Safe Speed Forums

I would assume due to their elevated driving position and vertical windscreens they won't suffer as much from the reduced visability that car drivers do. However, that does not mean to say I condone speeds that are innapropriate to the conditions of course.

I know what your saying though, it's very intimidating to be in that situation. When we came back from France I went up the A1 and it was as close to monsoon weather as Britain will ever get, and I was just managing to do 50mph, but the HGV's were batting on at 56mph. I wasn't proud of going so slow, but there wasn't much else I could do - visability was so poor, especially being so low down.

The only funny bit was the look on the faces of the staff in McDonalds when I walk in wearing a flowery t-shirt and shorts...... with the rain bouncing down outside!

going off on a tangent- why don't the police carry large lightweight tarps to throw over crashed vehicles to deter rubberneckers? apart from the danger it's flippin' annoying when an entire carridgeway slows to 5mph for 15 minutes just because everyone wants to oggle at some broken cars on the other side.

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Fear is a weapon of mass distraction

blademansw said "Then again, when you hear the local pratnerships strapline "Drive Safe, Drive within the speed limit" you start to understand....."As long as I am not breaking the speed limit, I am safe"

But of course - the pratnerships say it all the time,
drive below the limit and you are a safe driver, no mention of the CONDITIONS.

BAA, BAA ,do we need sheepdogs on the roads or police.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/sout ... 505764.stm


M1 shut= man fell/pushed off a bridge
A1(m) shut accident
+ 2 more accidents in the chaos shuts the whole of Yorkshires motorway network

There comes a point wher investigating accidents could cost even more lives as people in the gridlocked areas fail to get around and fail to get the services they need.

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Speed limit sign radio interview. TV Snap Unhappy
“It has never been the rule in this country – I hope it never will be - that suspected criminal offences must automatically be the subject of prosecution” He added that there should be a prosecution: “wherever it appears that the offence or the circumstances of its commission is or are of such a character that a prosecution in respect thereof is required in the public interest”
This approach has been endorsed by Attorney General ever since 1951. CPS Code

what should they have done then? Brushed him to the side of the road and waited until tonight when it was quiet to pick up the pieces? If it was a family member, I submit that you would be keen that every piece of evidence was collected.

I know that sounds facetious but I think sometimes we miss the real story in our frustration at being delayed.

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COAST Not just somewhere to keep a beach.

A young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who operate above the law.

Did they really need to close the motorway BOTH SIDES for most of the day?

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Speed limit sign radio interview. TV Snap Unhappy
“It has never been the rule in this country – I hope it never will be - that suspected criminal offences must automatically be the subject of prosecution” He added that there should be a prosecution: “wherever it appears that the offence or the circumstances of its commission is or are of such a character that a prosecution in respect thereof is required in the public interest”
This approach has been endorsed by Attorney General ever since 1951. CPS Code

Without wishing to appear too callous, essentially yes IMHO. Collect the bits, take photographs, then get the traffic moving again.


It's not just the potential excess danger caused by the frustration, it's the sheer cost of the disruption... Think of all the truckers who went over their hours on the tacho... The timed deliveries that didn't get made and the penalty clauses that may have been triggered as a result... All the missed appointments... Etc etc.

What did yesterday's exercise actually cost? £50 million, £100 million??

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

I think the point with that specific incident was that it may have been a murder - in that case the police have an absolute duty to collect all the facts.

As I said, if it had been a family member who had been murdered, but the police were unable to prosecute because they had rushed the evidence gathering, they would be pilloried.

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COAST Not just somewhere to keep a beach.

A young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who operate above the law.

Actually, the fog problems are quite a lot less in an HGV. You don't get anywhere near as much glare back from the fog or the rain spraying on the windscreen in your line of sight when your head is 10 feet above the road surface and the beam of your headlights-which are mounted higher up so you get less glare too-so what you think is insufficient visibility from a car driver or bikers POV is fine in an HGV.Add to that the amount of power that you have from the headlights/fog lights in a truck ... (mine puts out 900 watts with all the front lights on and 500 watts on low beam with foglights on-around double that of a car but standard for an HGV)I went out in the car on the motorway in the rain a few days back and was surprised how little I could see compared with in the truck-you forget after a while. I ride a bike to work.

BTW, as for jacknifing, you won't jacknife an artic unless the tractor unit brakes are better than the trailer brakes(and that doesn't happen) or something causes the tractor unit to suddenly slow faster than the trailer wants to-for example changing down to 1st gear (yes, I know you cant actually do it) at 56 or not having the trailer brakes connected. The trailer does the majority of the stopping for you. I'd hazard a guess that the majority of the jacknifes you actually see are caused by the tractor unit hitting something-it's very hard to steer an artic hard enough under braking on a motorway to jacknife it.

The idiots in cars doing 80+ are something else. I swear they have a deathwish.

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Smokebelching,CO2 making,child murdering planet raping,granny mugging,politically incorrect globally warming (or is it climate changing now it's getting colder?)thug.
That's what the government want you to believe of me. If they get back in I'm emigrating.

