Safe Speed Forums

What makes you think we 'want to speed'?

We're here because we want road safety to give accurate and balanced messages. Clearly it is far more important that people use speed safely rather than legally, but present policy is gradually replacing the whole idea of using speed safely with the idea of using speed legally. That's a very dumb move because even 20mph is a deadly speed on occasion.

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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

What was I saying about preconceived ideas?
You have got it into your head that we're nothing but a bunch of demented speed freaks, and nothing we say is going to change your prejudice.
You prove this point here, and again and again.



And how would you know?
Have you ever actually hit anything?
In my younger days, not long after I got my licence, I did hit things - on several occasions. And on every one of those occasions I was driving at below the speed limit. All of those accidents were down to inattention on my part. On a couple of those occasions it happened that I was checking my rear view mirror and something behind me caught my attention for a fraction longer than it should have, and when I looked back ahead the car in front had stopped, and I panic-braked, but it was too late. Note that I was within the limit, and I was not tailgating, just took my eyes off the road ahead for a second or so at what turned out to be the wrong time.
So, yes - it can be dangerous to even check your mirrors. You learn - sometimes the hard way, as I did - from experience, when it's safe to do a mirror check and when it's not.

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Only when ideology, prejudice and dogma are set aside does the truth emerge - Kepler

Same here Pete.

The only accident that I have ever had that was my "fault" was well under the speed limit and due to a minor distraction (me looking to see if the road ahead up the hill was flowing smoothly or not, so that I could get into the correct gear for the hill) and an unpredictable action by another driver (stopping in L2 when they wanted to turn left from a DC at the point of exit - any indication they may have made was masked by the car between). That was 22 years ago, and was only a minor fender bender.

I have only been in two other accidents, one where I was a passenger in a car driving well below the speed limit, and a cheap remold tyre blew out causing a spin. The other was much more serious to me as I got a whiplash injury and again it was well below the speed limit - the M1 was stop start, and the driver of the minibus 2 behind me failed to observe that the entire motorway was stopping, and he pushed the car behind me into the back of my stationary car. He got out and said "why did you all stop?" to which the answer was "because everybody else had already stopped - why didn't you?". He didn't reply, but the answer was that he was distracted and not watching the road.

I have never seen or been involved in an accident that involved a "speeding" vehicle, but two of those that I have been in were down to the driver being distracted. So why do the authorities believe that forcing all drivers to have to check their speedos all the time can improve road safety? So for all the evidence is that it doesn't, and that it isn't.

This is a key point and the reason for my previous post on this thread. Visual cognition is a significant area of modern psycology. Huge strides have been made in understanding how we make sense of the physical world around us via our eyes and brain. It is a complicated area however and I don't pretend to be up to date (my degree is nearly a decade old) nor do I claim I was an expert back then.

Saying that one's peripheral vision is 'excellent' is meaningless. As Paul mentioned, 'foveal vision' extracts the most rich and detailed information on which to base our perception. I could link to many studies which characterise the role of foveal vision (eg http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=3269513&dopt=Abstract but there is some research that is directly relevant here. Horey et al '03 reviewed some recent studies by Summala et al. I won't go on too much but these are the words of objective researchers, not a speed obsessed death merchant like me.

Summala et al. (1996; replicated by Summala, 1998) examined the impact of IVTs using a technique where drivers were forced to focus their visual attention on a location inside the vehicle (located at various eccentricities) and to rely on peripheral vision to maintain vehicle control (lane keeping). In general, lane keeping ability declined with increasing eccentricity, although experienced drivers showed impairments at only the greatest separations, suggesting that they were better able to make use of peripheral information for vehicle control than were their inexperienced (novice) counterparts. Using the same forced-peripheral technique, Summala et al. (1998) and Lamble et al. (1999) investigated how well drivers were able to detect and respond to critical hazards (i.e., a lead vehicle braking) while focusing visual attention away from the driving scene. In these studies, reaction times to the critical events increased markedly with display separation and did not improve with driver experience. Taken together, these studies suggest that although peripheral vision may be used to support vehicle control, it is not able to sufficiently support hazard awareness, which is better served by foveal vision. The findings presented by Summala and colleagues offer some support for the notion of separate focal and ambient visual channels (Previc, 1998; 2000). This distinction comprises part of the resources within the visual modality of the multiple resource model of task performance (Wickens, 2002). In this model, focal visual channel relies heavily (though not exclusively) on foveal vision in order to complete tasks that require the discrimination of fine details (e.g., reading). In contrast, ambient vision utilizes peripheral vision to large degree for tasks involving perception of orientation and ego-motion. Multiple resources models posit that tasks which share common resources along a given dimension (e.g., processing stage, perceptual modality, visual channel, processing code) will be time-shared less effectively than tasks which utilize separate resources. For example, a driver may use focal vision to read information presented on a road sign while at the same time use ambient vision to keep the vehicle within their lane, however would be unable to read gauge information presented in the instrument panel, as this would require focal vision. As Summala et al. (1996) demonstrated, ambient vision does have its limitations, with performance becoming degraded at greater eccentricities. Therefore, the introduction of visual in-vehicle information creates a new source of competition for focal resources which will impact not only the availability of these resources for the detection and identification of road hazards but, depending on the location of the display, may also affect the ability to use ambient vision for vehicle control. As such, the information access costs associated with display separation become an important consideration for both focal and ambient driving tasks.

This was mainly centered on in-vehicle-technologies but findings could be transferrable even if the effect is weaker. My point again is that we still don't know what impact increased speedo checks make on our task performance. Saying 'my peripheral (x-ray, heat ray etc) vision is excellent' refers to the eyes. Its opthalmology. But what we see doesn't stop at the eyes, the brain makes sense of the information, ask too much of it and performance degrades. This is psychology.

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"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

[quote="mosis"]Rewolf wrote:
You all talk as if you're driving round Brands Hatch with hundreds of cars coming the opposite way, when in reality, most of the time driving is very easy.



driving is easy, driving well is not.

Yes it is very much like driving round brands with hundreds of cars coming the other way.

I used to race (before cost got in the way) driving at high speeds (ton up) on a closed circuit with other drivers of similar skill, objectives and competence was never as stressfull as Marble Arch at 5mph on a thursday afternoon!

The difference, on a race track you have a damn good idea exactly what every other driver is going to do, how they are going to do it and when. (We all brake at the blue hoarding, move right 1/2 a car width, then dab the brakes again, pull hard left and then full throttle again) At any point in any drive how accurately can you predict the actions, movements, and intentions of the other drivers around you. You cant accurately, just make a best guess, and leave yourself an escape for making a wrong guess, is that puegot about to turn right, or as it has an avis registration plate is an american who has never used a manual gearbox, never seen a roundabout and has just dropped his do-nut and kncked the switch by accident?

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Yes its 4wheel drive, yes it goes where a vectra fears to roll!