Safe Speed Forums

I don't usually overstate anything, but in this case I should have written "It does help to explain ...".

The point is, I think, that the like for like safety margin provided by the safe speed rule - "always be able to stop comfortably...." is more forgiving of momentary inattention or indecision at higher speeds than it is at lower speeds. That may be no more than an alternative way of acknowledging that the hazard density will be axiomatically lower where higher speeds are appropriate than where lower speeds are appropriate, but it also illuminates the fact, which Paul has stated many times, that drivers create time to react, it is not "given" to them (or denied) as a function of speed selection.

And a part of the brain's speeding-up process is by a process of
simplification. You re-define your brain's priorities and opt voluntarily for
a form of temporary tunnel-vision. You are concentrating your
attention, and in particular your short-term visual memory, onto reading
that road in front of you. You rigorously restrict your mental processes
and observation to 'Reading The Road': vehicles, road-signs etc. You
ignore all irrelevancies such as pretty girls or roadside advertising.

It's sounds very well in theory. And I certainly don't have any quarrel
with a properly trained police driver whizzing down the motorway in his
patrol car while responding to an emergency or during
refresher-training.

But no-one ever went wrong by under-estimating the driving ability of the
general public.

As Pete 317 so rightly says, ''the faster you travel the further ahead you
look' and for a lot of drivers that can be Tunnel Vision. The man who
doesn't notice the pretty girls may not be seeing the cyclists or the
pedestrians either.

I'm sorry if I sound bitter tonight but I came close to being 'taken-out'
while crossing the road this afternoon, and my experience may be
relevant to this discussion.

I was walking along one of my regular routes and I was crossing a road
at a particular point where a traffic island makes it a safe and easy
spot to do so. As is often the case I had to wait a few minutes at the
kerbside for a suitable gap in the traffic and then, when the opportunity
came, and I could see that it was safe, I stepped out into the road.

Wow !, I had to jump straight back. A car, with a veiled Muslim woman
driving, whipped round the corner 'like-a-bat-out-of-Hell'.

Her face wasn't fully covered but she her head was closely wrapped-up
in a wimple, with a large wide black sheet worn over the top of it. The
style was very like that of the nuns of sixty years ago.

She could have had no side-vision, and I would say that, as with those
old-fashioned nuns, the purpose of her head-covering was to
promote 'custody-of-the-eyes'; the idea being that it is immodest for a
woman to cast her eyes about and that tunnel-vision is virtuous.

I can assure you that their restricted vision certainly makes them faster
drivers. I saw that well enough this afternoon, and I have seen it often
enough around here.

Veiled women are a category of driver who can easily be identified as
concentrating their vision on the road that is in front of them and,
probably because of that, they certainly drive a lot faster than other
people.

But what I've seen of them doesn't make good evidence to support the
'Drive Faster, Drive Safer' theory. In fact I don't understand how they
manage to pass their Driving Tests.

Evidenced by the number of times you see rear-enders parked up on the hard shoulder, or witness sharpish to heavy braking in traffic when the brake lights begin to appear ahead.

Yes, but compare the numbers of those with the number of successful journeys, and we can see what the vast majority achieve. Road safety should build on the bits that work as well as deal with the bits that don't. This thread is mainly about the bits that work.

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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

no, yet again you're deliberately ignoring the fact that most of the time you can drive drunk, talking on your mobile, 2 inches from the car in front and absolutely nothing will happen. Your journey will be completed successfully.
It's when the 'unusual' happens that the person above (or a variation on the theme) won't cope whereas someone in full control probably will. Fortunately 'unusual' is just that, otherwise there would be total carnage on our roads. The reason people tailgate, talk on the phone or whatever is because nothing bad has happened to them while they're doing therefore they consider it to be perfectly safe.
The same reason I worry when people on here start with the "I've done ten billion miles sonny and never crashed so my driving must be perfect and I've got nothing to learn" (see recent IAM thread)

I AM deliberately ignoring those things. But that's because those sorts of risky driving are an ENTIRELY different subject.

In fact, if you think about it, the presence of those sorts of risks in our overall road safety system makes normal driving even more successful.

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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 those sorts of risks are the norm for the majority of people on the road, so what does that mean exactly?

In the broadest sense, that means we have good error tolerance in the road safety system - although I'm not sure if that's the direction you were thinking in.

And having thought some more about our recent exchanges in this thread, I realise that I haven't really explained why I believe it's so important to look at road safety as a series of 'system components' working together - without understanding the components we don't have much hope of understanding and improving the system. And of course the government has done little or nothing to understand the driver as a system component, let alone the driver as a sub-system made of many components.

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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

This is going off the topic of this thread, but the other day I was driving in Glasgow and behind me I noticed the driver was wearing a burka - i.e. the whole face was covered apart from the eyes, and even they are barely discernible. I was actually going to bring that up here as a potential safety hazard. Surely she would have had absolutely no peripheral vision to spot potential hazards and know what's going on (and, indeed , little vision of what's in front of her) - and surely even looking in mirrors/at speedo etc would become more difficult?

If this is indeed a safety hazard, personally I wouldn't allow driving while wearing these things. It's not PC, but I don't care. Safety is more important.

good tolerance or not a lot of errors? I guess that depends how you define an error.

Johnsher clearly has a gut feeling that there is something wrong with the idea being proposed within this thread, and I have to admit I share his reservations.
It is quite obvious (to me) that huge numbers of drivers do not leave themselves sufficient time in which to react should something occur up ahead at any speed! The fact that the roads aren't littered with (for example) rear-ended vehicles is perhaps more the result of serendipity; it is far more common for nothing untoward to happen than it is for something to go wrong and poor driving is therefore accomodated. In this case the system works, dare I say, in spite of not because of the behaviour of drivers

If you rely on your peripheral vision to detect hazards, you're doing it all wrong. By the time a hazard shows up in your peripheral vision, it's normally far too late to do anything about it, except perhaps to attempt to swerve out of the way.

In the case of the woman you mentioned, what she did wrong was not to ensure that the roadspace she was about to enter (after coming around the corner) was clear before proceeding at speed. This is a separate issue.

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

But that's the whole point. If they don't have sufficient time to react then it's down to a failure of attention and hazard awareness - and the speed they're doing is incidental to the equation.
A higher speed is more forgiving of errors of judgement, but only if you're using your judgement in the first place - no speed is safe for someone who's not watching the road.

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

or perhaps it should be phrased: "in order to drive at a higher speed you need to leave more room for error". That makes far more sense.

No, I stand by exactly what I said. It does make sense if you apply a bit of lateral thinking.

Edited to add: Have a look at my example at the bottom of the previous page of this thread.

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

but what you said is effectively "by leaving more room for error you have more room for error".

How about "in locations where it is safe to travel faster, you inherently gain an increased margin for error"?

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

but again it's safe to travel faster BECAUSE you can leave more room for error, not the other way around.

Oh, I see where you're coming from now.
The bit about using your judgement was actually clarified by the next bit: "no speed is safe for someone who's not watching the road.", and was meant in that context. If you're not watching the road then you cannot be using your judgement, because you have nothing to judge.
But I still stand by my original statement, although I'll rephrase it slightly: "Higher speeds are more forgiving of errors of judgement because, at higher speeds, you're looking further ahead".
See my example at the bottom of the previous page of this thread.

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

Of course in Muslim fundamentalist countries they have solved this problem. They don't allow women to drive!