Safe Speed Forums

But if we all drove around obeying the law precisely we'd have ZILLIONS more crashes and a totally different (and far worse) problem to solve. I'm absolutely certain about this.

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

And, because it is true that speeding does make accidents more likely and speeding does make accidents more severe, and because we have had very few suggestions about accidents where speed does not have any influence on the outcome, whenever anyone says "speeding does not cause accidents" I think we can pretty safely say: Yes it does!

_________________
I stole this .sig

basingwerk wrote
What evidence do you use to support this claim basingwerk?
basingwerk wrote
I think you mean something like " higher speeds might make the consequences of any accident more severe"

basingwerk wrote

Really basingwerk ..this is just nonsense and does not follow at all. I would have expected a little more joined up logic from a software engineer


[/quote]

From the guru himself:




That works for me.



Sorry I woke you!

_________________
I stole this .sig

When I renewed my insurance in August I asked about that, and was told that more insurers do overlook speeding than don't. Of course, that's just the word of one employee of a single insurance company who sits at a phone entering details into a computer for the premium, so not exactly concrete I admit. She also told me that compaines vary as to how much they overlook speeding offences. Some apparently will start to load the premium at 6 points and others at 9. Even that's not cut and dried - if a driver has only 3 points an insurer might load the premium if the speed was fast enough to land the driver in court. It seems that the first thing the insurance companies want to know now is the offence code(s), followed by the fine and points. That makes a lot of sense to me as that way they can get a clearer picture of the sort of driver they going to insure. For example, they might load a few quid on someone with 6 points from a pair of 5mph over the limit offences but refuse to insure at all a driver who has 6 points from a pair of defective vehicle type offences. The number of points on a driver's license is almost useless as a guide to the risk that driver presents unless we know exactly what those points are for. Even zero points doesn't tell you anything apart from "probably hasn't been caught speeding yet".

_________________
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

No one posting on this thread has seen the first Speed movie it seems. All you need is a reverse situation: Someone installs a bomb in your car that will go off above 30mph. Here breaking the speed limit certainly causes an accident.

Not if you get to a motorway first...

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Imagine there were no speed limits. Obviously there would still be crashes due to inappropriate speed, but none could be due to "speeding". Now imagine a blanket 1mph limit. Would all speed related crashes be due to speeding, since it's pretty much a given that most if not all would occur at illegal speeds? Again, pretty obviously not.

Now imagine a more realistic scenario. Pick any road, say for the sake of argument an NSL dual carriageway. In bad weather someone aquaplanes at 60mph, loses control of the car and ends up in the scenery. Now imgine that the limit is dropped to 50mph, after which there is another 60mph aquaplaning crash in the same location in equally bad weather. The first crash could not have been due to speeding, since no speeding offence occurred. Was the second crash due to speeding? Of course not, it was caused in exactly the same way as the first one.

It doesn't have to be NSL, or a dual carriageway, or aquaplaning, or even a higher limit that is reduced. We could just as easily imagine this happening the other way round - the first 60mph crash happens under a 50mph limit, which is then raised to NSL (okay, we're getting unrealistic again here ) and is followed by an identical crash which is now within the speed limit. The result is the same either way. The accidents are caused by the driver using speed unwisely. The speed limits themselves define only the maximum legal speed, which is about all that can have an absolute definition. Sensible speed limits may act as a rough guide to what speed is usually safe, but that's it.

Given all that how can we possibly say that speeding causes accidents? It's like saying that not paying for a dog license (in the days that dog licenses were still around) caused dog attacks. Dogs bit people licensed or not, and now we don't have licenses dogs still bite people. (BTW that's not an argument for disposing of limits, and personally for various reaons I'd be happy to see dog licenses back.) The closest we can get to identifying speeding as a cause of an accident is the idea that it may change someone else's course of action, and that's pretty tenuous. My example was at least as much down to a second driver failing to judge the speed of the first. Your example is that speeding drivers indirectly encourage other drivers to speed as well. If so, then it follows that we must get rid of all unrealistically low limits as soon as possible. After all, a majority of drivers seem to be prepared to break unrealitically low limits, and if you're right that is encouraging others to treat limts with disdain.

_________________
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

it's easy if you try
no cameras there to ping us
above us only sky

John Lennon thought of all this a long, long time ago. Your mother would know, oh oh, your mother would know. Sing it again. All of this is the old 'legal risk' versus 'actual risk' stuff. And guess what? As you might think, the legal risk assessment can change. Whenever a limit is altered for safety reasons, that is what is happening.

In the legal assessment of the risk, it is done mechanically because a) there is no other way that is indisputable and b) it is cheap, so my taxes stay down. Now, of course I realise that a full investigation by a judge and jury and a team of forensic scientists might get a better fix on the real risk caused by certain activity, but that would be very dear. Sensible speed limits may act as a rough guide to what speed is usually safe, but they also act as an absolute limit above which the system wil judge you to have been at too high a legal risk. That is different fromt the actual risk. Such is life, the system seems to work OK.



I'm not going down analogy avenue with you today, but I agree about the dog poo thing. It is almost as anti-social as speeding, although no one has been killed by stepping in dog poo, as far as I know. We can say that speeding causes accidents because it does sometimes. Even the most ardent SafeSpeeder surely knows that?



