Safe Speed Forums

To get value from this, we need to convert the "crash risk" to "involved in KSI". (To refute arguments you must, in general, use the same measures - unless you want to reject the measure as invalid). However, whilst the overall shapes may be right, (as is the reasonable assertion that the median driver has a less than average crash risk) we don't know how "extreme" (or not) the shapes of both curves may be. When looking at KSIs we need to understand how many KSIs are "solo jobs" and hence more likely (but not absolutely - could for example be a mechanical failure) to be the result of sub-par driving (or behaviour) as opposed to the possibly excellent (but unlucky) drivers (and their passengers) who are "KSIed" by someone elses actions.

Just to revisit this.
I started out on motorcycles and then moved on to cars. On my 650 Suzuki in 1982 I could, if/when I wanted, be amongst the fastest vehicles on the road.
Since returning to bikes last year, one thing that has struck me is how noticeably faster other vehicles are going; its not something I'd noticed in my car when I was never that bothered about tearing about. Back in 1982, 90mph was not all that comon (IME) and at that speed you could pretty much make progress on your own. Nowadays anyone in a small Peugot can easily do that sort of speed and will as a matter of routine.
Speed limits have remained the same, drivers now have the tools to exceed them with ease. Its not at all surprsing that they do without giving it a second thought.

He suggested nothing of the sort. He said that the average driver goes 150 years between injury accidents.
By what logic do you manage to twist that around to 10 deaths a day being the point of comparison?



What happened?
Before your vacation from this forum, you indicated that you were going to turn over a new leaf - that 'basingwerk' had become a millstone around your neck.
But it's become quite clear that you're still your old self - you're just argumentative for the sake of being so.

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

It’s obvious. If we had bombs going off in London and killing and maiming people at the same rate that cars do, there would be a hell of a to-do about it. If we had 747's crashing every month, and trains crashing every day, people would gasp and say how dangerous it all is. We don't do that with cars, do we? Even though the figures are much worse than all that. You are wrong - it is not argumentative to suggest that we have become inured by familiarity to cars’ negative aspects.

But that is all by-the-by. The point is that this is not a road safety site, but a car-ism site. Else you would be agreeing with my comparisons and wringing your hands to find ways to make cars as safe as (say) planes. This means you don't really care as much about safety as you say - you really want to drive fast. You are trying to find a way to hide behind safety because you can’t admit what is true – drivers speed because they are selfish.

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Basingwerk.

I'd like a reply too...or is my last post actually blowing your theory apart and putting road injuries & deaths into perspective? After all, driving statistically ('cos you love stats.) takes up far more of our life than flying does....it's all relative, so don't go comparing 747's dropping out of the sky to motor vehicle crashes - unless it's a car that can hold 300 passengers crashing every month...and NO other road deaths.

ps.



Planes are piloted by professional with much training and (annual?) testing, 'vehicle' inspections are carried out prior to EVERY flight. Cars are 'piloted' by both professionals & morons, many of whom never check the safety of their car. To make your comparison work, plane, train, whatever - you'd have to compare the operators & vehicle condition - put an unskilled pilot in a 747, crash. Put an unskilled driver in a train, crash. Cars are by themselves NOT dangerous - it's the lack of operator skill, attention & imperviousness to distraction that contributes significantly to 'accidents'.


So here it is again my last post! (sorry for sort of double posting, but I REALLY want a reply!)

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......and I don't see the government putting the same affort into this as 'speed kills' campaigns. Do you?

You proclaim how safe driving is, but you have chosen the wrong site, hobbes.

This is a Road Safety site, where people accept that road traffic accidents are too common, and want to prevent them. We'd all appreciate it if you could get with the programme!

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This is COMPLETE garbage. We live our lives within 'acceptable risk' parameters. If you want to find scandals that waste lives look at charity funded cancer research (should be government funded). Look at medical errors and accidents. Look at MRSA. Look at smoking. Look at world poverty. Look at starvation as a population regulator.

Transport has massive usefulness and is inherently dangerous. We accept the dangers because it is worth it. Road transport is everywhere and (in the UK) is remarkably safe. Far safer for example than pre-industrial transport (i.e. horses and carts.)

