Speed linits! Who actually gives a f$%£K?????

[Brian Kirby]

[QUOTE]trigrem - 2006-07-30 11:04 PM I'm glad someone else has noticed its the Brits in France who do not pull back in after overtaking, I thought I was beng too critical. I agree with Dave Newall comments especially the one about those who travel at 40mph in a 60 zone and then do not slow down for the 30 limit, just carry on at 40. However I do think that the powers that be bear some resposibility in the placing of 30 mph signs. We have one near us that is right on the corner of the exit road of a five road island, most resposible drivers will be looking at the traffic approaching or on the island and can easily miss the sign, even so the lampost spacing and no limit signs on side roads should tell them something. I like those signs that illuminate if you are even 1 MPH over the limit, no excuses then. doug[/QUOTE]

Two other things.  Has anyone noticed how the French have suddenly discovered they have speed limits over the past couple of years?  Time was when, provided you touched your brakes as you flashed past the 60kph sign at around 100kph, you'd be more or less OK. (Oh and did you know there's a presumed [and enforced] 60kph limit as soon as you pass a town or village nameboard, that extends right through to the exit sign the other end?  No?  Well, you're living on borrowed time!)  Now everyone (pretty much) sticks to the limit.  It's the hidden radar traps that have done it!  No huge proliferation of Gatsos, just the usual boys in blue hiding behind unmarked parked cars and zapping the unsuspecting.  If oncoming traffic flashes you, don't flash/wave back, slow down: then look carefully along the sides of the road ahead!  They'll be there somewhere.

The other point is that cars are now so quiet and powerful compared to a few years back.  I doubt many drivers are fully aware of quite how fast they are travelling.  Problem is, UK roads haven't kept up with the cars.  Almost any small hatch will now do around 100mph, many "family" cars substantially more, and quite a few won't take 5th (or even 6th) gear much below 60.  The cars simply won't do 40mph, you keep having to shout "whoah" at them!

[Dave Newell]

[QUOTE]Brian Kirby - 2006-07-31 12:24 PM

[QUOTE]Dave Newell - 2006-07-31 7:25 AM Just for the record, the Porsche driver didn't irritate me that much, I just found it ironic after Clarkson's piece about caravans holding up traffic that 2 caravans, 3 motorhomes, 2 vintage motorcycles and several ordinary cars were being held up by a 150MPH+ supercar being driven at 40MPH where 60 was the limit and quite safely acchievable. Perhaps he couldn't get it out of second gear (just like in that old comedy song). D. :-)[/QUOTE]

You managed to discover irony in Clarkson? I've never been able to see anything other that a crass, dangerously opinionated, irresponsible, prat!

Well done!

[/QUOTE] The irony wasn't in Clarkson it was that he claimed caravans were responsible for just about everything but my experience was that it was a Posche driver who caused the problem in this instance. D.

[Don Madge]

[QUOTE]Brian Kirby - 2006-07-31 12:43 PM (Oh and did you know there's a presumed [and enforced] 60kph limit as soon as you pass a town or village nameboard, that extends right through to the exit sign the other end?  No?  Well, you're living on borrowed time!)

[/QUOTE] Brian, I think you will find that it's 50kph when you pass the name board :-D I could be wrong of course :-D Don

[Brian Kirby]

You're right Don, unnoticed slip of the finger.  Careless!

Thanks.

[Mel B]

Dave You keep mentioning the Porche ... do you secretly want one? Speed limits - what speed limits? Do you mean the ones that those of us who don't speed keep to (yes I do mean that, we NEVER knowingly speed, it's not worth the risk of the damage you can do to yourself or others by doing it). Or do you mean the 'stretchable' ones that the idiots that shoot past you seem to know about, you know, the idots in their posh cars that think they are enclosed in a cocoon type force-field where nothing can touch them ... they're usually the ones you see piled up at the side of the road in a mangled mess. And then again there are the 'old' sports car owners (old cars I mean) that go past you at the speed of light belching blue smoke everwhere, who you then see a few miles on at the side of the road when they've broken down! Yes, it's ruddy annoying when you stick to the 'rules' and they don't but so what, let them get on with it, at least it gets them out of your way. I agree with Dave that the most annoying ones are the 'under-speeders', they are much more dangerous in my book, as they cause problems which means you either have to tootle behind or risk overtaking, and overtaking has got to be one of the most dangerous things you can actually do on the road ... especially if one of the nutters who speeds is coming in your direction! As for parents & kids ... the problem with the ones in 4x4s is that they think nothing can touch them and as they are parents (usually Mums) they think that they can just do as they please ... because they are parents and have wonderful offspring, and the world owes it to them to let them do as they please, when they please, as they please!!!! The only reason they have the special 'parent & child' parking at supermarkets is because the normal bays were too small for their 'tanks' and they probably kept squashing shopping trollies! At least it keeps them in one area of the car park and away from causing havoc elsewhere! Before you ask, NO we haven't got any SPROGS!!!

