Safe Speed Forums

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Drive in haste, repent at leisure.

What is selfish about recognising the wisdom of the road safety policies that gave us the safest roads in the World in the first place?

What is selfish about giving up well paid work to campaign for better road safety? - That's what I did when I realised that modern road safety policy has failed to save around 7,000 UK lives to date.

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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

Selfish!
From your 'Claims' page

I’d hoped that most peoples attitudes to weakness would draw from the ideology of ‘Origin of Species’ not ‘Mein Kampf’!

Some have more natural skills than others. I’m a cautious, not brilliant driver, and I’ll accept youre better than me. Thousands of people like me have good reasons why their driving skills are restricted. Does that give you the right to bully and intimidate me with your speed, flashing past 40mph faster than me in the blind hope I’ve seen more than a flicker of you in my rear mirror.
I’ve as much right on the road as you!
A ridiculously superior selfish attitude – you should be ashamed of yourself!


Your wrong – THIS aint happening every day. Please evidence it otherwise delete. Its crap!


Evidence?
Not far enough ahead, and they don’t check their mirrors enough either – easy, blinkered driving – no consideration for others.


from your own link. http://sense.bc.ca/research.htm

You are talking about taking speeds way above the 85th percentile. You’ve got dramatically increased crash risk there.
Could you also add to this chart a line showing the risk of being killed or seriously injured as speed increases from the low speed crashes, which we all know are commonplace, but rarely result in injury.
You might not want to though, it would show that your need for speed is selfish in the extreme!


You THINK you know. This supreme overconfidence will trip you up my man. It might take a few lifetimes to do it, but it’ll happen. Selfish selfish!
You are also guilty of attempting to instill this overconfidence in your disciples - people who often have less skill than you think you have, who decide this dogma sounds plausible.
Irresponsible!
You may feel it’s safe to do 60 through a 40 limit in a village. No perceptible hazards, no pedestrians to squish.
But what you have ignored is the likelihood that inconsiderate speeding a**es have driven these pedestrians off the pavements or verges, into their cars or houses, because their village is not safe to walk through!
Selfish!
Your skill levels might be suitable for the track, Mr Smith, but we have public roads, paid for and used by the public. We rely on safe driving within limits, not arrogant show offs, who feel their personally perceived skill level (much of which is in their own heads) places them above the law.
Selfish!



Monumental arrogance. The guy is now playing God!


Slightly mad maybe, doesn’t particularly add to your credentials!

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Drive in haste, repent at leisure.

Clearly you have no understanding of my position. I suggest you read much more of the web site if you wish to understand.

I would be extraordinarilly ashamed if I ever carried out a manoeuvre in "blind hope". But this isn't and should be about my skills as a driver (whatever they are). It needs to be about minimising road danger. It needs to be about the factors that genuinely deliver improved road safety. It needs to be about the skills and attitudes that help to save lives.

I don't believe for a second that the 85th percentile speed (let alone the 90th - frequently the safest) on the M6 Toll is under 104mph. Last time I drove it there was loads of 110mph traffic.

The "claims" page is no more or less than an argument database. I tend to believe the claims, but I don't assert them as true on that page. It's also rather out of date. I have carried out many thousands of hours of research and analysis since it was written.

Your reply highlights a range of fundamental misunderstandings about my work. I abhor selfish or careless driving. I am quite certain - having done a great deal of homework - that road safety is being very badly served by an overemphasis on the importance of speed limits.

[I'd also suggest that you made rather too many points in one post to enable a point by point reply. I started doing it point by point, but it was turning into a monster. Can you please try and focus on one or two issues per post? If you think I've ignored something important or significant, please ask me again.]

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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

You commend the road safety policies that we have in this country, yet you criticise the process because it has given us cameras as well as the safest roads in the World. You can’t have it both ways – we either have a good system for road governance, or we don’t.

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I stole this .sig

Basingwerk! I'm surprised at you! I thought we covered this the other day?

Our road safety policy was just about the best in the World until a bit over a decade ago. The results speak for themselves.

In the last decade there has been a MASSIVE change in emphasis and we've gone from being the one of the fastest improving to being one of the slowest.