But that's no reason not to wish to find the best methods for improving it. And that's why we're here.

I'd really rather you didn't pollute worthwhile threads with wild and nonsensical red herrings. If you want to promote red herrings, then please start your own thread.

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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

But that's got nothing to do with what he said. Not only did you fail to answer his point, but you went off on a tangent.
In any case, why isn't there a hell-to-do about the 747's worth of people who die every week as a result of medical negligence and hospital lurgies? These deaths are almost entirely preventable.
And if you took as many plane journeys as you do car journeys, your chances of seeing old age would be pretty iffy.



I have lost my mother, cousin, two distant relatives and several friends to road accidents, so don't you dare question my motives.

Most of us are here because current misguided policy means road safety isn't improving - and it should be. People are dying out there and nothing is being done about it.

Don't bother replying if you're just going to twist things around or go off on another tangent.

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

Commercial air travel is only relatively safe because the average journey distance is much longer than cars. If the average plane flight was 10 miles, the casualty rate would be much higher. It should really be looked at in terms of risk per trip.

And if you looked at light aircraft, which are more comparable to cars than airliners, I would not be surprised if the per-mile casualty rate was higher too.


When are you going to stop lying?

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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

Make up your mind Basingwerk..... either it IS a ROAD SAFETY site OR as YOU said a few posts ago



And if you bothered to read my post, you'd clearly see I'm NOT saying how safe driving is, or how safe cars are, I'm saying that YOU the doom merchant with "Oh the terror, we're doomed I tell you! Doomed!" With a 1 in 3 chance of injury during a 50 year span are playing the goverments game of making stats LOOK bad. I was pointing out the odds are (to quote myself) "Not great" "But better than the GUARANTEED 25% of us that ARE dying / going to die of cancer for example"

ps. Don't bother replying as you obviously can't comprehend written text, or stick to your own convictions between two posts! You're just a waste of bandwidth.

My tupenceworth --

Oh we used to drive at a speed conducive to safety, possibly bending the letter of the law, but as cars have become better so have roads become straighter and faster.
Perhaps the maximum speed on the motorways in the 70s was lower because in those days fewer cars had the capacity for much above 85, but (perhaps its looking back) journey times seemed shorter due to an average higher speed.waves in L3 were not heard of.
In the 30/40 limits i remember that although the limit was not obeyed to the letter of the law, it was obeyed. Places where now we see mandatory limits of 40/50 were places where drivers used to reduce speed.

( And oh yes, the man with the red flag had graduated to sprinting)

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

I never speed. I always travel at a speed that I consider to be safe, taking all things into consideration: weather, road conditions, visibility, location, speed cams etc. I have a motorbike capable of 180mph and I have exercised the engine a few times to see what it can do. I have never killed or injured anyone. So perhaps speed doesn't kill after all.

The inapproriate use of speed does.

I will not abide by speed restrictions imposed by people I don't consider to know better than me what the road conditions are like when I'm travelling on them, be it by car or motorbike.

If these people were to enforce current Highway Code instructions, like use your indicator etc., then maybe I'd take them more seriously.

I also travel on the quick side, because local authorities seem to think it is a good idea to artificially congest the road system, by narrowing roads, putting humps in roads etc., which in turn means I need to travel faster when I can, to avoid being late etc.

Look at the use of statistics here. I've whittled down the first claim. In that, the implication was that the chance of an injury through driving was around 150 to 1.

Now we find it’s worse than 3 to one. That's a heck of a change, so SafeSpeed says “so what, other things are dangerous too, like chopping garlic”. Think about that – for one thing, it’s such an odd thing for a road safety campaigner to say? For another, is your average garlic chopping injury as bad as your average road traffic accident? Perhaps.

But more dirt lies under his numbers. The chance of a particular driver being involved in an injury causing accident may (as he says) be once in 150 years, but each accident of that type must cause at least 1 injury and could cause many more. I would not be surprised if this worsens it to (not much better than) even odds that a particular driver is injured during his driving lifetime. A flip of the coin. And that is only injuries that are reported, ignoring a good deal of ones that are not!

