Safe Speed Forums

I know exactly what Robin means – that the underlying causes of accidents should be investigated in a dispassionate way, as they are in aviation, rather than simply seeking to apportion blame.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

My understanding of an air crash investigation is that discovery of the cause comes first...blame/prosecution may then result.

In the new mad mullah world we see all fatal RTA's being investigated 'as though they were murder scenes' blame first, cause second....if ever.

I don't buy that, the faster you go the further away the event horizon is situated that defines the point where if something happens, a collision is inevitable.

As vehicles go faster they effectivly get bigger and I think a lot of people only see the end of their bonnet, and think that's the end of their car, when in reality it (or where it's going to be) stretches quite a way in front.

...that "something" being the active causal factor.

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Paul Smith: a legend.

"The freedom provided by the motor vehicle is not universally applauded, however: there are those who resent the loss of state control over individual choice that the car represents. Such people rarely admit their prejudices openly; instead, they make false or exaggerated claims about the adverse effects of road transport in order to justify calls for higher taxation or restrictions on mobility." (Conservative Way Forward: Stop The War Against Drivers)

Is going slower in an environment where hazards are likely to 'randomly' present themselves a better idea than going more quickly?

So then we agree that lack of foresight would be the cause of any accident. Good.

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Regulation without education merely creates more criminals.

No, because, hazards are not 'randomly' presented.

An experienced driver can ascertain potential hazards. You appear to possibly not grasp that things do not 'just happen' on the roads, with good general obsservation skills that most drivers become pretty good at - they 'read' the road ahead quite well. So you slow down and come off the gas/throttle and start to slow down as you see a potential hazard and then start to brake as the potential hazard become a 'hazard'. So the speed with which you 'choose' is a constant variant and one that becomes 'safe' for every mile.
To go deliberately slowly 'just in case' the entire time that you drive would be extremely dangerous for a host of reasons. Do you 'get' this? Does this help you ?

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Safe Speed for Intelligent Road Safety through proper research, experience & guidance.

She beat me to the punch.

Hazards do not randomly present themselves.

Further, as each individual hazard is unique, they present themselves in myriad combinations of severity, and in different places to create more combinations. To treat every hazard, or grouping of hazards, as equal in priority, is ludicrous.

Finally, with enough prescience - to which even though shortcuts exist, can only ripen with experience - certain hazards are in fact better mitigated by preventing them from getting in front of you in the first place. Obviously, these are in the minority, and in order to be able to use the gaspedal to negate a hazard in front of you, ironically, you have to have managed enough space in front to see this hazard.

"Speed & Surprise" are the numerator, and Space is the denominator. You can't manage all three properly by obsessing with speed, without creating hazards behind you (at least not in my line of work).

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The Rules for ALL ROAD USERS:
1) No one gets hurt
2) Nothing gets hit, except to protect others; see Rule#1
3) The Laws of Physics are invincible and immutable - so-called 'laws' of men are not
4) You are always immediately and ultimately responsible for your safety first, then proximately responsible for everyone's
Do not let other road users' mistakes become yours, nor yours become others
5) The rest, including laws of the land, is thoughtful observation, prescience, etiquette, decorum, and cooperation

No indeed it's fine i had not mis-understood your excellent intentions, I guess that I had not made it clear, that I was exploring them ...
I agree that trying to go towards a zero is good, and certainly understanding the (true), cause of accidents is a crucial component, to better road safety comprehension and engineering.

Tried to look for the helicopter smilie but it has flown off sorry) if you could possibly plot a flight path back to me I would be v grateful.

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Safe Speed for Intelligent Road Safety through proper research, experience & guidance.

It is also preferable to treating accidents as unfortunate inevitabilities that can only be mitigated.

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The Rules for ALL ROAD USERS:
1) No one gets hurt
2) Nothing gets hit, except to protect others; see Rule#1
3) The Laws of Physics are invincible and immutable - so-called 'laws' of men are not
4) You are always immediately and ultimately responsible for your safety first, then proximately responsible for everyone's
Do not let other road users' mistakes become yours, nor yours become others
5) The rest, including laws of the land, is thoughtful observation, prescience, etiquette, decorum, and cooperation

Try telling that to the guy that collided with the toddler that this thread begun with.



