I will say it again anyway (lets face it, I wouldn't be here still if I got offended easily!)

There are more interfaces in the vehicle - human system than the speedo. There is the noise - both engine and road. There is the vibration through the entire contact area of the seat. There are visual clues outside the window. There is even an inate human sense of stability (the same one that tells you when your plane starts to turn, long before you have any visual clues through the window) and of course there is the absolute indicator, the speedo.

All of the above should be operating in 'the system'. I would not expect anyone to be able to deduce absolute speed from any of the non absolute indicators, but I maintain that you should be able to deduce a deviation or change. 4mph at 30 is more than a 10% change, unless the rate of change is slow (by definition - an imperceptable rate of change) then this should be sensed by the human in the system. If the rate IS so slow, then surely at some point in the extended time the human will have referred to the speedo as part of the standard operational cycle?

As to driving at 10% below the limit (temporarily rather than consistently) I don't have the same issues with this.

Andy

p.s. I used to say - prior to joining this site - that "I never speed". I now recognise that I am merely human and now I say "When driving, at ALL times I make the best possible efforts I can to keep my speed inside the posted limit". It's not a huge difference, but an important one to me.

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COAST Not just somewhere to keep a beach.

A young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who operate above the law.

Oh yes, you often hear of a bus queue being mowed down by a vegetable chopper! And those tributes and flowers you see at the side of the road are actually for cricketers who have hurt thier thumbs!

PS. 300 people have been killed this month on the roads (on average). I expect some of them were children playing childhood games!

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first lets agree the definition.

'speeding' means exceeding the posted limit.

second why do drivers speed.

two reasons

1 - accidentally
1a - not aware of posted limit for given road.
1b - not aware of exact numerical speed of vehicle

2 - because they choose to (as simple as that)

I choose to exceed the limit when I have assessed the conditions and have selected a speed that I consider to be appropriate for the prevailing conditions. Others may not but they still choose to 'speed'

So there it is....that is why drivers 'speed'

PS. I don't actually recall the last time I heard of a bus queue being mown down by a speeding driver. It seems to be a favoured but mythical scenario repeated by the people who seek to use such emotive nonsense to hide their anti-motorist prejudices for wanting lower speeds and heavy enforcement.

PPS. I won't even ask how many of the 300 were killed by speeding drivers......

Climbing stairs is another good example, as I know to my cost

If I was representative of the whole population, stairs would be far more dangerous than cars.

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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

If you're going to play games with statistics then you really should go the whole hog.
Over a real driving lifeime there's going to be a hell of a lot more than 32m drivers on the road, as every year new drivers are licenced and old drivers stop driving. That brings the odds right down.



What are the odds that you're going to fall and injure yourself during your lifetme, just by walking? A hell of a lot worse than 3 to 1. Does that make walking a dangerous activity?



We're talking about injuries, not fatalities.
Besides, I daresay vegetable choppers have killed more people than those mowed down in bus queues by cars.



And how many people have died as a result of accidents in their own homes this month? How many people have died this month as a result of medical negligence? Around 70,000 people die each month, and not all of them die of old age.

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

Whilst this is almost certainly a reasonable assertion, do we actually have the evidence to enable us to be honest in calling it a "fact"? Sorry to be "picky", but these things, ultimately, matter. Do we have evidence that poor drivers HAVE (as opposed, for example, to CAUSE) more accidents than the median driver?

There's ample evidence that young drivers are over-represented in the accident stats, so if you read 'inexperienced' for 'poor' then yes, we can say it's 'fact' - on this count alone.

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

It's good to be picky. We don't have much more than 'guesstimates'. It's an area that needs investigation. We know that the following graph must be the right shape (and we therefore know that the median driver has much less than the average crash risk).



But we can't yet put scales on the axes.

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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

Yes, Pete317, but the idea is to show the pro-car reactions. Unless I have misunderstood SafeSpeed, he suggests that 10 deaths a day is fine because driving is safer that chopping garlic!

This is important. I want to reveal the true intent of the campaign, and find if it has less to do with safety than with the pathological (i.e. habitual, maladaptive, and compulsive) fast driving that forms the modern car culture.

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I stole this .sig

The intent of the campaign is to find the path to improved road safety. As you very well know.

If policy hadn't run off the rails your 10 per day would be down to <6 per day by now. That's the true disaster. That's the reason I went full time. That's the reason I do 80 hours a week on this.

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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

That's right. No-one in thier right mind would say that chopping with a sharp knife is not dangerous. It is, and we know it is. Yet many think that driving, which is much more able to cause death, is quite safe. Or at least we routinly surf the edges of what is safe, as can be witnessed by the amount of tailgating and other nonsense that goes on.

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I stole this .sig

Basingwerk.
I'm making an assumtion here....

You drive don't you? So by you OWN admission & mumblings YOU have a 1 in 3 chance of killing or injuring either yourself or another 'road user'* (*lest we forget that playing children need roads to run freely in) during your driving career. So, how can you sit (presumably) there and rant on in a "Danger! Will Robinson! Danger!" fashion? I don't really want to call you a hypocrite in the making! But how dare you put someones life or health in jeopardy! :tongue in cheek:

And grouping K's in with the SI's is govermental 'statistical' jiggery pokery to make 'us' believe using the roads is REALLY bad for our health. Even worse is grouping the crash related injuries in one big bunch. That'll be everything from a badly bruised finger to severed limbs & deaths then.

At only a 1 in 3 chance of spraining my wrist* for 50 years of driving - stats are starting to look pretty good to me! Compare the vehicle related incidents to general 'sporting' injuries - I've been to casualty several times from cycling accidents (5 times in 10 years/50k miles - extrapolate to 25 accidents in 50 years or 100 accidents per million miles) - oh, wait.....cycling is GOOD for you, the environment, traffic congestion, hell, everything!

*and of that, only a 1 in 70 chance of being killed in the 1 in 3 incident (214000 injury v 3000 deaths) so in reality, only a 1 in 210 chance of dying in a car crash during my lifespan....not great odds, but not bad either better than the, 1 in 3 of developing cancer and 1 in 4 of dying of it......

Are you the sort of person that believes this 'statistic' too?http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=309222005 media scare mongering!