Yes absolutely agree. The police are in a 'damned if they do and damned if they don't scenario here.
I'd much sooner they take their time and do it right, however, having been stuck on the M54 for 5 hours once (having told my boss I'd only be 30 minutes) I'm well aware of the gnawing frustration that just sitting there waiting for radio updates can create.
I often wonder if, after determining that a clearup is going to be complex and protracted, the motorway cannot be shut 2 junctions back from the incident and and vehicles trapped between the incident and the previous junction couldn't be backtracked in a safe and controlled manner to the previous junction so they could escape.
I realise that on some motorways with large distances between junctions, or instances where diverted traffic would spill into a cramped urban setting this would be impracticale.

Let's not forget the little girl a couple of weeks ago who saw her favourite cuddly toy fly out of a partially-open window (hopefully didn't hit a bike).
Dad pulls over onto hard shoulder, calls police- who do a rolling roadblock AND SHUT THE MOTORWAY to retrieve the toy and return it to owner...

WE should consider ourselves lucky they didn't choose to investigate why the said cuddly toy was ejected from the vehicle.
You couldn't make it up could you, imagine the cost of that particular heroic good deed. Also maybe the officers in question would like to explain why when a woman stops at a police vehicle that was on the hard shoulder to ask for direction help she gets fined and pointed, but in this case the boys in blue are happy to ignore the offence of stopping on a motorway and stop everyone else instead to recover a toy?
RJ

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Too much of our money is being wasted on supposed road safety improvements that are actually making driving more dangerous.

Whilst this thread has some valid points, accident investigation is an integral part of the process of dealing with motorway accidents...

However there are some other factors to be considered.
1. Accident scenes are treated as crime scenes, so where a simple non-injury bump occurs there should be no reason to close the motorway, however where the there is an accident that involves major injury, or fatality, this has to be investigated, so scene preservation is essential, and unfortunately closing the road (as is done on the normal roads in similar instances) is the acceptable methodology employed. For major crashes opposite carriageways are closed sometimes to stop the culture of rubbernecking causing more chaos, i've seen hgvs in lane 3 watching one accident on the m6 in the last few weeks.

2. this also gives the emergency services a "sterile area" to work where they can be assured that the correct care is given to those who need it. Without having 40 tonnes of hgv bearing down around them.

3. Sometimes the carriageways have to be repaired, it is not safe to leave contaminents on the road surface, barriers and street furniture may be damaged, these have implications and decisions are made as to the practicalities of re-opening or repairing.
Also as i said on a previous thread, someone has to clean up blood( sorry to be crude but itis a fact.)

Unfortunately there is a lemming like attitude from some drivers on the motorway, for instance on xmas eve the m62 was shut due to a multiple vehicle rta, i know the motorway was clearly closed, yet there were over 250 vehicles that ignored the closure and proceeded against the indicated closure and signs, this then compounded the incident preventing emergency service access , and these vehicles eventually had to be turned round and escorted off the exit before the crash.

Also consideration is given to hgv tacho users if they are stuck in a motorway closure, the simplest method is ask the traffic bobby as long-term closures (over 1 hr) they do (or should) inform people stuck and offer advice.

The closures, whether you agree with them or not, also bring home the real truth of what could happen to a driver on the network.

Do you mean he could learn that he could get stuck in traffic? Because that's about the only lesson that the vast majority of passing members of the public gets from extended road closures.

If you're talking more about evidence of mortality and risk, I think you're wrong because most people simply never put it into personal terms. Crashes happen to 'other people'.

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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

Do you have to find a way of disagreeing with everything I post?

A closed motorway is almost always due to a crash of some description. Being on a motorway when it is closed brings home the fact that a) crashes happen and b) they are usually exceptionally good ways of getting round the country.

People subconsciously think 'there but for the grace of god go I', which is why they rubberneck. It's part of the reinforcement of being alive...

Now, a perfect driver would probably not even consider that they might be involved in a crash. But hopefully there are not that many people out there that think they are perfect drivers.

With regards to the 'happens to other people' why is the public at large in fear when out at night? Don't muggings happen to other people?

I dont agree with the first sentence - IMHO most people rubberneck out of a sense of morbid curiosity. They usually go on to eagerly report as much detail as they can remember at the earliest opportunity.
They probably all buy the News of the World for the same reason!
Your second point is partly true - there are no perfect drivers.
However a good driver will always anticipate that a situation could occur in which he might be in an accident, and take steps firstly to lessen the risk, then the danger - even down to the choice of safety equipment in a new vehicle. After all, there would be no point in paying for safety features if you never thoought you would make use of them!

There is another curious phenomena - the driver who is afraid of having an accident, and sees it as almost inevitable. Often they are not "good" drivers and attempt to lessen the risk to themselves at others expense.
My father-in-law has a fear of airbags going off, and in his last car had them removed. I honestly believe if he were in an accident where the airbag was deployed, it COULD endanger his life, and the shock would be too much for him, no matter how minor the accident.

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

I'm sorry if it seems that way. I give you my word that I've never made an effort to disagree you...



Actually a 'perfect driver' would never stop considering the risk and expectation of a crash. I strive to be a perfect driver but I don't ever expect to achieve it. Right at the top of the priority list is searching the environment for potential crash risk.



A particular problem with driving is that you only survive on the basis of your own performance - yet vast tracts of your own performance are apparently beyond conscious control. Real-time risk assessment (for example) is controlled subconsciously. This is the fundamental reason that we object to being criticised and also the fundamental reason that we tend to believe that crashes happen to other people.

The 'crashes happen to other people' effect is because we tend not to accept that we're at the mercy of our own subconscious.

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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