Safe Speed Forums

Pete317, I guess so. That's like first class on trains and planes. You pay more for more space. And shops do put on sales when there is little business to get things going a bit. With supermarkets, you are more likely to pay a different way. It cost you time by waiting. And that is what we do now on crowded roads – we pay with our time.



I'd say that the cost of fuel depends on what people want. If you can tolerate crowded roads, then don’t levy a toll or put up fuel to discourage use. On the other hand, if you are sick of crowded roads, then you can build some more or get rid of some traffic by making it dearer to drive. Or maybe you can take some money from something else. E.g Schools, Universities, Hospitals etc. Or cut back the army. Maybe if you can offload some of the traffic monitoring to scameras, you can sack some coppers to save some money. It's a tough question, that one.



I'm on your side. I have a twenty minute commute to work, with no congestion. I don’t need no new roads, and I don’t give a hoot if traffic can’t move in Manchester, Cambridge, Norwich London, Birmingham, Glasgow, Newcastle or Liverpool, or a hundred other places. But some people want less congestion, and that means better roads, and the guys who build them want wages, and that means taxes or tolls, take your pick. But one thing is for sure, nobody’s going to give anybody a free lunch – road builders want profits, so road users have to pay.

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Hi In Gear,



Sorry to hear about that.



Hey, candyfloss – sorry “In Gear”, I’m with you on that one. Because I think the whole world is charging down this technology route doesn't mean I like it all. Some of it sucks, but mamon is in control, so machines will be used instead of cops wherever they can be, on cost grounds.

By the way, I was once driving through a country lane in Quebec when I found one of your kind literally lying in the ditch pointing a camera at the cars! What a job. I drove to a restaurant for dinner and had a couple of beers. My wife drove back and the fool was still there. Ever since, I've had no respect. Anyway, thanks for your comments. I've inspired you to anger, which is an evil trait in a copper!

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My lucky day today! Tea break and a lunch break!



They do acknowledge the Speeder?'s letters. (He lives in Lancashire Hill Country and is another Wildcat cousin! )

He never gets an explanation for the reduced speed limit - just the same old spin about "scams saving lives" - except there were never any deaths on some of these roads, and the alleged injuries? Did not need the hospitals!!

We did see a press cutting about issuing cautions instead of the points and the course for low blips - but this has not happened yet!




Yup! Life is so unfair! On the other hand - she was lucky - survived and recovered 100%! (Was an 80mph hit into stationary vehicle!)



Why wait until they get pinged? Better to introduce some form of retrain with ADI or similar from passing L-test. That is - if we really want to see better driving standards in general and to try to avoid getting pinged! .



Horrid world you envisage. Wildcat lived in Moscow (supposedly to improve her command of spoken Russian). She never improved her spoken Russian aas she never got to speak to thee locals! She also spent time in Leipzig before we married. Visited her there - and the atmosphere was just awful and depressing. It did make your skin crawl. Would not like to see anything so intrusive imposed here.

Avoid children on public highways? Kids should be chained to their parents until they understand the Green Cross Code! Ours are!



In Lancs -far too many scams in wrong places and far too easy to get caught out.

Camber in crown of road, surfaces and slight gradients - could be quite easy to blip over four times in the three years in this county. especially at such low tolerances. You are twice as likely to get ticket there than in Brustromia!

Colleague still fighting NIP he got for pinging the scam hidden behind the bus shelter near the hospital (which he knew about) - but he had been called back to an emergency with a patient. He trigged it at 34mph and should get the Course offer - but it is the principle here. He is excellent driver and does not need the course!



Ah! So we agree that they can get even the best of us!




Expensive!

Wilfe is Swiss and hurtles around Germany visiting friends and relatives.



Do obey speed limit most of time - but normal bloke and can blip just over like anyone else!

Love all the women in my life (She'd claw me to pieces if said anything else - but it is true!) Also love all my cars! But would probably rescue the wife and kids first in a fire!

Thanks Gatsobait - you have given me a glimmer of hope. The global death rate due to cars is over a million people per year. Check it out. That's the point - the penny has dropped. Over a million per year. That's a lot, Gatsobait, unless you just mean UK, which is 3 or 4 k.

Aside: some people have even (callously) hinted that if they are not British, they don't count in some way. Nobody could believe that, could they?

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The best estimate I have seen for global road deaths per annum is under 250,000. Where does your 1 million come from?


Since we are discussing the road safety policies (and their effects) in the country with the safest roads in the world, I fail to see the direct relevance or significance of road deaths in - say - India.

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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

The Internet. I'll meet you in the middle, and say 500,000 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/car_crash/47357.stm, so that makes 4 big plane loads a day. Still quite a few. And then there's the 15 million people injured, which I hadn't mentioned, thanks for reminding me.



