Safe Speed Forums

Do you feel "safe" going at 35mph on a pushbike?

No.

Why is travelling at 35mph in a car any different?

Well, you can't fall off a car for starters. Cars have more grip, they have to have minimum standards of maintenance, they have to have qualified drivers, they don't get punctures all the time. I'd rather go over the bonnet of a car at 35 MPH than get hit by a bike at 35 mph. What is the braking distance of a push bike (assuming it has working brakes) at 35 mph?

I was more talking about interference from outside agencies.

For instance going at 35mph down a particular hill with junctions on it, all it takes is a car to stick a nose out and you're toast (which is the reasons why you won't catch me doing that sort of speed).

Yet cars hurtle down it apparently without a fear in the world.

What's the diffence?

(I'll check the stopping distance tomorrow on a 40mph road near me that doesn't have junctions)

But if you read the Highway Code - you should know the stopping distance.

Also .. if you use Wildy's calculations from her foreign codes - you can work out more precisely.

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For a pushbike at 35mph?

Don't remember that one!

Testing the negative:

I've done 47mph (on a flat, on a road) on my pushbike and I felt safe doing it (I've gone a lot faster but the less said about that the better).
I've done less than 10mph and felt at risk (usually from other cyclists).

So I'm not sure what you're trying to prove here.

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That there's no such thing as a safe speed.

Are you saying you are always riding/driving/walking at a dangerous speed?
(before anyone claims a strawman - this is reductio ad absurdum)

Also, is 'driving at a speed such that one can stop within the distance one can reasonably expect to be clear' a safe speed? If not then why not?
Also, do you accept that definition of a safe speed is one accepted by the general population? If so then do you accept your opinion is one of an extreme minority?

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Views expressed are personal opinions and are not necessarily shared by the Safe Speed campaign

Neither do I. American Federal Regulations require a stopping distance of 15fett from a speed of 15mph http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/cfr_2007/janqtr/pdf/16cfr1512.18.pdf

As it is quadratic with speed that translates to 82ft at 35mph. Add the HC reaction time of 2/3 second, equal to 34ft. Gives a total of 116ft or 35meters. HC distance for a car is 29meters.

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But surely you know how your brakes work on your bike You need longer to stop. In fact .. that also applies to motor bikes per something Wildy was saying to some IAM wannabes she was giving a welcome spiel to.

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No I don’t, I never go that fast on my bicycle. I used to but feel too vulnerable in the traffic these days, (SMIDSY). I don’t have a speedo on my bike anymore but with the near incident yesterday I was just pounding up a hill out of my seat at about 5mph with the wind blowing every-which-way.

All drivers should be aware that cycists are not on rails but he obviously hasn’t cycled in years, if ever, and thought only of himself. Cyclists are likely to wobble for all sorts of reasons - fact! I could hear him coming up behind me and could sense he was going to overtake me while a car was coming towards us the other way even though it was going to be tight. I quickly sat down for more stability and pulled over as far as I could. If I didn’t I’m absolutely certain he would have clipped me or who knows what...

The point I was trying to make Weepej is that he was not speeding. In fact it would have been safer if he had broken the speed limit to overtake me safely, leaving me room, and then pull back in before the on-coming car was level with us.

Obviously, he could also have just waited behind me until there was a better gap but the point I’m making is it’s about safe driving and not just speed. He was an unsafe driver and that is what I would like to see targeted. How would a speed camera have helped me? Answer – It wouldn’t.

I have come so very close to giving up cycling because of these morons, (mentioned it here before), but last year I moved house and have been trying different routes to work. I’ve got it down to mainly side roads and part of a cycle path, route 5, which follows the river Rea for a while . But on some of the roads I am literally taking my life in my hands. So I still may give up yet; either that or join the KSI stats I fear

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The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not necessarily represent the views of Safe Speed.
You will be branded a threat to society by going over a speed limit where it is safe to do so, and suffer the consequences of your actions in a way criminals do not, more so than someone who is a real threat to our society.

I'd like to explain something to you weepej. A bit about me...

As part of my job, I often see what happens to cyclists when they come into contact with cars or the road and I wonder how some of them are alive after having half their skull removed. The same goes for motorcyclists condemned to life as a tetraplegic after a C5/6 fracture and their new world is controlled via a sip/puff switch for the rest of their lives. I’ve seen young men cut down in the prime of their life after a car accident. You wouldn’t believe some of the things I see.