Possibly, but many drivers are not experienced, and even those that are might not be paying attention, or driving too fast. I know a lot of 'experienced' driver that are way way too overconfident that nothing is going to happen, Tone mentioned one on this very thread driving far too close to the car in front.



I see people every day accelerate into a hazard situations, a closing gap is a classic, or speeding up to go around a slowing vehicle without really thinking why it might be slowing.

Or going too fast for the foresight being applied, or indeed for the foresight that can possibly be applied given the limitations of human observational powers and responses.

20 mph limits in residential areas will save people from being hit by drivers and will save drivers from hitting people, or doing so much damage when they do, a result all round.

Can't you see that its not speed in excess of the speed limit that would be the cause of any accident, but lack of foresight/judgment on the part of the driver?

We need to focus on the actual causes of accidents if we want to eliminate, rather than merely mitigate, them. Which would you prefer, a crippled child who's been hit at 20mph, or a child thats not been hit by a car at all?

Would rape be more acceptable as long as all rapists wore condoms? That is exactly the sort of action we take by focusing on reducing speed to mitigate accident severity, rather than focusing on factors that will prevent accidents altogether.

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Regulation without education merely creates more criminals.

No, he can't see it. He notices too many drivers who shouldn't be driving. He then assumes that, since they will not stop driving, that a good many of these collisions are inevitable, thus they should be mitigated, since these people won't be taken off the road prior.

I regret that you are surrounded by idiots, weepej. Having said that, and knowing full well the mountain that has to be moved in order to implement the most effective solution, doesn't change the fact that the chances for preventing these collisions in the first place increase if you could
a) remove these underperforming drivers from the road
and / or
b) raise the average driving standard

A side effect would be c) that the collisions that do take place would be of less severity.

Since your strategy of not reducing the number of idiots on the road, but only reducing their free traveling speed would - at best - only yield 'c)' , I, for one, vastly prefer higher driving standards AND removing underperforming drivers.

However, I strongly suspect that the lower the free traveling speed, the lower the attention paid, which would make the impact speed closer to the free travelling speed, thus possibly negating c).

To sum up:
Any strategy that effectively prevents collisions is superior to every strategy that mitigates their severity. You are simply trying to trade K's for SI's, whereas the rest of us are trying to trade KSI's for minor injuries and misses.

_________________
The Rules for ALL ROAD USERS:
1) No one gets hurt
2) Nothing gets hit, except to protect others; see Rule#1
3) The Laws of Physics are invincible and immutable - so-called 'laws' of men are not
4) You are always immediately and ultimately responsible for your safety first, then proximately responsible for everyone's
Do not let other road users' mistakes become yours, nor yours become others
5) The rest, including laws of the land, is thoughtful observation, prescience, etiquette, decorum, and cooperation

No they won't because this is addressing a symptom not a cause. 20mph limits will simply mean that pedestrians get killed by a driver doing 20mph rather than being killed by a driver doing 30mph, I'm not sure why you think this is preferable, still each to their own.

In fact it is likely that since the 20mph limits will be placed to artificially reduce speed, greater concentration is needed on maintaining such a low speed, that the driver will fail to notice a hazard, and make an accident more likely.

Robin

You are spot and on and am saying the same thing as I've been for quiet some time, our road 'safety' policy is not based on fact or proven safety methodology, but a vague pc wooliness that accepts that accidents will happen and at best seek to reduce the severity of the outcome.

Absolutely barking !!

Root cause analysis works, if we want evidence all we need to do is look at safety critical industries:

Petrochemical
Explosives manufacture
Aviation
Commercial Diving
Offshore industries

What do they have in common?

Yes, root cause analysis as a means of investigating incidents and ascertaining FACT - what caused the incident and what contributed to the severity of the incident - also known as Primary and Secondary factors.

If you remove the Primary factor(s) that accident CANNOT happen, if you remove a secondary factor, the accident can still happen but with a reduced severity of outcome.

So why, when the above industries which when they started off were all considered (rightly so) extremely high risk industries have they become amongst the safest?

