Safe Speed Forums

I sometimes wonder if it's the case that some people regard driving inattentively as 'normal', if they give it much thought at all. To such people, the sort of arguments we present on this site may well appear to be nonsense, because the concepts we espouse are completely alien to them.

I won't mention any names

How often do you see a driver on television talking to their passenger, but looking at them at the same time and not watching the road for several seconds. I've even seen police drivers do this in police programs.
How often do you see drivers doing the self-same thing in real-life on the roads. I see it several times every single day.
If a pedestrian should step into the road, they're history. If a lorry pulls out of a side street, the driver and his passenger are history.
It only takes a second or two, and it's over - as anyone who's had an accident will know only too well.
But still you hear cries of, 'he suddenly appeared out of nowhere'.

There's none so blind as those who will not see.

Regards
Peter

Wow! That's fascinating. I'd never made that exact connection and it would explain a lot. I bet you're right. How can we test the hypothesis on a population of typical drivers?

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Paul Smith
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Ohhh...Paul you beat me to it
I think Pete has hit a rather large nail smack on its ugly head. I once read somewhere (newspaper editorial I think it was), that to expect 'normal' drivers to pay complete attention all the time was unrealistic. A somewhat defeatist attitude I thought at the time.

I'm not sure we're hitting the same nail.

My nail is the one that explains why some folk don't understand a few basics - their personal terms of reference are incomplete.

Your nail seems to be "something else" to do with driver quality. But I think I recognise it. I agree drivers are imperfect and inattentive. Clearly there's ample room for improvement. That's good.

It's also good that we already have the safest roads in the World. So how is it that drivers are crap yet the roads are safe? I think that's because when the average driver makes a mistake there's usually another driver paying enough attention to avoid the consequences of it. In this way we really only have crashes when one driver makes a mistake (fairly unusual) and another fails to avoid it (also unusual). It's the rarity of the error co-incidence that gives us our safety record.

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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

Excellent post, Peter, and like Paul & Rigpig I think that this is a very interesting area to pursue. It reminded me of the expression "APPROPRIATE AWARENESS" that I was talking about in another thread (http://www.safespeed.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=3630&highlight=#3630).

I suppose this could define one set of bad drivers as those who do not always practice "appropriate awareness" while driving.

Exactly - and this is what COAST is all about.

It is why each member of this family who post to these sites and others will refer to it in hope of getting message across to both sides of the argument.

It is why the Lancashire Speed Awareness Course teach this to those invited (and yest I agree they are not inviting the right people as they tend to invite the "blips" and Driver Improverment Schemes teach this.

It also forms part of the "lecture" we give out on the spot.


But - people are people - and I understand the Mad Cats got into a very heated argument elsewhere on topic of the mobile phone.

It will take a long time to get this message into psyche of the human race that driving is akin to operating a complicated piece of machinery and requires maximum skill and concentration at all times.

And we will never get this message across properly if the powers that be keep focussing on the one aspect of speed alone. It is one factor which affect outcome - but not the root cause - and the root cause is addressed by spreading meassage of COAST and what it actually stands for.

But of course we look forward to arguing the toss with you again.

As Kirk is a TV character, so you are right on that! I have no problem with "sense" or "reason", I quite like the idea of attentively scanning the road ahead for problems and setting your speed such that you can stop before you reach them. Nobody could quibble with a sensible and reasonable approach like that. The rule is concisely and grammatically well formed to convey this notion well. But there is a slight problem with the 'probability' term that you have introduced - it runs from 0 through 1 and your rule doesn't mention when it becomes an issue. In fact, I'd say that is a problem with your rule as it stands. It doesn’t account for the small probabilities that something goes wrong. When these small probabilities are repeated over millions of driver miles, many accidents do happen. The small probabilities exist because a) you haven’t applied the rule properly or b) some else crosses your path or c) something goes wrong with you or d) something goes wrong with your car or e) something 'unforeseeable' happens etc. It also doesn’t account for the other road users who cross your path when something goes wrong, either because a) they haven’t applied the rule properly or b) something goes wrong with them or c) something goes wrong with their car or e) something 'unforeseeable' happens to them. We are only human. When something like that happens, we need the safety net of the speed limit to take the edge off things.



