Safe Speed Forums

For some time now, I've been pondering the purpose of setting speed limits and erecting lollipops by the side of the road. How does it serve road safety to have them there?

I suppose what I'm wondering about is whether they are still fulfilling the purpose that they originally had many years ago, up to, say the 1980s. I think they were seen by nearly all motorists as a sensible guideline as to the type of road that you were about to encounter - so 30mph meant an urban, built-up road, NSL meant the open country road and motorways, and limits in between were used sparingly where particular hazards demanded, or where it was possible in towns to allow increased speeds due to the topography. The vast majority of limits were obviously sensible (I know we'd all quibble about this or that stretch of road) and respected. The police were there to keep a watching brief and pull over the obviously unsafe.

Looking at the lollipops today, I really can't say that anymore. There are now 20mph "zones", which are a bad joke, for a start. They are meant to be "self-enforcing", so the police are hardly going to bother. However, the real blight is not in towns, but out in the open country. Oxfordshire appears bent on reducing the limit on single-carriageway major A-roads to 50mph across the county, and is then surprised when no-one takes much notice except near the cameras. Worcestershire has a blanket policy of imposing 30mph or 40mph limits in "villages", which may consist of a very few widely-spaced houses. Reduced limits for settlements are gradually extended hundreds of yards outside those settlements. I can only describe these speed limits as "political", imposed in the expectation that road users will immediately obey them. They won't, of course, unless forced to.

So, we've had a change of purpose, I believe, from that of "information" to that of "enforcement". This is not, I believe, a change for the better.

Should we keep speed limits? Paul Smith thinks so, as a guide to drivers - this fits the "information" purpose above". The "safety" camera brigade also think so, but for very different reasons - "enforcement" alone seems to be their watchword.

For my part, I'd keep the lollipops, but abolish the offence of "speeding". All by itself it serves no useful purpose. Pull people over for lack of care and attention, reckless or dangerous driving to be sure, and use their speed as an aggravating factor - similarly, build it into the more serious charges where injury and/or death are involved. But "speeding" must go, and with it the battalion of Gatsos and the cavalry of Talivans. Am I on my own in this opinion?

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Keep right on to the end of the road ...

It would be nice to lose the offence of speeding, but it ain't going to happen. There would still be times when a dangerous driver is stopped but the speeding offence is really all the police have got against him. It's a bit like if proving GBH after a pub fight is going to be iffy they'll settle for ABH or affray because at least they can make it stick.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

I firmly believe that - in practice - speed limits should be enforced as though they were strongly advisory rather than mandatory. The traffic police should only prosecute drivers if, in their judgment, they are both exceeding the posted limit (a technical violation) and driving in a risky or dangerous manner (a safety violation).

However, this must depend on the judgment of the individual officer. If the principle was enshrined in law, then the result would be one of three outcomes:

(1) in effect, the courts would rubber-stamp the posted limits, so the situation would be little different from at present
(2) whether someone was convicted or not would largely depend on how much they could spend on a lawyer to make a case that their driving under those circumstances was not dangerous. It would be a lawyers' field day and end up as one law for the rich and another for the rest of us
(3) securing convictions would become so problematical that the police would effectively stop speed enforcement altogether, which would give a green light to a substantial minority of irresponsible drivers

I fully understand the theoretical appeal of the idea but do not feel it is workable in practice.

If we still had sensible, consistent speed limits and enforcement by live police officers exercising discretion, then of course this problem would not have arisen at all.

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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

Perhaps the working in the highway code could be changed from MUST NOT to SHOULD NOT but I think it might be wise to leave the MUST NOT for 30 mph limits to get across the message that speeding in built up urban areas is far more dangerous than on the open road. Hopefully allowing drivers latitude outside towns will make them more willing to accept enforcement in town centres where that extra few mph probably makes more difference.

Perhaps there should be a specific 'driving like a plonker in the opinion of a traffic pol' offence which lawyers can't defend against

Isn't that called "driving without due care and attention"? That can happen at any speed from 5mph to 500mph.

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Keep right on to the end of the road ...

Indeed. But let's say someone drives down their local High Street, which is quite wide, at a quietish time, at 44 mph. It's a nominal 30 limit. There's nothing obviously wrong with their driving, no collisions or near misses, they're just going a bit too fast for the conditions.