Three things really. First, the Internet respects no borders. Second, I thought it might be helpful if I compared death by car to the carnage and destruction of the Second World War, which was international and comparable in terms of destruction to global road carnage. Also, I have lived in several countries and I take an international perspective - death by car is still death by car in whatever country you live.

We can narrow it down to the local level, where it is down to 70 or so a week, and that’s in the country with the safest roads. Some might argue that we have the safest roads because we have good codes of behaviour. One of those codes should relate to maximum speed limits, but some drivers ignore them. Technology enforces the limits now, and people have started to adjust. But there are still cry babies who have been pinged by scameras who are making a fuss. Could the Australians be right about “whinging poms”, or is this a legitate concern - I'm not convinced.
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Well, this is a site focusing mainly on road safety within the UK.

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-mike[F]
Caught in the rush of the crowd, lost in a wall of sound..

The BBC site also claims 5000 road deaths Europe wide annually, and has plenty other dodgy facts. We'll have to find a far better reference source.



We have to offset against this death and injury some of the lives saved, economic benefits, and also the lives that were previously lost through other means of transport both directly and indirectly. Try these questions:

How many died in Horse related accidents before the car?
How many died due to horse manure related dieseses before the car?
How many are saved due to road transport to hospitals?
How many are saved due to medical care enabled by economic activity enabled by road transport?
How many are saved due to mobility for Police, Doctors, nurses and midwives?

And so on. Do you REALLY think that motorised road transport kills more than it saves?

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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

I for one am not here to 'whine'. I am troubled by 3 questions:
1. Can automated speed limit enforcement at least in theory result in impoved road safety (= a reduction in fatalities especially as the most objective measure)?
2. Does automated speed limit enforcement as implemented currently in the UK have a positive result overall on safety?
3. Is automated speed limit enforcement the most effective option for reducing fatalities and injuries, or merely the most 'cost-effective', or neither?

I am quite prepared to accept the speed camera if it is proven to me that it is effective. Pro- speed camera research and claims published to date are not convincing (being a research scientist I know what scientifically rigorous reserach should be). Moreover the authorities appear unwilling to face up to these entirely justified questions whilst the camera partnerships are set up in such a way that they have a strong vested interest in maintaining their operations almost regardless of success in terms of safety. The only clear winners in this whole setup are a) the treasury b) lawyers/magistrates c) those employed by the safety partnerships d) the government so long as the general public remains convinced by the 'awareness campaign'. All this does not inspire confidence.

Regards,
arthurdent

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DO NOT PANIC

No, I think that motorised road transport kills more than it needs to.

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So do I. Common ground at last.

So we can agree to drop the dodgy stats about how many die, and concentrate on how the awful toll might be reduced. Can't we?

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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

Hi basingcomputernerdywerks



Candyfloss? (I've arrested folk for that kind of talk before - tha knows! )

Oh! Help! Does that mean that film about robo terminators may actually horrors become true? Along with the one with the obedience bracelets? Gosh - coppers to become (gulp) thing of the past?

It will never catch on! People are social creatures - and prefer the human touch. Besides - we are an institution! A tradition!

Mind you - must admit -- quite like the idea of sitting down with me feet up, munching a doughnut whilst watching a PC screen and then lock on to some thug robbing an old lady of her pensions, click on him with me mouse and boom down at him "SHAT IT! YER NICKED!" or words of that kind of vernacular! Not sure how I would cuff him and get him down the nick - perhaps I then press another button and some remote controlled tank comes out and flattens him and, no doubt, given the type of software we use at the moment - flattens the the old lady too! Icing on the cake if I still draws me money!

It'll never catch on - this Brave New World of yours!

But then again - bit like - er - my colleagues elsewhere looking at certain naughty piccys on their (ahem) rest days!






And by 'eck - it's a bit rough on your back and shoulders doing that. Still think of all the loot he collected that day!

Have larked around in side streets in the past, basked like a shark at motorway junctions and exits - but in my nice warm cushy motor! Occasionally - we even catch the odd Mr Big! See - we do do other things! Won't go into the weird and wonderful messes I've got into in the past and present! But like your Canadian Mounty - I always gets my man!

Anger? Me? Have weird sense of humour, mate - you acquire it in my job!

Sorry if it sounds callous, but to echo SafeSpeed, they do not count. How would a hypothetical automated traffic control system in the UK affect the safety of a Brazilian farmer in a 20 year old Toyota pick-up? Not at all, and therefore of no relevance. I'm not saying that a road death in another country is any less tragic than it is here, but simply that it is not relevant when discussing the UK road system. Maybe in five hundred years all nations (if nations still exist as they do now) will be on about the same level technologically, and we could then include the global population. However, it seems far more pratical to stick to the 21st century, which means sticking to the UK as well.

