Safe Speed Forums

In all seriousness, if any of that was true, surely you would have 'caught us out' by now? (Except for Top Gear - I confess!)

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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, seriously, I appear to have two choices here. I could come round to the idea that maybe you are what you say you are. Or I could choose to disbelieve you.

But there is another possibility. As well as being what you say you are, you could be something else as well. You could be a person who loves the Joie de Vivre, verve and panache (call it what you will) of driving well in an exhilarated way on the wide open road in a fine car (and who could blame you) without worrying about annoying distractions such as the speed limit. And as well, you could be a person with a social conscious who wants to promote safety in the community.

Now, as things stood (e.g. Speed kills etc), that was a problem. It could explain why you have made such efforts to 'square the circle' (so to speak). If you can show that speed is OK, you can validate your own behavior in your own mind. Unfortunately, to do that, you have to ignore certain political aspects to the matter, and rely on an argument consisting, largely, of “if I can drive safely without a speedo, so can anybody else”. Unfortunately, it doesn't matter whether people can drive safely without speedos in theory – it is a question of would people drive safely without speedos. My experience of village life is that speed merchants would not, so I want limits, I'm afraid.

So it goes...

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Oh, get a sense of humour, Observer. At least SafeSpeed only watches Top Gear. Here's a joke for you -

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You've got your carts and horses muddled up a bit. The truth is a little simpler.

Yes. I'm an enthusiast. Yes, I have a social conscience. And yes I wanted to square the circle on a personal basis but that was over 20 years ago. So I went on a driver training course - and I found some answers. I liked the course so much I went on another, and another - about 20 in all.

It worked. I learned the mental skills required to stay out of trouble, motivated by personal interest and social conscience. I gained a broad general understanding of road safety at the ground level - at the individual driver level. And those skills are extensible - if we give a small percentage of them to all drivers - then the crash risk will reduce. We've now reached about 1989 and they are talking about speed cameras for the first time. I know they won't improve road safety because they don't fit with the optimal skill set that I've learned to understand. Just an pointless annoyance. I thought.

Jump on ~12 years to 2001 and I hear about a case where a lady accountant stands to lose licence, job and home. I think that's very rough justice and I set up Safe Speed.

I fit my knowledge of skilled and safe driving into the pattern of changes that speed cameras have fostered. And I realise that speed cameras aren't just an annoyance. They are a disaster because they make drivers worse. And we've got the awful results to provide confirmation.



Absolutely not. It's about comparing the change in average skill set with the ideal skill set. And speed cameras are moving us further from the ideal - not closer to it.



Limits are fine, but obsession with them is deadly.

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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

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (which I read I read 20 odd years ago while living in an isolated village in the Golan Heights!) describes how the Greek philosophers "saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes." Do you think about time in a different way to that? Do you think, as most people do, that the past is behind you and you are looking into the future?

Perhaps the Greeks were closer – we don’t know what is coming up around the next bend, and even 1000 driver-training courses would not tell you, never mind 20.

I’m not knocking driver training – most of the time the future will play out something like the past did. But we need speed limits (and enforced ones, to some extent) for those risks that drivers don’t foresee, because they haven’t the imagination to foresee them.

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Now , is it just me , or do i sense a parallel between cameras and road safety ??

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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

Who cares what's round the bend when you can stop within the distance that you know to be clear?



It's possible for any driver to get into a crash that could not be foreseen.

But a majority of crashes in the real world are the result of very simple driver failures, not looking, not paying attention, stuff like that. Most crashes are highly foreseeable. We (nationally) don't need to seek perfection - we need to seek regular and reliable improvement.

So no crystal ball is required - although you might think that some good drivers must have one - it's just good practice.

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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

[quote="SafeSpeed]
So no crystal ball is required - although you might think that some good drivers must have one - it's just good practice.[/quote]

Paul - the bit about Golan Heights - now i smell an animal with a curly tail
Crystal ball - not really - perhaps "reading the road " is more appropriate - experience also a bit usefull , as is the phrases my mentor , my uncle taught me "not sure , slow down and find out" and "if in doubt ,slow down" - he drove tanKs in WW2 , in most of the major battles in africa - so there must besome sense in his reasoning - he died n later life on his settee

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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

Would courses always allow you to prevent things developing in an unfortunate way once you've had chance to see them? We know the answer to that.



Fine, but are you attacking people's natural habits? Those are hard to change. People spill drinks, break plates and slice their fingers off because of not looking, not paying attention, or rushing – it’s the way of the world. If only you could see!

A majority of people fall down the stairs because of not looking, not paying attention, or rushing, but we still put up rails and banisters.



Yes, and much more foreseeable and avoidable when you are not rushing. There is a HUGE gap between “foreseeable” and “foreseen”.