[Dave Newell]

My god Mel, do I detect a little annoyance with your fellow road users? The only reason the porsche keeps getting mentioned is because it was there. No I don't want one, I've driven one, Ive actually fitted cruise control to one and I don't particularly like them. If I could have a sports car it would be a Westfield (ideally a Seight) but I do quite fancy one of those bike engined jobs from the QPod people, they look like fun. D.

[Brian Kirby]

Mel

Chill!  If you really want to get agitated about other people's driving tendencies, take a long ride round Italy. 

I submit that there is no known road rule, statutory or common sense, that the Italian male won't break, most probably several times, in the course of a single journey! 

Single white lines, double white lines, speed limits, no parking signs, marked parking bays, one way streets, traffic lights, double parking, pedestrian crossings: not sure if I've covered them all, but if you can think of any more they'll break them for you anyhow!

By comparison, we are the most law abiding country on earth!

There: better?

[Mel B]

Dave I bet you would like the replica Isetta (called a Zetta) that I saw a few years ago at a microcar rally ... instead of the standard 198cc (I think) engine it had a 650cc motorcycle engine in instead - my God, it could move!!! Before anyone asks, yes he had upgraded the brakes etc. The worse drivers I've come across to date was when we were trying to navigate the large roundabout on the outskirts of Paris - 9 lanes, no rules, everyone for themselves ... we were masochists ... we did it in the evening rush hour and again in the morning rush hour just for good measure!!!

[passionwagon]

8-) Very interesting debate. Have you noticed how more and more supermarket articulated units are now keeping to their speed limits ie. over 7.5 tonnes it is 40mph on single cway, 50 on dual and bend the limiter at 59 on mways . Call me cynical but i believe this is a ploy by the haulage comapanies to get these speeds up - this would not be a bad thing. One haulier even has a rear end notice explaining why the truck is only doing 40. While on this subject there are now over 15 mway and A road sites (many more to come) where the intelligent cameras check speed and weight from road sensors refer to DVLA record for the vehicle in 3 secs and alert a contol point 6 or so miles along the road. One such checking point found 75% of vehicles over weight. ;-)

[JohnP]

Whose wife takes the kid's to school in a 4x4 ? Answer Clarkson

[colin]

I have a poor mans seven, a dutton phaeton. When I first built it we had good roads and french had bad roads, now its the other way round and I'm trying to get suspension more supple without to much body roll. Next village to us has installed speed sign which i'm told displays speed if over limit, trouble is its around bend that I know cars park on and am liable to meet traffic head on, so i've not plucked up enough courage( or been stupid enough) to trigger it, but I can imagine youngsters trying to get highest speed!

[michele]

Yes he does make himself look a little like an arse ...........clarkson..that is...

[Clive]

Clarky ? I love him. Anybody who cannot see where his tounge is well and truly planted should either change their glasses or cut down on the pills. He does after all SAY what most of us blokes actually think!! Even my Mrs agrees. If I won a few million what cars would I have ?.?.?.?. I know, a BIG supercharged Petrol Range Rover with a yanky 8.5 litre V10 lump in it. With the biggest bull bar on the front you could imagine. If I was that rich I wouldnt have to worry about reliability! As a motorway copper said to me "you cant beat metal" when involved in a shunt. The heaviest vehicle will decelerate the least. Use the other vehicle as your crumple zone. Oops just noticed cyclists on pavements. These drive me mad. But you should have heard the tyrade i gave two young coppers on bicycles on the pavement in front of my house. A couple of open mouther prats with bannanas on their heads did not have a leg to stand on. The road (minor road) being only 10 feet to the side. The cycle paths are clearly marked in our area and one pedal cyclist has already knocked down an old codger who never recovered and later died. So, yes this does wind me up a tad. Speeding is not a problem, its stopping fast thats the problem or mixing pedestrians with motorcars. Germany don,t have speed limits on their main motorways and it minimises the number of hospital beds taken up by injuries. Over !

[michele]

one word Volvo.....................can't beat em.

[Clive]

Volvo? I just wish they would turn those pesky headlights off during the day. It dazzles me for what? But Volvo cars were good. Today they are Ford don,t forget.

[michele]

Took a lot of getting used to .But at least you never forget to put them on .. Years ago the french used to flash like mad at us.... How can they dazzle you in the day ?