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Thanks for your input on the matter, Hobbes.

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Yes, there are a lot of people with this opinion. And everybody is entitled to express their opinion.

But there is a type of bloke who thinks he is right, regardless of anything else. If that type gets a ticket, he cannot accept that it is his fault – he must always find someone else to blame. It is always the fault of someone (or something) else. Quite a few of this type turn up here, blaming other things for their own problems that have arisen through speeding.

Unfortunately, there is absolutely no correlation between the blamers, and their actual driving skill. All we have is their self-opinion. I’m not saying that your self-opinion is not accurate (I don’t know you after all), but many people's are inaccurate.

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I try not to allow lateness to figure highly in my driving decisions, and I never use lateness (or impatience) as an excuse for significantly increasing risk levels.

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Cheers mate!

I suppose it's not your fault you're just very antagonistic, some may say "barely above troll level", with your pseudo mathematics. Or is it because you are you just passionate about the world we live in? Either way you can't go posting crap on the net and not expect it to bite you in the ass eventually! Stick to ranting on the other forums where the rest of your mates..oh wait, you don't have any http://slashdot.org/~basingwerk/friends. Cheap shot

Incidentally, do you really feel the way you so eloquently posted on that other site?



Surely you cannot be advocating criminal damage to get any of your points across?

What next, shooting motorists to prevent them having accidents?

The ONLY part of the figures you haven't entirely fuped - (only "mildly" exaggerated), to this, YOU DO RAISE A VALID POINT. (I never thought I'd say that!)



YES it IS true that the chance of a driver having SOME FORM of accident is statistically 1 in 3 by calculations (not the 1 in 2 coinflip as you say) during a 50 year driving career. AND YES this was simplified to cover incidents PER DRIVER, (whether or not the driver himself was injured), not stripped down to 'per occupant' or pedestrian injuries, (if these stats were given throughout it would actually make driver odds much BETTER than 3:1, as of the accident related injuries, only a proportion of these will be driver injuries.)

All of these rants have seriously gone off track of the original thread "WHY do drivers speed?" Let's do something constructive here. As much fun as it is to rip each other to pieces - it's accomplishing nothing towards the aim of better road safety policy.

There is – large sums of money and endless newspaper columns are devoted to those very issues. But this site is supposed to be about road safety.



You have my sincere condolences.



But it is not me who says that chopping vegetables is as risky as road traffic accidents. I am driving more carefully than ever. Paying excessive regard to dismantling speed traps is counter productive and panders to the blamers who are always right and never to blame for their own faults.

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Well we could quite simply change the title of this thread to why do you humans make good or bad decisions and the thread would still stand.

Safespeed is merely stating there is inherent danger in almost any walk of life we take. I get the impression you and Rigpig seem to believe that there is some sort of magic legislative or punishment out there just waiting to be reaped to end all road deaths. There is a limit on how much blanket enforcement we can place in road travel, plane travel etc because ultimately whenever objects move people are sometimes killed.

There are idiots in all walks of life, whether on the bus, in a train, in a shop or in a car. Your sitting here moaning about how much wrong there is in society, when in fact you are simply complaining about human nature in its purest form. Humans can be good or bad, evil or righteous, and they have the freedom to choose to do either. What are you trying to achieve, some sort of civilised utopia where EVERYBODY walks around greeting each other and waving to everybody out of their cars at a pleasant 5MPH? It's a fact of human nature, that people are distracted, have a lack of concentration, that people simply walk out into danger without looking first etc. Bad things will always happen which manifests in ways which will make victims of innocent people?

Do you actually believe that there is a solution to all 'accidents or deaths in general'? Who do you think you are? God? well good luck, you're going to need it.



Dont speed cameras also pander to the blamers. The parents who send their children off into the street without a care in the world yet demand a speed camera if their child is knocked down? Or the careless adult whom blindly walked into the street?

Thanks for your endorsement, but I already know.

BTW: I haven’t been horrid to you yet, despite your provocative style! Good luck to you Hobbes – at least you realise that the odds of crashing are much higher than SS would have us believe.

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