But since you brought up worldwide deaths, let me offer you a little bet. A fiver says that more people die in the third world from malaria than road accidents. In fact I'll give you odds - 2 to 1, loser coughs up through Paypal on production of references to malarial deaths etc. If I'm right I would also expect that many more lives could be saved by making mozzie repellant more avaliable to people in affected countries than any type of road safety improvement.

Can I ask you something Basingwerk? Something you said in one of your replies to InGear (I think) suggested that you aren't so much suggesting how an automated system would help improve safety as predicting that sooner or later we're going to be stuck with one regardless. Have I misread you? I had assumed that you were very much in favour of automation, in spite of the impossible task of automating pedestrians etc. Apologies if I've jumped to the wrong conclusion about your position on this, although I still believe that automating the traffic has too many inherent problems to ever work in reality.

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Ah, you've not been on the M6Toll yet, then?

Various other motorways such as M45, M58, M69 and M180 are also likely to give you a similar experience for much of the time.

Regards,

Peter

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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

The internet also has not respect for the law - judging from the crime rate emanating from shady deals and those really dodgy sites! In fact, given number of people driven to suicide, incited to commit atrocious acts - I'd say the Internet is killing more people than the roads - if you want to look at it from global and nerdy inward perspective! Trouble is - again - cannot prove for certain - because we are back to ...... those dodgy figures which neither side can believe!

Both World Wars - high death rate (thought the influenza outbreak following WW1 actually killed more people than WW1 did!). But even so - carnage in WW2 (your example) not down to road deaths. There were the death camps, ghettoes, malnutrition throughout mainland Europe, bombs, air raids, sinkings, convoy attacks, shootings, gas attacks, battles going on everywhere. Not quite the same thing. All these atrocitiies came about with planning and deliberation! People were practically sacrificed as means to an end. Not quite the same thing as a car accident for whatever reason!

Though I will admit - have attended many crash scenes - and it has always been horrendous! So - my stance is on prevention - and I can put the fear of God up someone just by acid lecture on the dangers. At least they understand why their action can be dangerous. With a scamera - they never remember committing the offence, and they certainly do not learn from it.

With the mad Doc on this one - continuous encouragement to refresh skills is best way forward in short and long term.



People will be annoyed if they think they are being treated unfairly. Spoken to many colleagues and general consensus is dislike of methods currently being used. We are seeing reductions in trafpol, increases in automated fines for speeds which would perhaps have carried discretioanry caution and thus some education input,and increase in chancers who drive whilst under influence, fatigues, in defective vehicle with dangerous parts, worn and incorrectly inflated tyres, disqulaified, untaxed and insured. As trafpols decrease, these little germs are infecting our roads - and these are the people who actually cause most of the accidents. They are the ones who speed willy nilly - and because they are such fly- by- nights, uncannily they seem to avoid the fleecespots - but hit the real blackspots (not policed by scam as it makes no dosh by all accounts) and scoop jackpot each time. Only they hit the innocent! On PH - I read of a good cop (featured in Autocar a bit back) ready to jack it all in because of this! It is happening all the time! We cannot get the raw recruits to train up now because of the scam issues!

These increase as trafpol numbers drop. And a crook will find a way to over-ride technology as well.

Many of these "cry babies" you are talking about could have been amongst those pinged unfairly and illegally on the M4, could be on receiving end of TVP and Lancs draconian tolerance. Speed education course is a good idea, and the Lancs course is a darned good one. But they seriously undermine this iniative by targetting the wrong people. A caution would suffice for these minor up to 34/mph "offences" , and course should be offered to all at 10% + 2 and over. Points as well - if a serious breach - but the education should be offered.

Fair play is as important to me as enforcing the law which I do do with fairness and professionalism!

A small reduction in speed can be expected to result in a small decrease in accident risk, given a sufficiently large sample size, and also assuming all other factors remain constant - which they never do. But there are many other factors which determine accident risk, most of which are beyond the driver's control, and some of which have far more of an effect on accident risk than speed. To make it worse, reducing speed may well adversely affect other large risk factors, such as driver attention and risk-taking by pedestrians.
Even the impact speed in any particular collision depends on many factors, of which the pre-incident travelling speed is one of the less important.
But I digress. Your first question was whether, in theory, automated speed enforcement can result in improved road safety. Given the above, and also the fact that the speed limit seldom bears any relationship to a speed which is safe for conditions at the time, I'd say that the answer is, at best, inconclusive.
The answer to your second question can be found in the published figures for road fatalities. These figures have stopped improving since the advent of automated speed enforcement.
I think the answer to your third question is rather self-evident.



