Safe Speed Forums

lay off the new guys ladies and gents, its a free country let them have their say and respect their views please, even though you disagree with them

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now retired

I dont think it's a good idea from a point of view of supporting a prosecution - but you are welcome to give it a go.
I merely pointed out the possible pitfalls of adopting such a tactic. Just as the cameras happened to be in the background when my photograph was taken, you might well be passing a Post Office or Exchange.
Not many people know you should not get caught photographing them.

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

There is no need for all this argument over speed cameras. The details hardly matter.

Once upon a time this country ran on common sense. Now, in almost every area of public life, it is governed by regulations and penalties. I do not exaggerate. Think about it.

It's a system that has evolved through a government bereft of solutions and desperate for revenue by whatever means. Fines = taxes.

This alone makes me quite certain that the speed camera industry is based on improper motives.

I think you may find you have to be a bloke in uniform - alll the person's likely to get is a warning letter per the village busy body schemes.

There are laws still in this country over vigilante - and even the village schemes fell flat because some villagers were not in favour.

But then they found the main culprits were....

.. the villagers



Because Ern's not using it to go snitching on folk Also - his phot shows you do not always get the car reg

IN fact - if some one were tailgating you - they'd be too close to get the reg - so it would only prove they ketp reasonable space in your cam showed their registration for mounint in parcel shelf/

Plus there is the zoom of lens - use the wrong one and it distorts as well.

Methinks you really need to leanr pretty much about photography as well as driving

Speaking of driving ... when are you going to answer my wife's questions?

If you drive to COAST - you don't need glances at speedos every 10 seconds - which smacks of "constant" and rather proves Paul's point that accidnets can occur if driver is not looking at road ahead - but constantly checking to ensure he crashes at the right speed.

By the way - love my wife very much.

Love my 7 kids very much.

Please stay away from the North West and Cumbria

we do not want you to run into rear of our cars whilst you are speedo gawping every ten seconds and one or the other of us has a baby in the middle of the rear seat in her baby seat quite often.

Answer what you understand by COAST, LOOKOUT and POWER - and prove you abide by them . All safe drivers do... all on here are mostly IAM or highly skilled by experience and the 17 year olds on board are encouraging examples of youth at finest and most sensible. MikeF and Mikexx68 ? - both come across as lads any parent can be proud of.

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If you want to get to heaven - you have to raise a little hell!

Smilies are contagious
They are just like the flu
We use our smilies on YOU today
Now Good Causes are smiling too!

KEEP SMILING
It makes folk wonder just what you REALLY got up to last night!

Smily to penny.. penny to pound
safespeed prospers-smiles all round! !
But the real message? SMILE.. GO ON ! DO IT! and the world will smile with you!
Enjoy life! You only have the one bite at it.

OK, I'll answer you.

SafeSpeed is about intelligent driving, not moribund acceptance of limits placed by a political system that is convinced that speed is the cause of accidents and has worked out that a large amount of revenue can be raised by mechanical enforcement of these limits.

If trundling about unquestioningly accepting these impositions is your idea of enjoying driving, then this community really isn't for you.

We do not drive in excess of the speed limit all the time as you assert, but use our knowledge of our vehicles and our acquired skills as drivers to make safe progress as the road environment permits.

I must bow to your extraordinary ability of knowing your precise speed without consulting your speedometer! Thirty years of driving on the road and in competition and I still have to glance at my dashboard as I pass a speed trap to ensure that I am within the arbitrary limit - how lax I must seem to you.

I hope this answers your query and makes it very, very clear that we are a community above all else.

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Aquila



Licat volare si super tergum aquila volat...

Since when are we breaking the speed limit ALL the time? This sort of implies some kind of quantum leap from a ground state of 0mph to 31mph, with other states at 21mph, 41mph, 51mph, 61mph, and 71mph, or something....

(Or 20mph - althought I've lived down here for five years, I only once went to Cambourne - there's a 19mph limit there )

If you have a car that can do 0 to 21 in 0 seconds I'll buy it!