You are one of many lucky or good drivers who have survived. I am sure that you have offset your experiences against multiple repetitions of the same risk by many drivers over many years. These risks add up to hundreds of thousands of crashes. Each one could have been avoided via management, luck and error margin, but wasn't. Absolute top speed limits give error margin to the overall system, and they should be preserved and enforced, although a good process is required for setting them appropriately.

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I was being too critical. The rule is OK, even good, although I thought it was common sense (hence my comment that it is meaningless). Perhaps it does need spelling out, especially nowadays.

But we still need speed limits, to properly set expectations and to provide a safetly limit when things go wrong.

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The Safe Speed rule is more or less perfect, and if everyone observed it constantly there would be few accidents. But we're talking about the real world. Things will go wrong. People will fail to observe the rule. People will fail to understand a threat to their "safe braking zone". People will even die at the wheel and crash.

The objective here isn't to find the golden answer to road accidents. Instead, the objective is to set policy components that will lead to incremental improvements in road safety.

Incremental improvements require optimum road safety priorities, and the safe speed rule is hundreds of times more important to road safety than speed limits.

It's a question of priorities.

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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

It's a question of priorities and costs.

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The 'thumb in bum' brigade deserve a ticket to shock them out of their stupor. A good case for cameras, if I ever heard one.

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Granted, but we could also add in: Politics. Beliefs. Results. Sociology. Psychology. And so on pretty endlessly.

And anyway, my approach - "feeding the safety culture" - is cheap as chips.

And anyway, speed cameras are massively expensive. And don't give me that guff about the "offender pays". The total cost is taken out of society. People who pay 60 pound fines don't spend their 60 pounds in the High Street do they? We're looking at at least 120 million pounds sunk (i.e. actually spent) on cameras this year.

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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

Cost is special because it makes you prioritise. Those other things you list, politics, beliefs, etc. relate to why certain priorities are set.



But surely the people who receive the 60 pound fines don’t burn the cash on a bonfire? Every 60 pound fine received means work for those who service the camera industry, which eventually spreads back to the high street. Or else, it goes to the treasury, which distributes the funds on roads, hospitals, schools, third world aid and so on. Why are you such a bleeding heart for these speeders?

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Well in effect yes they do, in that this collected resource is sunk into something that yields no tangible benefit.

To illustrate the point, what if we collected the equivalent of all the £60 fines but spent the resulting (say £160M) on something else that would deliver a tangible benefit, such as improving driver education.

The money IS wasted. It takes money to physically install a camera - that money is spent and can't now be spent on something else. We pay for the time of the staff that service them and send the tickets out, when we could alternatively pay people to do something useful. Whilst I agree that some proportion of money spent on anything must inevitably find find its way back into the economy, nevertheless most doesn't. Anything spent on something tangible (such as a yellow box by the side of the road) has effectively been spent once and for all.

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Punishing law breakers is a fine benefit.

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Not when it is done at the expense of NOT punishing dangerous drivers, which is what is happening now.

Or are you meaning it is of benefit from the point of view of reducing the number of motorists on the road? In this case it would be more or less as fair to get the DVLA computer to select driver numbers at random for a 12 month ban, a bit like ERNIE! This would have the same result as we are seeing now, but without the multi-million pound parasitic cost of running the camera partnerships!

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I fully accept that we could go on from here to create a new branch of philosophy. I don't really want to go there - life is too short.

The important economic point is that as a society we're spending an awful lot of money on speed cameras and they aren't making the roads safer.

How can something that isn't effective be cost effective? Answer: It can't.

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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

Something I've been thinking for a while now is, how much would road safety have improved, if we'd had an "Inattentiveness Kills!" campaign over the last ten years, instead of the one dimensional "Speed Kills!" mantra that we actually got?

Kaz

I wouldn't want that because it could select me! As things stand, if I stay under the limit, I won't get a ban.

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