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National speed limit to be cut to 50 mph

spanglechick said:
ah - ok. or rather than spend huge amounts of money on new roadside technolgy and retrofitting every car in the country, you can just give drivers points every time they choose to speed.:)
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We are not talking about huge sums of money to install such a system (compared with the vast sums we spend on new roads and other things to let us go *faster*!) , although retro-fitting could be a big expense I grant you (and proberbly not possible in the case of older cars)

A lot would depend on the type of system used. Any system would proberbly start by being compulsory on new cars, rather than across the board.

And of course if we are gonna look at this in cold hard financial terms you have to take into account the money saved. Every time someone is seriously injured speeding, (quite apart from the terrible human cost) it costs the country a fortune in police, ambulance, hospital, and proberbly disabilty payments for the rest of their lives
 
I wonder how many of the 3000 people killed each year are killed by motorists exceeding the speed limit?
 
Crispy said:
If you don't mind paying for it.
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Drivers already pay through council tax, road tax and government taxes for road maintenance. If they spent even a fraction of the money they waste on sending our troops overseas to fight other people's battles on improving the infrastructure of our own country then wouldn't that be infinitely better?

After all, we needn't waste time and money repairing someone else's infrastructure if we hadn't gone out there to blow it up in the first place...
 
Oswaldtwistle said:
And of course if we are gonna look at this in cold hard financial terms you have to take into account the money saved. Every time someone is seriously injured speeding, (quite apart from the terrible human cost) it costs the country a fortune in police, ambulance, hospital, and proberbly disabilty payments for the rest of their lives
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... yet when you look at the amount of money the NHS spends on smokers, drug users and alcohol related problems, nobody seems keen on taking action against those instead.

Is that because the majority of people on this forum smoke, drink, take drugs, or a combination of the above?
 
ajdown said:
... yet when you look at the amount of money the NHS spends on smokers, drug users and alcohol related problems, nobody seems keen on taking action against those instead.

Is that because the majority of people on this forum smoke, drink, take drugs, or a combination of the above?
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Well the gov seems to be taking all sorts of actions on the three issues you mentioned, and spends a fuck of a lot of money doing so. RTA gets less attention.
 
Unfortunately, like everything else it's years of under-investment by successive governments, of varying parties, not keeping up with the needs of modern society.

Cars can go faster. People need to travel more. There is more traffic. People work longer hours. People commute longer distances to work.

Yet we're still using most of the tube, rail and road network that was build for conditions 50 years ago.
 
moose said:
I wonder how many of the 3000 people killed each year are killed by motorists exceeding the speed limit?
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Well, IIRC, the government's own statistics suggest that road layout is a causal factor in more RTAs than speed alone.

I do think this relentless focus on speed is going to come back and bite us on the arse in the end...
 
Oswaldtwistle said:
We are not talking about huge sums of money to install such a system (compared with the vast sums we spend on new roads and other things to let us go *faster*!) , although retro-fitting could be a big expense I grant you (and proberbly not possible in the case of older cars)
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Not to worry, they can all be scrapped and dumped in land fill.

hopefully this tosh is just more spin designed to deflect voters attention away from "Prudence's " pitiful mismanagement of the economy.If they actually give it a go, they'll find tehmselves sitting behind the Liberal Democrats after the next election.
 
What, with new cars - faster and more efficent engines - you'd expect the national speed limit to increase :confused:
 
100% masahiko said:
What, with new cars - faster and more efficent engines - you'd expect the national speed limit to increase :confused:
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TBF, the rate of evolution compared with that of technological change means that improvements in the abilities of those driving the cars hasn't kept pace with the improvements in the cars themselves.

And I think that the biggest factor in road safety is still, by a country mile (soon to take slightly more than a minute to travel), the human one.

I just don't think that slapping blanket speed limits is the way - indeed, on the contrary, I think we need to be doing more to educate people. There has been quite a good campaign about rural road safety lately, but even there the focus seems to have been almost exclusively on speed, rather than more general driving safety. It's a bit like adverts about drinking too much focusing entirely on getting people to drink beer instead of spirits...
 
T & P said:
Overtaking is the most obvious one. It is critical to have power and speed available in reserve, should you need it while overtaking.
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I've done my fair share of overtaking, but I have to point out the key objection to this -- you shouldn't *really* be needing to overtake in the first place unless the person you are overtaking is going so much below the speed limit that it isn't really an issue.

Generally when I have overtaken, it is either because there is some kind of slow moving vehicle such as a tractor doing 30mph in a 60mph zone, say, or because I want to drive at 65mph rather than the 50mph limit that everybody else is obeying. (Not that I would do the latter any more, of course. Like most people, I was an idiot when younger. The age limit for driving should be 30, not 17!)

For the last year, I've had a very low powered car -- 1.2l, 0-60 in 20s and struggles above 70mph. And yet I haven't actually noticed any more problem overtaking in the narrow country roads where I live than when I had my 20V Turbo. Basically because I had already given up overtaking people driving 5mph less than the speed limit five years ago and you just don't need the power you are talking about to overtake real slow movers.
 
What kabbes said. If you need a turbo boost to perform the overtake, then it's not a safe move to make.
 
There are benefits to being able to accelerate out of a dangerous situation. And overtaking someone who's driving unsafely but slowly, is important too.
 
cesare said:
There are benefits to being able to accelerate out of a dangerous situation. And overtaking someone who's driving unsafely but slowly, is important too.
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Then why have I been in fewer dangerous situations, and with those being less severe, since I traded my monster beast of a car for a little grannymobile?
 
kabbes said:
Classic zombies or post-ironic zombies?
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tbh your classical zombie can be outrun by most people with one leg providing they were a nippy hopper. So it would have to be your post ironic super zombie I guess. Or people infected with the RAGE virus

or vampires


why o why dont the government do something about mad scientists creating their superbugs and speedy zombies rather than looking to punish the motorist yet again?
 
cesare said:
You probably started driving differently.
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That's a large part of my point, though. I am the same person. One day I was driving one car, the next day a different car. So why do I drive them differently? In particular, why do I drive the new one considerably more safely?

You can't divorce the psychological effects on a driver from having the power available from the physical act of driving. I would suggest that the negligible benefit from having the extra power is massively overwhelmed by the psychological need to use that power.
 
kabbes said:
That's a large part of my point, though. I am the same person. One day I was driving one car, the next day a different car. So why do I drive them differently? In particular, why do I drive the new one considerably more safely?

You can't divorce the psychological effects on a driver from having the power available from the physical act of driving. I would suggest that the negligible benefit from having the extra power is massively overwhelmed by the psychological need to use that power.
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Well, that certainly seems to have been the case for you. I've driven powerful cars and not-so-powerful cars, and I'm not sure that my driving style changes accordingly.
 
cesare said:
Well, that certainly seems to have been the case for you. I've driven powerful cars and not-so-powerful cars, and I'm not sure that my driving style changes accordingly.
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ORLY? :hmm:

My driving style has certainly been on a safer slope for a number of years. But when you just have to touch an accelerator for it to zoooom away, you don't even realise that you are doing it, really. It was so easy to nip around slow moving traffic in a short dual carriageway that I would do it without even thinking, even when that traffic was driving at pretty much the speed limit, because I didn't want to get stuck behind them later. Was that dangerous? Not really, in and of itself. But it was part of a general attitude that has disappeared now that these options aren't available in the first place.

Yeah, you can be someone that drives powerful cars as if they were grannymobiles. But then, why do you have the powerful car if you aren't interested in its power?
 
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