Safe Speed Forums

The summer is nearly over so "motorbike season" is about to end, whilst motor cycles make up a tiny minority of travelled time, they make up a great number of deaths and serious injuries, the people I know who own these bikes seem to use them not for serious transport but for "pleasure".

Should public roads not be for the use of people who need to travel rather than pople who want to use them for "leisure"?

Leisure is a factor of choice in the purchase of many 4 wheeled cars and the reason behind many journeys as well.

Few travel activities are 100% based on need to travelincluding many business activities as well.

Would you seek to have all leisure activities banned and only those that can demonstrate need be permitted ?

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Richard Ceen
We live in a time where emotions and feelings count far more than the truth, and there is a vast ignorance of science (James Lovelock 2005)

Would that include people who only use the roads in order to go on holiday? Sightseeing buses?

I do enjoy driving at times, and sometimes go out for the pleasure of doing it.

Also, I should imagine that the bikers who have died while riding have taken comparatively less people with them when the went than anyone in a car/bus/lorry/etc.

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Andrew.

Could you possibly PM me the name & address of your dealer....because I'd really like to experience some of the shit you are taking

Well thank goodness many of us do use the roads for pleasure – that’s where the safest road users come from.

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It's tricky doing nothing - you never know when you're finished

Can't it be up to the person driving what they use the road for?
After all they do pay to use it.

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Oct 11 Birmingham Half Marathon. I am running for the British Heart Foundation.
http://www.justgiving.com/Rob-Taylor

Better stop all this "leisure" cycling then?

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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

Speaking as someone who lives in an area where a great deal of the motoring is done for "pleasure" (Cumbria) AND whose economy is largely dependent on those who choose to motor for pleasure...

...I'd say NO!

They are public roads; therefore they are for the use of the public. It matters not one jot or tittle whether the public use them because they need (for whatever reason) to travel or because they simply want to use them - for whatever other reason. What does it matter?

So why this bizarre question, "Safetyman"?

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Save a cow - eat a vegetarian

Hi,

As far as I'm concerned they are public highways and people have a right to travel on them for any purpose they see fit.

I'm also in an area which sees a lot of leisure driving (around the Norfolk Broads). If you took away the summer tourist trade many places around here would just fold up.

How on earth could you enforce a ban on leisure travel anyway? Who would decide what constitutes essential driving and what is leisure driving? The only way I can see this working would be some horrendous Soviet-style system where everybody has to get a travel permit to drive anywhere, with some bureaucrat sitting behind a desk arbitrarily deciding whether to grant permission for a journey or not. What happens if a trip is part essential, part pleasure?

How would you propose to stop unauthorized travel? Satellite tracking of every vehicle to automatically check against a central database of authorized journeys? Police checkpoints everywhere to ask where everybody is going?

"Your papers, citizen!"

Safetyman, just tell me a leisure activity which you take part in and I will find a good reason why it should be stopped.

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

Noe people mis understood on purpose, I am not poposing that people ought to be stopped from travelling to and from holidays, leisure activities and so on, what i would propose is that viehicle should not be used or sold for the purpose of leisure, IE high powered motor cycles when a car would do the job of transporting you just as well (actually for many reasons Better)
The fact that the manufactures advatize and sell cars with far bigger outputs than needed is the point, the fact that people are going nowwhere in some of these vehicles is the point.
Look at the Chelsea tractor brigade, big heavy vehicles made for rough ground, taking kids to school by women who quite frankly could not drive the things for the reason they are designed.

WHO PAYS??
all of us through taxes, keeping injured motorcyclists alive.
all of us through unwarrented pollotion.

It's hard to see how anyone could have misunderstood you on purpose, when in your opening post you stated:

"Should public roads not be for the use of people who need to travel rather than pople who want to use them for "leisure"?"

Nothing in that statement which even hints at the merest suggestion that what you really meant was:

"Why should anyone need to buy a vehicle with more power output than an asthmatic vacuum cleaner given that such a low-powered vehicle will still allow them to get to their destination - be it business or leisure - even though it might take longer, be less comfortable, and probably far more unsafe"





Ah, but who decides how much is too much? I very much doubt that if the decision were to be made by guvmint, it'd be made by anyone with even the merest whiff of petrol/diesel running through their veins. Noooo, given the way our beloved leaders are currently talking, you can be as sure as sure can be that the decision is going to be made by some greenie who thinks private motoring is the very essence of evil and will do everything in their power (and perhaps a few things outside their jurisdiction, but these days who's going to penalise someone for wanting to be even more green?) to make life as unpleasant as possible for the average person in the street who just wants to buy a car/bike/van/etc thats suitable for their personal needs.