Because they investigated to find what actually caused the incident and have used a variety of tools to put in place control measures that prevent incidents from happening and then working to mitigate severity of the outcome if the worst does happen.


By contrast our road safety policy is fixating on the obvious - speed, speed will always be a factor by virtue that at least one party is engaged in some form of movement.

It would be interesting to find out if the DoT and police are actually aware of root cause analysis as a means of incident investigation.

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Gordon Brown saying I got the country into it's current economic mess so I'll get us out of it is the same as Bomber Harris nipping over to Dresden and offering to repair a few windows.

Chaos, panic and disorder - my work here is done.

http://www.wildcrafts.co.uk

I can see the logic of applying root cause analysis to the road network, but I’m not sure how successful it would be in “real life”. The petrochemical, explosives, diving etc… industries are also heavily regulated especially in comparison to the roads! So would such analysis be worth while if there is no servere regulation to back it up? Can the two examples even be compared, the inputs are hugely different and the access to the systems involved are far more stringent in these industries.

Okay, assuming the analysis has been carried out, we now know for certain that it isn’t speeding that kills, speeding is a symptom, not a cause. Just like red light jumping and drink driving for example (other examples of illegal behaviour that in the right circumstances do not cause problems). It’s the attitude of the driver that needs changing to correct this inappropriate behaviour. So we come to a situation whereby all new drivers are subject to far more rigorous testing and only those who can pass an IAM equivalent test are given a licence. What happens in the meantime? Can we just revoke everyone else’s licence who isn’t up to standard?

Or should we put in place rules that cater to the lowest common denominator to minimise the inevitable accidents that will happen while we have such poorly trained drivers on the roads? Hence the 20mph limits…

…I don’t know if they will work, but I’d be up for them to try out the 20mph limits to see if they do work. It’s either that or stick with the current status quo which doesn’t seem to be working either.

We've spelt out the required actions time and time again; we need to scrap the system that focuses all of drivers' attentions on compliance with a largely inconsequential, and increasingly arbitrary, limit and return to human roads policing, in a fashion where a huge range of motoring offences and faux pas can be detected, and adressed in a proportionate fashion.

People need to care about the quality of their driving, not just their numerical speed. Some people will care because they are conscientious, some will only care if there's a threat of punishment, and some will be indifferent, but have their minds focused by a talking to by a police officer. Those who are wildly outside the realms of the acceptable can be removed from the road at once, removing the danger they pose immediately, not merely sent a bill for their actions a fortnight later.

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Regulation without education merely creates more criminals.

I guess this is the point at which Safespeed and myself have differing views.

Personally, I don't believe the current system focusses all the drivers attention on the speed limit.

I think the speed limit is a valuable tool in controlling the behaviour of people who use the roads. I don't think that tool is the be all and end all of road safety, I don't really believe anyone does, you'd have to be pretty stupid to think " I'll stick to the speed limit and I'll be safe" and as I keep being told, if drivers can avoid contless millions of accidents every day they can't be that stupid! But, I believe speed limits are a useful tool to have and to use in addition to more traffic police. Much like I believe speed cameras are a useful tool, again in addition to more traffic police.

But hey, that's just me, and I recognise I'm in a (huge!)minority here!

I agree with SE, but the trouble is that all those you have mentioned SE are highly trained and qualified professionals who look out for each other whereas private transport is a means of mobilizing a nation of people, every kind of people, including those who shouldn’t be on the road and are basically bad at driving.

The test is a snapshot of how one behaves on the day followed by a lifetime of potentially bad driving without any checks or balances.

No speed camera is going to pick up on this of course, which is why I am so vehemently against their widespread use/abuse.

Education and better training, with more emphasis on continued improvement of driver skills, would be a good step in the right direction - but also suitability to drive in the first place.

One could argue that if you haven’t passed your driving test after, let’s say, ten attempts then maybe you should question whether you actually have what it takes to drive and should take some time out to reflect on your suitability to command a ton of metal.

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The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not necessarily represent the views of Safe Speed.
You will be branded a threat to society by going over a speed limit where it is safe to do so, and suffer the consequences of your actions in a way criminals do not, more so than someone who is a real threat to our society.