Then you'll no doubt be aware of the amount of pure sophistry which passes off as research nowdays.
One of the worst examples I've seen is a research paper from the University of Adelaide which, incidentally, is quoted as a reference source in many of our own TRL research documents. This paper sets out to examine the relationship between speed and accidents, and then purports to quantify the changes in casualty figures likely to result from reductions in speed.
All very well, except that their whole theory is underpinned by the quite incredible assumption that one can change the speed of a vehicle without changing its position at a particular point in time. Evidently, elementary physics is not one of the learned gentlemen's strong points.

Regards
Peter

I thought I was fully aware of the flaws in that work, but I hadn't spotted that one. Can you explain more please? Which report exactly are you referring to? Kloeden? (SP?)

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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

And we pay all over again in fuel tax.



Well, you either tolerate them or you stay at home and live off benefits, which - incidentally - someone has to pay for.
But we're being charged for going to work and being productive.



Some of that 40-odd billion they take off us anually in fuel tax might be a good start. 40 billion would build a lot of roads.
But the government probably wastes most of that, leaving even less money for hospitals, schools etc.

The same. There are several similar papers from the same authors which say much the same thing, so I'll quote from one of them: "Travelling Speed and the Risk of Crash Involvement."

It says:

"Additional information about the effects of travelling speed was obtained by calculating what the change in velocity at impact (delta V) for those people injured in the crash would have been if the case vehicle had been travelling at a different speed, using methods similar to those applied in the recent Road Accident Research Unit study of speed effects in fatal
pedestrian collisions (McLean, et al., 1994).
The calculated travelling speed for the case vehicle was changed, if necessary, according to the hypothetical scenario. All other crash factors were kept constant including points of impacts on vehicles. If the driver of the case vehicle reacted before the collision, by applying brakes, the distance away from the crash site (calculated using reaction times) when he or she reacted was used as the starting point for the scenario. Full details of the calculations used are presented in Volume 2 of this report.
The resulting crash severity, measured by change in velocity at impact, for all persons injured was calculated and compared to the original crash severity."

The telling bits are: "The calculated travelling speed for the case vehicle was changed", and: "the distance away from the crash site (calculated using reaction times) when he or she reacted was used as the starting point for the scenario."

Now, unless the driver started off from this chosen starting point and accelerated instantaneously from rest to travelling speed (a physical impossibility, as I'm sure you'll agree) then they cannot have been at that particular starting point at that time had they been doing a different speed.
Had they been travelling even slightly slower, over any appreciable distance, they would not yet have reached that point, and had they been travelling slightly faster they would have been a long way past it at that particular time. Remember, they're using actual accident cases here.

And, on that point, and that point alone, all of their carefully calculated conclusions come to nought.

This is the sort of fundamental error you might expect from a somewhat dim fifth-grader, not from a distinguished team of professors.
It also makes me wonder whatever became of the peer-review process.

Regards
Peter

In my experience you get control systems by stealth whether you like it or not. This is because animals are mostly driven by fear and greed. People, who are clever, lazy animals, use things to save effort (or cost or time or something). Since before the industrial revolution, we have been at it, automating everything we can. Since the computer, it's got worse. It's got to the point where the process is as important as the product, and humanity is becoming nothing more than a huge group of statistical, jostling atoms. People have become the servants of the very processes they set up to serve them, and we are getting pissed off.

For example, one of the last great freedoms is your car. In the 70's, when it was still quite dear, it was great. Now, motoring is dirt cheap and every Tom, Dick and Harry can afford a fast car. The roads are clogged and drivers are intolerant, and everybody is angry - the cost has moved from the product (owning the car) to the process (getting somewhere in a timely way in the damn thing).

So now, in this process controlled age, in move the process engineers to sort this out. They will remove your congestion by a charge (in Durham, M6 Toll, London etc ) or remove your danger with an instrument. And, of course, feed the results to the computer that sends you the summons - bing, bang, bong, closed loop control.

So that's it really. Motoring has been in a local minimum for a long time, but now social and technolgy forces are combining to impose order onto that particular avenue of pleasure.

Being lazy, greedy, afraid and clever, I am only interested in the effects it has on me. I might pick up a little work on the systems end of it, and I don't mind pinging the 'thumb in bum, mind in neutral' brigade, but I would expect some tolerance - 3 points is a bit much for a first offence at 31 mph, anybody would agree. After all, they might get me! But a total ban for doing 90 in the 60 zone is in the frame, as far as I am concerned. And 45 near a school deserves gaol time.

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