S'ppose I ought to answer your question too Mosis. Then maybe you'll answer some of mine eh?!

The truth is, like most other people on here, I don't "feel the need" to break speed limits. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't - it really depends on what's appropriate and safe at the time. I happen to run a big, diesel people-carrier as my main transport so I can assure you that I don't go out to break the speed limit just so as to enjoy the heady adrenalin rush that such a rewarding "driver's car" brings! (That was sarcasm by the way!) The truth is, it's not very fast -but perfectly capable of exceeding all the speed limits on UK roads - just not by as much as some cars!

I live in a rural area where most of the roads are NSL. Many are single track. Some are safe enough at 100MPH in places, others are lethal at 40. They all have a 60 limit if you're a passenger car though. Seriously, if there's one thing that makes you realise how daft it is trying to impose a one-size-fits-all speed limit, it's rural roads. Every mile of every road ought to have a different limit! (and it would change with weather, traffic and so on). Sometimes, my job takes me to places 100 or more miles away. Most of this gets done on motorways. The main limit on the speed at which I would naturally choose to drive is obviously safety but there are other factors too - the cost being the next biggest. Obviously, at higher speeds, something with a big frontal area can get a bit thirsty! Besides, believe it or not, I do have a bit of an environmental conscience!

You seem to have decided that the only reason people could ever possibly want to speed is so that they can kill, maim, terrorise and oppress the innocent. Maybe there's the testosterone factor too. I don't know. I'd be curious to know why YOU think they speed though.

The only only thing I WOULD say on that point is that I'm clearly not the only homicidal maniac out there. In fact, I'm in a majority! If you do any reasonable number of miles on our motorways, you must have noticed that most cars travel between an indicated 75 and 85 most of the time (as do I). The irony of this can't be lost on you! I wouldn't mind betting that many of them would be in support of cameras and would deplore speeding! My father in law used to wag the finger at me somewhat (until he got one!) Oh how we laughed!

So the "bottom line" is that I (sometimes) speed for any of the following reasons:

1. It saves me a bit of time.
2. It leaves me free to concentrate on the road rather than the speedo (we're not all superhuman, you see and some of us need to look at it periodically - unless we're going to stay a LONG way below the posted limit)!
2. It builds me up a "buffer" against unforseen circumstances, tailbacks, getting lost, weather, whatever. if I can go a bit faster on the stretches where it is safe to do so, I am under less presure to try and "keep to time" in the places where it is not. That's when it gets dangerous. And believe me, if you've never been in the situation where unforseen circumstances have left you running a bit late, you're a very luck man and I'd like to know if there are any jobs going at your place of work!
3. It's what everyone else does. That doesn't mean I'm a sheep, it means I'm considerate enough not to want to place other road users in the position of getting stuck behind me and having to overtake. Remember I spend a lot of time on single carriageway "A" roads too and the last thing I want is an inexperienced driver (for whatever reason -impatience, testosterone etc) getting killed or injured (not to mention whatever's coming the other way) as a result of my unwillingness to move with the traffic flow. You might be able to find sufficient consolation in the fact that at least YOU were well within the posted limit - I doubt I'd find it so easy to shrug it off.

Does any of that answer your question?

Paul, I think there is an attempt to 'set us up' by 2 new posters who can't or won't address the real issues (one might wonder if one of them is the 'Speedfinder-General' in a new and hidden guise).
Probably best to ignore them as they clearly have little to contribute in terms of suggesting improvements to safety and accident reduction.
If cameras were the 'magic bullet' for road safety then casualties would have been reduced by a large amount by now. Instead they have ceased their pre-camera reduction and the graph has levelled out.

Speed cameras do have a use and are good for some situations. However I beleve they are overused and some of their uses are dubias at best.

No chance. Although I do hope so, because I reckon he's on an official warning to stay away from web forums.

who is the speedfinder-general?

I've never seen the nickname before (that I can remember). However, I'm fairly confident the poster is referring to Steve Calaghan, head honcho of Cumbria CSP. He appears from time to time under various guises. There was some unpleasantness a while ago with name calling and accusations of falsehoods. Much content has had to be deleted as a result of Steve taking personal offence to the point of taking matters up with SafeSpeed's ISP using the might of the police force to drive home his point.

People should be allowed to have their say, I agree.

Provided of couse they don't troll.

Or indeed ad hominem.

Whilst I can agree with your sentiment, you have to admit that placing fifty-odd posts on your first day, many challenging and aggressive in their tone, others directly argumentum ad hominem, does smack a bit of the old silicon-based life-form...

I haven't been on here all that long and I've only just become a member, so I talk from limited experience, but it occurs to me that, all jibing aside, your presence on here as well as the BiB's shows us to be a balanced and (dare I say it) democratic community. The assertions of mosis that we all feel the need to break the speed limit includes you and I and the BiB's and leads me to wonder if 'mosis' is:-

a) A Troll
b) A disgruntled ex-member
c) Someone from a community with a vested interest in invoking a response from this forum that could be used in a smear campaign against us
d) Someone with a very antisocial personality disorder
e) Someone whose views were not skewed enough to be accepted into one of the uber-anti car lobbies and just chose to come and have a go anyway.

You keep your cameras loaded, and I'll keep watching my clocks!

We are all awash in a sea of blood, and the least we can do is wave to each other...

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Aquila



Licat volare si super tergum aquila volat...

I am not reading four pages of this but from
the first post...



Why not go work for the American Government
then, they are having a whale of a time oppressing
the general public, much more than in the UK with
speed cameras?

I bet you also support £80 fines for swearing?

You wouldn't know what freedom was if it smacked
you round the face. Thats not an insult, its a fact.

The bottom line is this.

The Government could kill off virtually all opposition to speed cameras tomorrow if they wanted to.

All they'd have to do is start giving all the fines money to charity.

So why don't they?

If someone was trying to sell you something, but when you asked them for proof of its benefits, you were presented with statistics as shaky as those used to "prove" the safety benefits of speed cameras, would you buy it?

Can you reasonably accept that, in a system as complex as a developed country's road network, one single factor (compliance with speed limits) is they key to an accident-free future?

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“For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.” - H. L. Mencken

Thants a really good suggestion. I would like to add my suggestions:

Perhaps removing the councils right to set speed limits would be a good idea.

And re-setting all recently imopsed council-set limits would be another.

A further good idea would be to locate them where it is dangererous to drive fast, in high risk locations. Current rules only allow cameras to be introduced on the safest roads.

Ummmm, no? So when you went out with a 'really fast' driver, how fast was fast? 20mph? 30mph? Surely not more than that otherwise you must have crashed?

Speed is NOT dangerous. Inappropriate speed is.

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Pecunia Prius Equitas et Salus

I don't CONSTANTLY speed. I do, however, CONSTANTLY try to drive in a safe, respectful & courteous manner to other road users...

Mosis - hang around this forum, because hopefully you'll see that this forum is about road safety and not anarchy. I'm new here and when I joined, I suspected it was staffed by petrol heads, but it's not.

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Pecunia Prius Equitas et Salus

I think I hered it best when it was said

"speed doesnt kill. Poor judgement does"

My driving instructor gave me a great peace of advice which i use for when traveling around roads not safe at their designated speed limit.

"Less space. Less speed"

But unfortunatly we are not rewarded for driving sensabally.



I think the news reports of ZERO Tollerence police forces kinda makes it hard for any one to forget about speed cameras. Although, i believe, by law all spedometers have to be 100% accurate older cars built when speedo's only had to be 10% accurate,like mine, tend to make u think alot when going over the white lines on the line and will in many cases cause the traffic to slow to 3-4mph less then the speed limit to be "safe"