I don't think earlier policy was perfect - we could add a lot to it with modern health and safety thinking - but broadly I agree with policy up until the camera decade started. Since then policy and results have both (let's be polite) gone to seed.

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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 Søren. What YOU have ignored is the possibility that those people may be in their beds reading the Sunday papers and have no intention of walking the pavements. Circumstances change constantly and Paul is advocating varying speeds accordingly, not driving at ever increasing speeds nor blindly and blithely conforming to an ever decreasing limit to compensate for other failures in road maintenance/engineering/driver training.

Proper driver training, road maintenance and engineering, and policing has an immediate cost and a long term benefit. Rigidly and excessively enforcing unrealistically low speed limits has an immediate fiscal profit but longer term deficit on safety if it used as a replacement for maintenance, engineering, education and policing - which there is now overwhelming evidence to show is exactly what the advocates of the current policy are doing.

The people who are selfish are the revenue collectors who have made the roads more dangerous under a pretence that you are falling for. They love to hear people like you because you underwrite their tax collecting, short-term money saving policies.

I can give you an example of this dangerous attitude: I was recently discussing speed policy, and the sudden rash of cameras in our area, with a friend of mine; incidentally, a mother of two small children. When asked what speed she would deem suitable outside a school in a normal restricted area, she replied "30mph". When I refined my question further, with specific reference to school chucking out time, she still maintained that 30mph was fine... and I quote: "...because that is the posted speed limit." This is a normal member of the public; she does not particularly follow road safety issues; but, through the general media, has been exposed to the government's "speed kills" campaign, whether consciously or not.

I really do believe the over emphasis of posted limits, has indeed skewed people's understanding of safe speed, and falsely gives the impression that you're "safe", as long as you don't exceed the posted limit.


Kaz

I can give you two examples which are very close to my heart:

1) My young cousin was killed outright by a car doing 25mph in a 30 zone. The driver made no attempt to brake, as he was looking somewhere else.

2) The head injuries my mother sustained when she was hit by a car which pulled off while she was walking in front of it (about 5mph) robbed her of her memory, her dignity and, ultimately, her life.

In both instances, the drivers felt so safe, because they were below the posted limit, that they didn't even bother looking in front of them.

You will understand why I'm so against current policies which place so much emphasis on numerical speed, to the detriment of all else - and why it galls when people like Paul Smith, who fight against such policies, are branded 'selfish'.

All people here ever want are special cases to be let off. “I was safe because I'm an advanced driver”, or “it was night time and nobody was about”, or “I was almost up to the 40 zone”, or “I was in the middle of overtaking a slow poke” or “I was speeding out of danger” or a “speed camera distracted me” or “somebody was on my tail” or “the sign were misleading” blah blah blah. How come nobody can admit the straight fact – “I was going too fast and I got caught”. If we followed some of these suggestions, we’d have a list of rules as long as your arm and we’d still be unable to convict anybody. Nope – keep it simple, I say. Put up a sign to show the limit and convict everybody who exceeds it, with the possible exception of cops and emergency staff responding to a situation.

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I stole this .sig

Too fast for what, though? Too fast for the conditions? Too fast for the capabilities of the vehicle and driver? No, it's too fast for a limit which may well have been imposed by some local politician as a political gesture to local voters with no consideration for the actual design speed of the road in question...

...and even those limits which have no political motives behind them could still be out of touch with the reality of present-day motoring. Consider the motorway limit. Set in an age when the average car would struggle to reach a 3-figure speed, and which had braking abilities that were, to put it mildly, pretty dismal. Several decades of engineering improvement later we now find the average car more than capable of cruising all day at 100+MPH, and stopping from such speeds without nearly as much fuss and bother. I wonder, if the average car of the 60's had the same performance as the average car of today, and if the motorways of the 60's had been built to the same standards as today, would the motorway limit still have been set to 70 MPH?



Fine by me, so long as the limits are chosen based on a scientific and engineering assessment of the road and average driver/vehicle capabilities, NOT on what a minority of local NIMBYs would prefer, and that the limits are subject to review on a regular basis to take into account improvements in road and vehicle design. That way we might just end up with a nationwide set of limits that are consistent, that drivers can see are set with no ulterior motives in mind, and which would stand a better chance of being adhered to by the majority of drivers who currently risk prosecution every time they venture onto the roads for doing nothing more than driving at 10%+2 (or less in some areas) over a limit which may well have just been reduced from a far more sane limit in order to appease a handful of vocal locals.