I think if you had just one month of this you may start to focus more on real danger and what is actually safe IMHO. A speed camera measures speed, not safety. If a traf pol was there yesterday he would have seen the dangerous driving but instead that driver can carry on with his bad driving without ever breaking a speed limit until he kills someone. What do you propose is done about it? More speed cameras?

Do you see where I’m coming from bud?

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The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not necessarily represent the views of Safe Speed.
You will be branded a threat to society by going over a speed limit where it is safe to do so, and suffer the consequences of your actions in a way criminals do not, more so than someone who is a real threat to our society.

What the speed camera doesn't and can' do is not important, it's what it does do that is and that helps more than it hinders.

Saying what something can't do isn't aiding your side of the argument and in my estimation it will be ignored by those that you hope would be influenced by it. You may influence some teenagers or those with a thuggish intellect but you won't convince anyone of worth.

You've 'decided' not to reply to (or even acknowledge) many of my reposes to you earlier within this thread (in fact you've been remarkably selective with who you reply to). I feel I now need to remind you of one of these missed posts. Within this I directly challenged you with the statement that cameras haven't been shown to give any positive impact when considering fundamental confounding factors.

So yes it is about what it does, but so many SCP analysis and PR staff have had many years to demonstrate a positive impact when factoring these fundamental confounding factors - yet nothing has ever been forthcoming (from them or yourself); it's not like they don't have the resource. Why is this?
Shall we look at the national trend since 1950 and see what's really happened?


Saying what something can/does do without factoring known factors (let alone the known and quantified ones) isn't aiding the SCP side of the argument. In my estimation their claims should be ignored by those that apply a critical thought process. The SCPs may influence some teenagers or those with a sluggish intellect but they won't convince anyone of real worth.

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Views expressed are personal opinions and are not necessarily shared by the Safe Speed campaign

Your "fundamental confounding factors" are nothing more than assumptions on your part and have no supporting base.

Are you having a laugh?

Firstly there's RTTM and long-term trends, which has been already shown to be responsible for ~80% of the fall of KSIs at urban camera sites (more for rural); I'm sure you know the Four Year Report well enough to accept this as fact. Yet the SCPs continue to mislead the public into believing the cameras are responsible for the entire fall of KSIs. Don't you think that's nothing short of outright deception?

Don't you think there is a problem with the confounding factor of 'bias on selection', where additional safety features at camera sites result with a reduction of KSI, that reduction being nothing to do with the camera site? I did already say to you (within the post I just linked to you, something else you never acknowledged) "Camera success is indeed measured in KSI reduction, but many other things cause KSI reduction, even at camera sites; hence so it follows that the standard measure for camera success, as you have quoted it, is an false one."
Is this not reason enough to accept it as a fundamental confounding factor? If not the please explain to all of us why you believe it isn't.

I think Odin gave a great example of the issue "to generate a non-existent benefit from a speed limit reduction"; oddly enough this is something else you didn't acknowledge.

What about:
- reduced exposure ('push'ed displacement to non-control roads),
- less overall travel (prohibitive fuel costs, credit crunch),
- concerted crackdown of other offences (e.g. driving while impaired),
Are you really going to say we should reject these as confounding factors because those who have the resource to gather the relevant data (usually those who benefit from the fines their efforts generates) haven't done so?

Do you really believe all these factors should simply be outright ignored whilst letting the SCPs wrongly claim the amount of success that they do without accounting for these obvious factors?

The RTTM argument previously had 'no base' as you put it, but look at the statistical damage that one alone did!

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Views expressed are personal opinions and are not necessarily shared by the Safe Speed campaign

What I would like to see is some way of reducing accidents not caused by ,"people exceeding a speed limit" and some improvement in the increasing amount of poor/sloppy driving on our roads today. Speed cameras and speed restrictions won't do a thing to help those statistics.

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My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.

My point exactly. You don’t make an big impact on a problem unless you recognise what the problem is, where it is going wrong and tackle it at source!

What we need are “highly responsible, highly trained drivers with adequate time to react to anything that might happen”]

Greenshed, why don't you answer Steve?

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The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not necessarily represent the views of Safe Speed.
You will be branded a threat to society by going over a speed limit where it is safe to do so, and suffer the consequences of your actions in a way criminals do not, more so than someone who is a real threat to our society.

You surely can't mean the other 95% of accidents

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Views expressed are personal opinions and are not necessarily shared by the Safe Speed campaign