Safe Speed Forums

Absolutely beggars belief!

Did you see what BRAKE said - "No emergency vehicle should break a speed limit....."
So, when we have a tower block on fire with 'persons reported, the fire engines must comply with the 30 mph and 20 mph limits it encounters en-route.
Just wait until someone from BRAKE has a heart attack. Will they tell the ambulance not to exceed any speed limits on the way to hospital?
This, surely, has to be the comment which will prove to everyone how stupid they really are and how meaningless their comments are in the real world.

Can you imagine a fire engine doing 20 MPH . I hope the Brake's spokesman ever needs their service.

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Useless laws weaken necessary laws.

Now to be strictly accurate brake should tell us

How many incidents were attended, where the attendees exceeded the speed limit
How many lives were saved.
In the case of ambulances - an EXPERT--( think they're , or used to be called doctors) define the difference this made in terms of time
In the case of Fire - medical expertise ( as above) define the difference, and Fire experts define the change in risk and the lesser problems encountered.

Till then , i would respectfuly suggest that Brake spokes person is talking out of the wrong oriface

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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 had always thought that Brake were a little misguided in places, but those sorts of quotes lead me to believe that they are just mad.

I believe Brake is primarily to support relatives of those killed and injured in road accidents - surely they can see that if ambulances had to stick to the speed limits then it would delay time-critical medical care? Ditto for fire engines - for many years now the paramedics hardly ever just yank people from cars even if it is physically possible.

Gareth

Email just sent to BRAKE regarding this misguided comment.

I think you may be confusing Brake with Roadpeace.

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

So next time on some tv production we might see "no emergency vehicles sped in the making of this production"

_________________
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

Its a perfect example of ignorant people who should know when to shut the hell up.

Brake's usual mantra is that speeding is against the law therefor everyone should comply.

Well guess what, asshats - emergency vehicles have specific legal exemption. What's more, there are damn good reasons for those exemptions. For every incident of 'speeding' emergency vehicles that doesn't result in a crash (ie. by far the overwhelming majority) we should chalk that up as a tragedy prevented thanks to quick response - 'our' successes in relieving/avoiding severe injury to health or preventing death will swiftly cancel out and then swamp the perceived benefit of their proposed changes. How blinkered and utterly, stupidly ignorant can some people be???

Brake have as much right to say this sort of guff as I have to tell them they are brainless morons from another planet. Doesn't make either of us right, but I'll let the readers decide which is closer to the truth.....

A quote from the Times article where PistonHeads posters were accused of "death threats" agains her, and the police were supposedly involved (which, after PH did a lot of phoning around, confirmed they weren't, and wouldn't because they weren't death threats at all)


edit: Just found an Ofcom adjudication here about a BBC news report, what a load of claptrap from the BBC and Brake - if they wanted to follow up who made the comments it would have been perfectly easy, and what's the rubbish about a "formal warning" against a website owner? I don't believe such a warning exists in any UK legal framework.

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/obb/prog_cb/ ... cation.pdf

And "Gassing Station" is the name of the forum (as in gassing = chatting), not a comment on how best to kill somebody, sheesh!

G

I’m so glad that trumped-up complaint was burnt down on such an issue for witch there was so much at stake; it cut down the reputation of Brake, they really should cable their energies elsewhere!

Did anyone else email BRAKE about this nonsense?
They have sent a reply saying that they have a lot of emails to answer and will reply to mine as soon as possible.

You will almost certainly not get a reply.

Ill mannered as well as misguided, then.

If brake's proposal became law,and emergency vehicles had to adhere to speed limits, this would lead to many painful, needless, preventable and pointless deaths.

This demonstrates how flawed their road safety stance is.

Wasn't there a quote from the head of the London Ambulance Service some time ago saying that for every "X" minutes delay in heart attack call-outs there was a "Y" percent increase in the chane of death? Can't remember the actual numbers but it sounded like a good factual argument.

To some extent Brake has a point. Ambulances and fire engines are big vehicles and the damage they could do in an accident is pretty severe. Having said that you could also reason there might not be an accident if they speed and they might end up saving more lives than they lose by speeding. Who knows? I reckon Brake are slightly biased and probably aren't the best people to look into this but at the same time most of the people on this forum start from the perspective that anti-speeding is misguided and dont see speeding as dangerous as it really is so they certainly aren't the best people to comment.

If you did get someone independent to study this and they found that either the Brake conclusion or this forum's conclusion was correct the other side wouldn't accept it anyway.

It might have then but it certainly doesn't now you have ruined it!

I don't think you have yet grasped the concept of what speeding actually is. I think it is very wrong of you, and absolutely incorrect of you to say people who use this forum, collectively have the opinion speeding is safe.

The type of speeding that is most dangerous is that of inappropriate speed for the conditions, this can occur both above and below the speed limit. Exceeding a poorly set speed limit, by an experienced professional driver, when its safe to do so, is not in itself hazardous.

Rigid enforcement of a speed limit set by a local council, with no know how or experience or expertise in setting speed limits is unlikely to improve road safety.

The suggestion that we should allow patients to bleed to death in the back of ambulances, while the paramedics dodder to the hospital at 30mph, is a suggestion I cannot accept.