However, advocates of speed limits offer as evidence the Berlin-Hamburg motorway, once one of the deadliest roads in the country; a speed limit of 130km/h was introduced a year ago.

"The number of accidents was sharply reduced and there haven't been any fatal accidents," said Brandenburg transport minister Frank Szymanski.
This is a good indicator that the speed limit idea saves a life or 2.
Is it regression to the mean, Ho, Ho? The regression is past the mean though, it's 0.

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It's Champion Man

The front page of the Safe Speed web site says:

"Safe Speed believes firmly in improved road safety. We do not campaign against speed limits or speed limit enforcement. We are not anti-police. We are not "pro speeding".

I fully accept that sensible speed limits and sensible enforcement make an important contribution to road safety. I campaign mainly against stupid speed limit enforcement.

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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

Going 'too fast'. In who's opinion, and too fast for what?? Going too fast to be safe and going over a posted speed limit are two different things.

When people are unduly penalised for exceeding an arbitary limit when clearly there is less danger than if someone was driving to the limit when it isn't safe to be doing so for reasons many and varied (drink, drugs, unsafe vehicle, fog, ice, snow..) yet doesn't, indeed cannot due to the mode of enforcement, get penalised...

Well, you know the drill.....

In the opinion of the law of the land and those who set the speed limit in the first place if we are talking about simply exceding the posted limit.



Unless of course the speed limit just happens to be the highest speed that is safe at the time.
The snag of course is that the actual safe speed will vary depending on the circumstances. The driver's perception of what it is will vary depending on the individuals disposition, attitude, sense of urgency, level of confidence etc etc.

The pivotal question is whether drivers should be trusted to judge the safe speed for themselves, or whether their judgement should be capped at the speed limit.

See, this is the problem. A lot of people, such as yourself, automatically assume that anyone who objects to the speed limit enforcement is an aggressive, tailgating, dangerous driver.

This is simply not the case -- I completely agree that there are some people out there who drive faster than their abilities, intimidate other motorists and ultimately cause accidents.

This is completely different from people who exceed the speed limit where they can see that it is safe to do so, and whilst leaving a safe distance between them and the car in front -- in other words "driving to the road" rather than continually checking your speedometer.

Of course you do know that we absolutely have to trust drivers to reduce speed when necessary don't you? When "reducing speed when necessary" is such a fundamental driver behaviour, we should be very afraid of anything that might tend to reduce its importance.

Seen this: http://www.safespeed.org.uk/why.html ?

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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 you're missing the vital point that every single circumstance is its own special case. That's the whole problem. Circumstances are not standardised and the correct speed cannot adequately be standardised either.

We must have adaptive drivers adjusting to the circumstances. We do have adaptive drivers adjusting to the circumstances. But I bet a smaller proportion of drivers are properly adapting to the circumstances now than a decade ago.

There is no magic number. Sometimes 5mph is murderously fast. Adapting the circumstances is entirely necessary.

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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

You aren't allowed to drive unless you stick to the rules that everybody has agreed to through the political process. Your license to drive is a privilege, not a right, and to keep it, you have to hold your end of the bargain, i.e. drive properly. We have already learned that this process has given us the safest roads in the world. If people start ignoring their responsibilities, we can expect that record to fall.



And where traffic density was must lower than today, and when drivers behaved properly.



So let us campaign for that, not on the idea that if we don't enforce the limits, things will go back to normal.

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I stole this .sig

I agree, and the top limit is not a suggestion about the right speed. It's the top limit for that stretch. Anybody can drive at less, indeed, almost they certainly should.



Too right, as long as it is within the absolute top limit. If you have a problem with the level of the absolute top limit, campaign for that, or if you believe that there should be no absolute top limit, campaign for that!But don't campaign for a limit which doesn't count, or that should be ignored, or ignored sometimes, in some case on some days of the week etc. etc. because then nobody will know where they stand. To work, the rules have to be simple.

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I stole this .sig