[Brian Kirby]

[QUOTE]Clive - 2006-07-31 10:57 PM Clarky ? I love him. Anybody who cannot see where his tounge is well and truly planted should either change their glasses or cut down on the pills. He does after all SAY what most of us blokes actually think!! Even my Mrs agrees. If I won a few million what cars would I have ?.?.?.?. I know, a BIG supercharged Petrol Range Rover with a yanky 8.5 litre V10 lump in it. With the biggest bull bar on the front you could imagine. If I was that rich I wouldnt have to worry about reliability! As a motorway copper said to me "you cant beat metal" when involved in a shunt. The heaviest vehicle will decelerate the least. Use the other vehicle as your crumple zone. Oops just noticed cyclists on pavements. These drive me mad. But you should have heard the tyrade i gave two young coppers on bicycles on the pavement in front of my house. A couple of open mouther prats with bannanas on their heads did not have a leg to stand on. The road (minor road) being only 10 feet to the side. The cycle paths are clearly marked in our area and one pedal cyclist has already knocked down an old codger who never recovered and later died. So, yes this does wind me up a tad. Speeding is not a problem, its stopping fast thats the problem or mixing pedestrians with motorcars. Germany don,t have speed limits on their main motorways and it minimises the number of hospital beds taken up by injuries. Over ! [/QUOTE]

"I know, a BIG supercharged Petrol Range Rover with a yanky 8.5 litre V10 lump in it."  Clive, isn't that a Hummer, and not a Range Rover?

[mom]

My comments below are bound to be controversial, but what the hell, in for a penny in for a pound!

Just to be a spoil sport for a second, and to address the original thread!!!, I believe when talking about speeding we have to separate motorways from all other roads.  Personally I would hate to see over-enforcement on M roads.  Most motorways in this country are of a quality that will support speeds greater than 70 mph (not withstanding the current conditions, amount of traffic and sensible driving practice).  It's the minor A and local roads that get me.  Speeding should be a no-no on these roads.  My following thoughts are for A roads and below, not for M roads.

My heritage is Australian, and in Victoria there is no speeding.  They stopped speeding, and halved (truly) the annual deathtoll overnight by introducing hidden mobile speed cameras.  Take a rusty old car, place a camera on the dash and flashlights on the bumper, park erratically on the side of the road and read the newspaper or have a kip.  Awaken after an hour and move on a few more miles.  70% of those fined will stop speeding.  The remaining 30% will stop on their second fine, just about the time that community word-of-mouth spreads about the perpetual hidden mobile cameras.  Speeding will be a thing of the past.  Sure, the money will probably go to the police or government to be mis-spent in the usual ways.  And yes, the newspapers will be shocked and dismayed at just about everyone and everything.  And many drivers will hate the fact that they now have to obey the law.  But this will disappear when the reduction in road deaths becomes apparent, and speeding becomes anti-social.  Surely this is worth the effort?  I hate it when people roll out the "what price a life" argument, but that year of the crackdown in Victoria, 100s of people who would have died, lived.

Which brings me to a question... back in Australia the road death toll is reported in the news, not daily or weekly but around holiday periods and periodically during the year.  Most people can quote the current average figure.  But here it is never spoken.  I have noticed a couple of A roads now have a death toll sign in dangerous stretches, but it seems to me that we can never be serious about slowing people down until the truth is in our face.  Why is there not a regular national or regional statement of the road death toll?  All drivers should be aware of it.

[Dave Newell]

Thank you Mom, you are quite right I was complaining about speeding on "A" and "B" roads not motorways. In particular I was complaining about people, including in one instance a police person, overtaking me in 30 limited areas when I was driving at or very near the limit. They therefore had to exceed the limit to pass me, by the way I was driving my wife's Fiat Brava car not the motorhome. Every one of them overtook me in a ridiculously dangerous manner and one of them nearly hit a car parked on the other side of the road! D.

[Brian Kirby]

Well, Dave started this with an interesting little rant about other people's driving.  What strikes me about what followed is that two different things have become conflated.

1 Safety: there is no natural relationship between speed and safety.  It is of course true that if you do have an accident, the result will tend to be worse the faster you were going.  But we all accept that maxim the moment we start the engine - walking would be safer!  However, it is not possible to equate 30mph (vide 20, 40, 50, 60, or 70mph) with safety or danger.  To attempt to negotiate our local High St at 30mph would be an act of crass irresponsibility, albeit the speed would be legal.  To travel at 100mph down a deserted motorway at 3am in a in Dave's Porche would hardly be dangerous.  The dangers here lie much more in the type of vehicle (remember, the same speed limits apply to 42 tonne trucks as to Dave's [yes, I know, sorry Dave!]  Porche), its condition and the mental alertness and experience of the driver.