I have just two words for anyone who wants to impose such restrictions on the private motorist. FUCK OFF.

Let the open market decide which vehicles shall live or die. If people have the means and desire to buy 8 litre V10's that drink fuel faster than someone with a full pint glass in their hand 5 seconds before the last orders bell rings, then they should bloody well be allowed to buy them. Look at the typical mix of vehicles on our roads right now - is everyone driving/riding around in/on massively overpowered/oversized vehicles that are "unsuitable" for their actual needs. No. For every high powered car or bike I see (and by high powered I'm using a pretty pessimistic, greenie-style, definition of high powered - e.g. anything bigger than, say, 2 litres for a medium sized car) I see a hell of a lot more cars and bikes which are low/average power. And quite frankly, having driven cars in the past with barely enough pulling power to skin a rice pudding, I now very much appreciate the ability to summon up an extra 50-100 horses with a small movement of my right foot when the situation suggests a need to do so - e.g. trying to match speeds when joining a motorway/NSL dual carriageway from a short/tightly curved slip road which doesn't allow you to take a long run-up to the merge point.

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Chris

The government will decide how much. Quite simply, the market will rule. Put taxes up until only those with LOTS of money can afford to drive anything. They will drive MASSIVE 4X4's and MASSIVE sports cars because they can. The greens can bleat about it, but they're not immune from backhanders, just like the other lots. Money buys politicians. The speed limits will be 20 everywhere, except in bus lanes and for taxis and police (no change there then).
None of then give a shit about the ecology, or CO2....they all just want power and at the moment the driving force (for driving force read: EXCUSE) is "green"
You have literally over a thousand government agencies, of one sort or another (including trusts totally dependent on government cash) which all need money to survive and prosper. So, they're all getting-in on the cash-cow that green is.
Not forgetting that the press is also big-biz, so not much impartiality there then.

After I waded through your style of spelling, punctuation and grammar, I see that you have changed your argument to one of controlling us for "our own good" as you see it.

On your second point of pollution control by stopping unwarranted activities, do you think that football should be banned? This is clearly an unnecessary activity and involves huge amounts of pointless travel by lots of people.

Oh, I mentioned above that you should name a leisure activity you enjoy. Just replace "football" in my paragraph above with your choice. Unless you chose playing solitaire you should get my point.

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

I thought a ridiculously powerful motorbike still used less fuel than a smallish car?

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Andrew.

Fuel economy on my 1000cc bike is around 45mpg, rising to 55ish when touring and dropping to 20ish when ridden hard.

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Less Kodak, more Kojak.
In times of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Really?

Please explain to me how your cage stuck in a traffic jam is doing the environment any favours.....hell, even when it isn't stuck in traffic it's pumping out much more shit than a bike ever will.


Maybe if you blind fuckers that are safely cocooned in a ton of steel actually bothered your arses to look twice instead of giving a cursory glance, there wouldn't be so many injured motorcyclists.......you ben zonah!



My XJ900 (Divvy) returns 43mpg regardless of whether I ride it like a big girls blouse, or whether I ride it like I stole it.

My very much modded 1976 Z1 on the other hand.......well, I won't go there

I am just in shock with what you have said.
People should buy anything they want, as long as they can afford it, and use the roads for whatever purpose they like. Perhaps if more people used the roads for enjoyment, rather than a means to an end, people might take more pride in there driving.

I enjoy driving, and therefore I do just drive for one purpose enjoyment. I pick routes that are a bit more interesting. As a result I take pride in my driving, so try to improve it.

The people who see driving as evil and get no pleasure out of it a probably more dangerous than those driving for pleasure. Because they will not want to improve.

You are welcome onto planet earth, anytime you wish to vist.

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Oct 11 Birmingham Half Marathon. I am running for the British Heart Foundation.
http://www.justgiving.com/Rob-Taylor