Safe Speed Forums

I stumbled upon this new website from ROSPA. It's still under construction.

http://www.helpingldrivers.com/sitetest.htm

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Anyone who tells you that nothing is impossible has never bathed in a saucer of water.

"But, this risk is reduced if learners gain as much supervised driving experience as possible while they are learning, including both professional lessons with an Approved Driving Instructor (ADI) and private practice with a parent or friend."

Are we now moving to the ideas as practiced many years ago where newies were mentored after their test??

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lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

Let's see what they say:

"Speed is one of the major contributory factors in incidents involving young drivers". Nothing to do with lack of ability, lack of experience and totally wrong attitude, then.
"Encourage positive attitudes to speed limits......."
Hang on, this is sounding a bit familiar.
"Remind learners to check their speedo regularly so they get into the habit of checking their speed...." and thereby crash due to lack of proper observation.

I thought this was appropriate for this thread. Whilst I don’t like to hear of anyone dying through car accidents, this article beggars belief. I’m just glad to hear that nobody else was killed as a result.





And yet in the day time mobile speed cameras operate along this road.

(imageshack was not working properly so if it's not readable let me know and I'll re-submit)

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Useless laws weaken necessary laws.

Dixie: It's difficult to read on my computer. I can just make out half the words but it's making my eyes go funny.

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Shooting is good for you and too good for some people.

I've re-posted the image, if you click on it twice (when in imageshack) it opens to a larger size.

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Useless laws weaken necessary laws.

The kid was 16... What the f*ck was his father doing letting him go out even though he had a very strong suspicion of what he was up to??

"No help from the police..." - It's always someone else's fault isn't it!

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"Politicians are the same the world over... We build bridges where there aren't any rivers." - Nikita Kruschev

Is it just me or is this ridiculous? How many people actually go out with the intention of crashing? How does that in any way excuse (a) stealing a car and (b) driving like a f*cking idiot?

In this case I’d say that’s a bit unfair. Maybe the boy was uncontrollable, his father was obviously concerned as he knew his son was driving round at night and what could have happened. He asked the police for help and got no response. Surely a word from the police wouldn’t have done any harm, and maybe should also have tracked his movements at night.

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Useless laws weaken necessary laws.

So, a quick summary:

Under age
drunk
stole a car
using a mobile whilst driving
total disregard for the law and everything/everyone else
killed in the collision.

At least it had a happy ending.
I'd be quite happy to go and award the wall a certificate for conspicuous services to crime prevention and road safety.

As it’s turned out this was the best result, it could have been allot worse should he have hit another car. And what would the judge have said then?

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Useless laws weaken necessary laws.

So you're saying that you can't read your speedometer in a fraction of a second, and that you therefore can't use it?
I think there's something very interesting going on here...

So many people like to break the law (and risk other people's lives) by speeding. They talk about how speed cameras are 'unfair' (I've never been caught by one, because I never speed), they talk about the risk of taking their eyes of the road and looking at the speedometer!
I check my speedo about every ten seconds, probably more often. It takes me a fraction of a second. I think the speeders on here have some sort of inability to read properly, or take in information from a dial, as it's such an easy and quick thing to do that I can't see how it could cause you to take your eyes off the road for more than a tenth of a second.
According to your logic, you should never check your mirrors either, nor look anywhere at all except directly in front of your car.

I agree, thank god he didn't kill anybody else, if he'd NOT had an accident and died, no doubt he'd have carried on risking hundreds of other people's lives every night while he was having 'fun'.

Try the test I devised on: http://www.safespeed.org.uk/speedo.html and come back and tell us exactly how long it takes you to check a dial ten times.

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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

Some speedos can be read essentially from peripheral vision once you're used to the car, so this test is not that similar. I also found rev matching very easy to learn in my focus, as third gear has the rev needle in exactly the same position as the speedo needle, and second is approximately 15 degrees less at any non-pushing on speed - you could do it entirely from your peripheral vision (although the focus has very big insturments compared to almost every other car I've driven).

To expand on that, once you've found 30 (or whatever) on your speedo by actively looking at it, you can easily keep it there using peripheral vision, as it is very sensitive to motion.

I would be a bit worried about someone that actually *looks* at it every 10 seconds though - and if they are consistent about this I'm amazed they are accident free.

That's interesting. I theorised that it might be possible to design a speedo for peripheral vision use. But the idea suffered a pretty big setback when I discovered that I couldn't read anything at all in my own peripheral vision - not even a newspaper headline.

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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

Then, presumably, you can give us an exact account of your speed at every stage of, let's say, the last mile of your last journey?
Did you at any stage slow down to well below the speed limit? If so, why? How did you know what speed to slow down to without a sign to tell you? Do you know what speed you're doing when going around a corner? How do you know what speed you should be doing?

Then, presumably, you can also give an exact account of any hazards you saw over your last mile? How many cars were coming the other way? How many parked cars did you negotiate? How many pedestrians were there crossing the road? How many children were playing on the pavement? How many cars were standing at junctions?

If you paid as much attention to the road ahead as you pay to your speedometer then you should have no problem answering the latter questions.

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Only when ideology, prejudice and dogma are set aside does the truth emerge - Kepler

Yep, the way that the receptor cells are laid out in your eye (concentrated in a very small area), you'll never be able to read anything in your peripheral vision - but you can get the angle of a decent sized speed needle easily enough, so if you know what angle 30 mph is at, then you can get the needle 'roughly' there through peripheral vision. What peripheral vision is better at is detecting very slight movement, so if you get it to 30 (or whatever), you can keep it there using peripheral vision alone.

The best speedo would be one on a hud imo.