Either the court says "the mere fact that you drove along here at 44 mph constitutes lack of due care", which in effect simply reinforces the speed limit, or they say "well, we can't find anything wrong with your driving on this occasion, so you're free to go", which makes it doubly difficult to convict anyone for 44 or under in the future.

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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'm with Peter all the way on this one. I think speed limits serve three worthy purposes:

1) To provide firm guidance for the inexperienced and the uncertain. The limits keep them away from exceeding safe speeds by wild margins.

2) To provide information about expected hazard density and local conditions to experienced drivers.

3) To provide an easy means of prosecution for those carelessly or recklessly exceeding safe thresholds.

If any one else can add any more to that list, I'd be very interested. (Funny thing is, I'm sure I thought of a 4th reason the other day, but I can't remember what it was and I didn't write it down - I was driving at the time)

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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

Trouble is, they provide an easy means of prosecution for ANYONE exceeding the number on the lollipop, no matter how safe or unsafe, and the numbers on the lollipops are coming down for ill-considered reasons. All too often they're too far away from the safe thresholds. The whole system is drifting into disrepute. Please tell me if I'm wrong here.

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Keep right on to the end of the road ...

I don't think we can think about removing speed limits until the average driving standard is raised. Speed limits serve to inform those who aren't confident in their ability to judge a safe speed, and perhaps more importantly, those who don't know the road, of a suitable speed for the conditions. Of course, many speed limits are now being inexplicably lowered in areas, so the idea of limits being used for information is being eroded.



To give the brave boys in the partnerships something to do, of course!

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

Surely overzealous policing and/or stupid limits are abusing an otherwise sensible system. Take that away and suddenly speed limits don't look so bad.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

Yes exactly. 15 years or so ago everything worked fine and didn't really generate any complaints. I was happy. Fatalities were falling every year.

We just need to get back to the previous sensible approach to speed limits.

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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 John Leeming said thirty-five years ago, it doesn't matter what anyone believes about [speed-limits], it only matters what the facts are.

Do speed limits work, or do they actually cause accidents?

I have been looking at a number of studies which suggest that imposition of speed limits (or more rigid enforcement of existing ones) actually causes more accidents although not necessarily more fatalities.

No-one has yet explained adequately why this happens. Two possibilities could be:

a) the speed limits take focus from actively observing road conditions to focusing on the speedometer or just dreaming along,

b) some road users assume traffic will be travelling slowly and fail to keep a proper lookout or misjudge speeds of faster traffic.

It seems that a huge proportion of urban accidents are caused by failure to give way. There seems to be insufficient analysis of why this happens.

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Alan Wilkinson (at http://www.fastandsafe.org)

From Simonet & Wilde on risk homestasis:

Due to the inevitable uncertainty of the outcome of any given action, the human brain has learned to optimise its degree of psycho-physiological arousal. A lower than optimal arousal would reduce our readiness to deal with a sudden threat; a higher than optimal level would soon exhaust our nervous resources. Physical risk, therefore, cannot be removed with impunity from the traffic system by a massive lowering of legal speed limits or any technical intervention aimed at the same effect. Such measures would be expected to produce a reduction in alertness and, hence, induce a state of behavioural adaptation to new conditions which is less capable of dealing with unexpected threats. A major decrease in the traffic accident rate per capita would, therefore, remain doubtful. If coercive speed reduction were successful in curtailing speed, this would likely amount to reversing the historical trend and thus lead to a reduced road mobility per head of population and a higher accident rate per kilometre driven.

So this would lead to a) and b) as people would just not be paying proper attention.

I have put the whole of the pdf as it is full of all sorts of interesting stuff here:
http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~teabell ... stasis.pdf

An excellent quote which will come in very handy when arguing the case that enforced speed reductions will lead to reduced concentration and are unlikely to deliver the claimed safety benefits.

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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

Support Peter E and our Paulie on this.

Our patch does indeed enforce according to good old common sense values.

Basically - we are back to good ol' COAST application. - which is what CJB et al are really saying.

Concentration, Observation, Anticipation, Space and Time - nail this into driving lessons, driving test, driver information adverts, periodic assessments - and lo and behold - majority would tend to drive safely at all times.

Acid lecture does extol virtues of COAST!

Yobs and thickos - well - we get them banged to rights with proper penalities - dished out by competent mags.

Utopia! Jobs for trafpols secure, safer roads, everyone's a winner!

Except for the Twazaks in the Talivan Noo Labia Offices!