Yes - in all dangerous activities such as driving or walking down the stars! But we need banisters and speed limits too, until everyone is skilled in the way you are (or until hell freezes over, which is more likely in my opinion).

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That is another piece of Ad Hominem. Watch it, botach, or I'll tweak you and you'll be resorting to your caps lock again in the near future.

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Sure, but irrelevant. See below.



Rails? You're off them! Clearly properly engineered staircases are analogous to properly engineered roads and you get no argument from me over that.



[my emboldening] Exactly. A gap which any decent road safety policy would seek to shrink. A gap which present policy is extending markedly. And probably the biggest single reason I'm here. We're dumbing down and it's deadly.



There's nothing wrong with properly set and intelligently enforced speed limits.

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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

According to the rules, you’ll have to suspend yourself now for that, so give me the root password and I’ll take over. All existing members (r11co included) are welcome to stay - make your cheques out to basingwerk.





I know that already, but that is the deadly effect of “taking things for granted”. Human beings (God/god bless them) have an almost infinite capacity for that, because they have survived OK so far. It’s that Zen thing again.

But what do you propose to do to halt this decline? Perhaps we could send out a few SafeSpeed flyers and hire “celebrities” to ask people to drive safely? Fat lot of good that would do.

Or do you propose to ask drivers to pay for their own enlightenment? Shriek! There’s the rub, isn’t it – how can you load the cost of decline (or dumbing down) in motoring standards, which you acknowledge, onto the motorists themselves? Did you think that making speed limits even less binding is somehow cost free?

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I'll ignore the silly quip about suspension.



Safe Speed campaigns for changes in policy. Ultimately policy must halt the decline.

I actually see the decline as far from 'natural'. I think it's almost entirely the result of bad policy.

As far as costs are concerned, in the first place policy must spend its cash wisely - on accurate information for example - and NEVER on misleading spin. And in the second place policy must encourage drivers to 'invest in themselves' and reward those that do so.

[edited to fix quotes]

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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

Yeah OK, but if you got something stuck in your craw, best spit it out.



Yes, but let’s drop the spin for a minute. The bottom line is that “rewarding drivers to invest in themselves” is the flip side of “punishing drivers who don’t invest in themselves”. That is straight - by doing what you say, we raise the costs of those who don’t try, by making it relatively dearer for them, don’t we?

I can live with that – after all, the idea behind enforcement is to raise the costs of those who don’t obey the laws, thereby lowering the relative costs of those who do. What do you have in mind as incentives for desirable behaviour and their flip side, disincentives for undesirable behaviour? Spell it out for me, please.

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But are you not making the (large and possibly unjustified) assumption that simplistically "obeying the laws" contributes to road safety?

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"Politicians are the same the world over... We build bridges where there aren't any rivers." - Nikita Kruschev

Flip side? In some ways you might say it is. But present policy is all stick and no carrot. I say the carrot is the more important part, but not only that - we're hitting the wrong folk with the sticks.

Clearly we need far better balances...



Undesirable behaviour is risky behaviour not illegal behaviour. We need a scheme to detect and punish risky behaviour. And that's effective roads policing.

As for the incentives, development is required. We first need policy to recognise the benefits and start moving in that direction. A personal favourite is a graded driving licence. We could hang a great deal of incentive off that.

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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, apart from the “large and possibly unjustified” and “simplistically” bits (which are your opinion), I’d say that the roads laws contributes to safety, and that lawbreakers don’t.

You might say that in certain circumstances or at such and such a time, or when so and so is doing it etc. that disobeying the law is OK. And maybe you’d have a point. I’m sure it’s been discussed since law started in the first place. But I think we all know that we should obey the law in general, although some may wish to be more pedantic about it than that. In any case, I’m certainly asking people to please try to get with the programme if they don’t mind too much.

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Well, you can’t have risky behaviour that is not illegal. All risky behaviour is against the law, including speeding. And all speeding is illegal. So all that’s left is your “safe speed” notion, which you say works for an individual driver. But speed limit elimination would send the wrong message to everybody and would have a negative overall effect on standards of driving behaviour.

And if you don’t enforce the limit, you do eliminate it.

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Nonsense, there is loads of risky behaviour (both on and off the roads) against which there is no specific legal prohibition. It might well be judged illegal if death or injury results, but if not, there is no law against it and it is never prosecuted.

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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 see Peter has answered you already, but your point is utter tosh. Loads of illegal behaviours are safe including a great deal of 'speeding' and loads of legal behaviours are unsafe - including the causes of most real world crashes (carelessness / inattention). Now you could argue that carelessness and inattention are illegal but by the standards you expressed: And if you don’t enforce the limit, you do eliminate it. they might as well not be.

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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