2 Legality.  To exceed speed limits, whether safely or not, is illegal.  However, just as with speed, legality has no natural relationship with safety.  To observe speed limits - that is to say to drive at, or below, the maximum permitted speed - is no safer, nor more dangerous, that to exceed them.  However, it is what the law requires us to do.  As has been remarked above, these limits are legal maxima, and not safe maxima.

Those who have commented that they never exceed the speed limit seem also to wish to claim that they are somehow "safer".  I would dispute that is routinely the case.  Those who bimble along, below the permitted limit, with their brains in neutral may well be legal, but many seem also inattentive, chatting away to (and looking at) their passenger, gesturing while so doing (thus driving one handed), and generally treating driving as a social event rather than something that requires 100% concentration for as much of the time as the driver can sustain.  We're back to the 50 mph everywhere merchant here - 50 on the motorway (probably middle lane irrespective of empty left hand lane), and 50 half way through the first town encountered irrespective of lower limits.

So confession time, I suppose.  Do I exceed speed limits?  Of course I do, I exceed them because I drive as quickly as seems reasonably possible.  I do not set out to exceed speed limits, I do seek to observe them, but I do not go everywhere with one eye on the speedo.  Inevitably, therefore, on any given road at any given time I will be exceeding, or below, the limit by a some margin.  Downhill, in a 40mph limit, I may well find I am doing 45, ditto similar conditions for almost any other limit.  I then ease back towards legality as smoothly as possible.  However, I may well travel much more slowly than the legal limit when a lower speed seems wiser. 

The point, surely, being that the speedometer merely tells you the speed you are travelling at, and not whether that speed is, in fact, safe.  For that, you need to exercise judgement, and to exercise that properly, you need to be fully engaged in what you are doing, and not chatting, you need to be alert and attentive, and to have sufficient experience to be able to "read" road, and traffic, conditions.

To those who claim they "never" exceed the speed limits I'd only say you'd be far safer if you spent more time looking at the road, and other traffic, and much less looking at your speedo!  You have to judge speed in relationship to overall road conditions, and not just against a dial gauge.

Y'all drive safely, now.

[Guest gootler]

For your amusement!

[Guest gootler]

and again!

[mom]

[QUOTE]Brian Kirby - 2006-08-01 11:50 AM

1 Safety: there is no natural relationship between speed and safety. 

2 Legality.  To exceed speed limits, whether safely or not, is illegal.  However, just as with speed, legality has no natural relationship with safety.[/QUOTE]

Brian, this is "hit the nail on the head" stuff, and you are so right... "Safe Driving" is the solution, not "Slow Speed" per se.

The one thing I would like to stress, and you have already covered most of it, is that there is a direct relationship between speed and injury level, and speed (and alcohol I guess) is about the only thing that a busy police force can reliably monitor.

As you said, 30 mph down the high street is too dangerous to imagine, and we have a blind corner without a pavement in our village that would be catastrophic to a mum and a pram at 10 mph.  Speed and safety are not necessarily related.  However, the opportunity to live to tell the tale is greatly enhanced at lower speeds, and a reduction in road toll in Victoria by 300 odd due to a clampdown on speed is hard to ignore.

Lets get everyone back into the classroom, at least occasionally.  The first and last driving class most of us attend is our initial driving lessons, and some of us didn't even do that!  Many learn their long term driving habits after they have passed their test and first hit the general driving population alone.  One year later, there should be a compulsory defensive driving class to correct these habits.  Two years after that, an advanced driving class. 

Am I in dreamworld?  Probably.  I have no idea who would pay (though I believe the motorist should).  And the required infrastructure would be considerable.  But can anything truly improve if we don't do something like this?

Ah, I can hear that acre of farmland calling, with no other vans and just the birds and wildlife to keep us company!  The world goes away.  It's the best time!

[enrico]

Brian I agree with you,you should be able to use your common sense and drive at a speed that fits the road conditions etc. but there is a problem with that. Take 1 example only.If everyone has common sense and uses it why do people insist on driving in lanes2/3 and 4 on motorways when lane 1 is virtually empty. With people like this surely we can understand why we have set laws,eg speed limits.Blame these idiots,not the government(I can`t believe I`ve just said that)!!

[enrico]

Forgot to say about A roads. 2 cars passed me on the other side of the road ,at the other side of the bollards.One driver looked about 18/20,the other about 50! Common sense,WHERE!!!