Nice one, and now I have to catch happy hour and do some binge drinking while it's there. Don't worry, I'll stay well below the limit, both for drink and speed. I'll give you a URL that shows some people who are politically opposed to your plans, so you'll have to duke it out with them (politically, of course). In my village, I would like it even lower because my kids have to walk along a busy road to school. A camera would be nice too. I saw a bloke driving through last week at around 75 in the 30 zone, even though it was still only Coronation Street time. It's just not on, you know, Gatsobait.

http://www.transport2000.org.uk/communityaction/Village30mphBriefing.htm

_________________
I stole this .sig

Classic! There's no speed limit there. The signing is illegal in the photo.



See this page:

http://www.safespeed.org.uk/badsigns.html

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Perhaps you think this is funny too:

A21 Keys Green, Matfield
• 4 people killed or seriously injured between 1998 and 2000

_________________
I stole this .sig

Give me a break! You must know I'm interested in making the road safer...

I laugh at the IDIOTS who get everything wrong. And let's be perfectly clear - I'm laughing at a website.

Road safety isn't funny. 7,200 unexplained deaths to date since speed cameras became central to UK road safety.

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Nice one mate. A couple more verses and we could be Xmas number one with that.

Er... you talking about automated enforcement again? That wasn't what I was on about. Methods of detection don't enter into it, as just for a change I'm not actually having a go about the cameras. It doesn't matter whether the speed offence is detected by a Gatso or plod. The point is that the offence of speeding cannot lead to a crash. A speed which is dangerous might and sometimes that will also be an illegal speed, but that's not the same thing.

Still not exactly where I was going. On the face of it the system seems to sacrifice justice for expediency, but in pratcice I can't see how the resources could ever be put in place to judge everything on it's merits in a court. A practical alternative is to let the plod do it by discretionary enforcement (plod are still cheaper than lawyers, but then what isn't? ). You know my argument for that, so I won't go over old ground. Besides, it just takes us further away from whether it is possible for to cause an accident by speeding alone.

Try jogging along Beachy Head half an hour after a dog with dysentery has been there. Seriously, I was only thinking about dog bites, which happen anyway licensing or no licensing. As for the health implications of, er, doggy excess products, isn't there some parasite in dog turds that can cause blindness in children? Cat turds too IIRC. I seem to remember advice about not letting pregnant women change the kitty litter. I expect Mad Moggie will correct me if I've got that wrong. Anyhow, back on topic!

Sorta kinda. A crash caused by driving at a dangerously high speed may qualify for a speeding fine on top of anything else, but it is not the speeding itself that causes the crash. I think you've identified that yourself already by separating the concepts of legal risk and physical risk. It's associative rather than causative. The original question could be rephrased: in what situation does physical risk increase because of the legal risk, rather than just at the same time as the legal risk?

Assuming it's a sane 30 limit (I'll take your word for it, and FWIW I think the majority are in residential areas) then 75 is taking the piss. I hope he gets what's coming to him without anyone getting in his way.

_________________
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

How can you be sure of that speed? Have you got a radar gun? Or do you have laser vision? Human eyes are extremely poor at judging speed, especially when a vehicle is travelling directly towards or away from them. Come on, own up to how you have your superhuman abilities

Oh, and what on earth does the time of day have anything to do with it?

_________________
Keep right on to the end of the road ...

When it comes to sign painting, you expect see the law enforced to the slightest detail, but when it comes to speeding offences, you expect the good people of Matfield to be lenient with drivers who are killing them! It is just incoherent.

_________________
I stole this .sig

You're completely wrong.

Firstly, it's the authorities that became DANGEROUSLY obsessed with detail first. The speed limit laws were perfectly OK before we started enforcing them digitally.

Secondly, I'm laughing at a web site. I haven't even passed comment on the incompetents who provided the signing.

Simple logic tells us that reasonable competence from those in charge of road safety is a pre-requisite to positive progress.

Signing that does not meet basic regulations warns of incompetence. If they get the signing wrong, when all they have to do is reproduce it from standard diagrams, what hope is there they they are properly considering all the effects of their actions?

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I can't be sure. I figured he was going at 90, but I couldn't be absolutely sure, so I estimated the lowest he could possibly have been doing, to avoid criticism from pedants.



It is to do with the likelihood of children playing.

_________________
I stole this .sig

So, that'll be pure, unscientific guesswork, then. How unlike you, with your attachment to gizmos with more bells and whistles than you can shake a stick at!

Kids playing in the street? Come off it, any kid worth his/her salt is at home staring at the playstation/PC/GameCube/X-Box or whatever. This is the 21st century, after all!

_________________
Keep right on to the end of the road ...

Yes. I'm getting good at it. Sorry for the generalisations, but there seems to be a pattern in the 30 zone of my village. You get the mums in a hurry in Isuzu troopers, doing 35 on the school run. Then you get reps in dark German cars, pushing 40. Then the white vans, who can't keep below 40 unless they are tailgating, and after that, basic knobheads and anti-social gits. The one I saw was an extreme case.

But isn't it odd that SafeSpeed wants to displace cameras in favour of unscientific guesswork?

_________________
I stole this .sig

No. It isn't odd at all. It isn't even true.

I want the law applied in such a way that: "The competent and careful actions of a majority of responsible people are considered legal."

That's not "easy" with the speed limit laws, and the best I've come up with is intelligent discretion at the time of the offence. I don't regard it as perfect, more of a best compromise. I'm wide open to better ideas.

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety