Safe Speed Forums

I still stand by my initial reasoning. You're going to extremes with the 2mph example, it's not likely to happen in practice. However, a more realistic general reduction is more beneficial to vulnerable road users, of which there are more than ever. Traffic noise is reduced, flow tends to be smoother, as a result people drive more calmly.

Speed limits are already generally reasonably set in my opinion. If road users don't want to obey them because they think they're better than the law, then more punitive measures will be introduced until you're forced to (i.e safety cameras, traffic calming, etc)

It's down to us.

I'm sorry to do this to death, but you really aren't grasping the point. The DfT have made a blanket statement that "lower speeds benefit all urban road users".

So if speeds are 30 mph, it will benefit all urban road users if they are reduced to 29 mph, will it?

If speeds are 25 mph, will it benefit all urban road users if they are reduced to 24 mph?

If speeds are 20 mph, will it benefit all urban road users if they are reduced to 19 mph?

See the point? Where do you draw the line? The statement is only even potentially true when the starting value of speed is above a certain value.


This may have been true 15 years ago, particularly as they were enforced by real-life traffic coppers, not automatons. It certainly isn't now.

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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

I rather think the DfT are referring to something more marked, like reductions from 35mph in a 30 zone to 25-30mph in a 30 zone. In this case there would be a benefit, especially if you are referring to urban areas which have a high concentration of vulnerable road users.

Smooth, consistent driving within the speed limit is far preferable to aggressive behaviour within the speed limit, which is commonplace. Once people figure out where fixed cameras are, the driving behaviour tends to settle down - there's a set of fixed cameras near to me, which have been recently installed (2004), driving down that route has definitely made a positive difference in terms of overall behaviour, not just speed limit compliance. Yes, the cameras are located on a fairly wide stretch of road where it's easy to exceed the limit, but you shouldn't be doing that anyway. It's a busy road with a park entrance, a crossing, two bus stops and a housing development. Go and stand at the side of the road and see what it's like when vehicles are passing you at 40-50mph.

I really worry about this continued push to lower and lower limits - surely if we want to get on as a civilisation and not stagnate we need to be going the other way?

The technology is simple to allow vehicles to safely travel at almost any speed, certainly on major routes such as motorways. A drive-by-wire system to stop the idiot motorist from making stupid control inputs and object sensing radar or similar sensors to avoid other vehicles and speeds of say 200mph are easy and safe. (if you think this is far fetched or dangerous, then ponder that systems identical to this have been flying you and your family on holiday for over 20 years). My current car is already capable of an electronically limited 155mph, why should I be forced to drive it around at less than half that?

We have spent many years going faster and faster, and now thanks to the PC brigade this trend is turning and we will all be back to riding horses or walking to the next village at this rate. Reduce the NSL by a third and technically you increase all our commutes by a third if we use NSL routes - I want my commute time to be coming down, not going up! I am already seeing a marked increase in the amount of "forty everywhere" drivers, the "Speed kills, Speed Kills, Speed Kills" mantra so oft repeated is clearly starting to have an effect on the nation's drivers.

I am just waiting for the day when the Goverment Issue Generic-o-car is introduced - limited to 5mph (10mph on motorways, but the wheels will be locked into grooves) with a SCP rep walking infront with a red flag and a bell shouting "unclean, unclean, motorist in the area!".

Er.. complete nonsense. The reason you can cruise at 520 knots in an aircraft is because:

- there's absolutely bloody nothing to hit.

The reality on the ground is very very different, in case you hadn't noticed!

I'm not so sure...

The skies are actually quite crowded and modern aircraft carry systems that warn the pilot of other 'planes within a specified radius... However, the technology to implement "autopilot" on a car is more-or-less available. many cars now have "parking sensors" (OK, these are sonic rather than radar and have a short range) which could be morphed into a "gap maintenance" system. A friend has an XK Jaguar that has "active cruise control" that will maintain a fixed distance from the car in front so it's not a major leap of imagination to devise a system that will do the same laterally. Add inputs to brakes via the ABS system and stering via the power system and you're well on the way.

Personally, though I still enjoy driving, I can think of nothing nicer than being able to relax a read a book while my car drives itself along motorways.

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

While car manufacturers regularly seem to release news of their latest fully-automated car, they are unlikely to release such an actual car - just think of the liability claims when the electronics malfunction. Frankly, the whole thing scares me witless: a car can't allow for the number of things a human can, and if you've done all you can to encourage the human driver to go to sleep, he will and there's no one/nothing there to pick up the pieces when it all goes wrong.

Anyway, I wanted to take issue with the comment about 'vulnerable road users, of which there are more than ever'. Certainly not more pedestrians than in days gone by, surely? (More stupid/careless ones, perhaps; or more children not taught basic road-crossing skills) And certainly far more zebra/puffin etc. crossings than there used to be, they're going up everywhere. And perhaps more cyclists than twenty years ago, but I'd guess fewer than 40 years ago.

Ian

Perhaps 'mpaton' would like to tell us his ideal speed limit setting. I suspect it is a single value of 15 mph on ALL roads, or am I wrong. After all we now have various people who want blanket 20 mph limits to take us back to pre-1914 days.

I hope they realise the cost of horse-drawn transport

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Good manners maketh a good motorist

Regardless of what limits are set, people will ignore them, even if they're set higher.

.....So why set them?

Answer a) Thank god people have a better reason to choose a speed than the number on the tin sign.

Answer b) 'People' is a bit too much of a blanket term to be useful. Clearly some people will and some people won't. The people who DON'T ignore them scare me more because they MUST BE setting speed for legal reasons not safety reasons.

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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

If the electronics malfunction, the back-up system will take over. If that failed then a fail safe system would bring the car to a stop.
I am always amazed that people assume this system would be liable to malunction all the time and kill them yet trust a fully automated system to fly them on their holidays (hard to pull over in a 747).

In fly-by-wire (as it would be with ddrive-by-wire), the pilot has no direct control of the aircraft - he asks the computer nicely if it wouldn't mind rolling right a little and the computer does it. If what the pilot asks is outside of safety parameters the computer says no.
If, by human error or falling asleep, they try to fly into a mountain the computer gives them a friendly warning ("terrain, terrain"), it then gets less friendly ("pull up, pull up") before finally taking over and climbing the aircraft away (this can be over-ridden, but only by the terminally suicidal).

And when was the last time a pedestrian walked out at 30,000 ft?

The serious point is that driving is very much a real-time hazard-driven task, while piloting is not normally so.

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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

As someone who made a submission to the consultation, I've received a summary of the results today, together with a copy of the document. The results don't seem to be on the DfT website yet.

While, predictably, local authorities were strongly in favour, most of the responses from the general public were strongly against, and the responses from the police were very sceptical about the move from 85th percentile to mean speeds.

If anyone's interested, I've uploaded my submission from last year here.

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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

Well thought out,written, and couldn't agree more with the content Peter.

Seeing as many have either their heads in the clouds or up their bottoms when crossing the road, I'd say quite a few

The sentiment as usual is that drivers need limits to tell them what is a safe speed at which to drive because they wouldn't be able to work it out for themselves.

In some cases that may be true - roads can be deceptive. In many cases it should not be required but as drivers are so much led to believe that the speed limit is a safe speed, the only step that works to slow them down is to post a lower speed limit.

There is no mention anywhere though of the possibility of 25mph areas, and 30mph to 20mph is a big drop. The USA has 25mph limit areas and so do most of the world that use km because 40km/hr is approximately 25mph.

No! Don't use this bit of legislation. It is for our own domestic "Single Vehicle Approval" scheme. The vast majority of mass produced cars will have speedos that comply with Directive 75/443/EC. That stipulates maximum intervals of 20MPH for an imperial speedo head.

...but they won't ignore them if they're set lower?

Why then, are you so keen to lower the limits?

I don't understand the logic.

Similarly, you seem to assert that whenever speed limits are reduced, a nicer environment results and people drive more calmly. Do you have any evidence for this? From what I've seen, the complete opposite is true. You get a few upright and virtuous citizens trying to obey increasingly ridiculous laws that nobody else can see the point in and you get more lunatic overtaking manoeuvres and tailgating from the few at the opposite end of the spectrum. The vast majority of us fit somewhere in between and just put up with it with gritted teeth.

If there were no speed limits, everyone would drive at whatever speed they felt appropriate. Clearly, there would be some who drove way too fast for any given set of conditions. The majority, however, probably wouldn't. Indeed, that's exactly the situation we had before speed limits.

As soon as you introduce a speed limit, you're effectively saying:

"someone in office whose job it is to know about these things has decided that "X" MPH is a safe maximum speed so you good citizens don't need to trouble your little brains any more worrying about what's appropriate".

This has two effects.

1. People who would naturally maybe have driven slower than the limit get forced to drive a bit faster than they would have.

2. People who would naturally maybe have driven faster than the limit get forced to drive a bit slower than they would have.

Thus you end up with 2 sets of frustrated people - neither of whom are concentrating on the most important thing anymore.

My feeling is that if you introduce 20 MPH limits where most people would naturally drive at 20 anyway, there won't be much point so you may as well not bother. If you introduce them in areas where most people would naturally drive faster, you'll just end up with more speeding convictions. Either way, you won't have any effect on road safety.

Why can't advocates of the "red flag" learn from the past? We've seen a general lowering and massive enforcement of speed limits in this country over the last ten years. Where is the corresponding reduction in deaths and serious injuries that has gone with it?

Isn't it time to switch tactics from enforcement to education?

Which, in essence, sums up why the present speed-obsessed thrust of "road safety" has been the abject failure that it obviously is...

The majority of accidents come from the "ends of the bell curve" of driving standards. The slow and incompetent aren't effected by speed limits - they can have shunts without needing to go that fast! The fast and incompetent just ignore the limits whatever they are and continue to have a disproportionate number of accidents. The rest of us, those with the "gritted teeth", have very few accidents but provide the bulk of the customers for the camera partnerships.

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