scanny77 wrote:
In Gear, you know as well as I do that it wont make the blindest bit of difference to road safety. Skid training (which includes learning how to avoid a skid) is the answer, not anti skid surfaces. People will skid on any surface and that is down to ignorance. They don't know the physics behind skidding so they don't know how to control or even avoid a skid. I think it's high time the driving test was 2 parts. Part 1 would be the existing test which covers basic car control. Part 2 should be learning to drive ie skid pan, joining motorways, adverse weather etc etc etc. That would be an effective road safety strategy!
The Rush wrote:
I know I wasn't called, but may I?
I'm not sure that's the whole answer.
1) Nearly everyone - over 99.9% of drivers - don't skid when road conditions are optimal, over 99.9% of the time.
Even if the number of people who skid increases by an entire order of magnitude when weather conspires to reduce grip by as much as 50%, you still have 95% of drivers not skidding, or at least managing skids so that they don't metastasize into collisions.
scanny77 wrote:
I have never crashed a truck but i am subject to ever more restrictive legislation in the name of road safety. The mistakes made by few affect the majority hence we get all sorts of ill thought out reactionary methods to increase road safety which simply do not work.
From one professional driver to another, it's obvious that the restrictions placed upon professional drivers are dreamt up by people who have no idea what it's like to drive at all, much less what it's like to drive a taxi, or an articulated lorry, in the real world.
I've never driven a tractor trailer, by the way.
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Better gripping surfaces may go some way to alleviate the problem but the effectiveness is reduced without education. Those that even notice the difference might even think that it means it is safer to go faster because of the extra grip on offer. That is only the case when it is combined with other driving skills, not on its own!
We've been banging on that education/training/testing drum for quite a while now; it probably needs to be tightened.
Those drivers who keep letting Murphy back-seat-drive, inch ever closer to their Darwin award ...
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Of course one type of surface that may improve the situation is a surface which is level without pot holes or changes where previous repairs have been carried out
[luddite]Maybe so, but in the 21st Century, it seems like an ever growing number of people can't leave well enough alone, as if they are secretly allowing things to fall into disrepair so that they then have an excuse to reinvent what could've been fixed a decade ago.[/luddite]