Cobbles said:
Unrestricted but with the death penalty reintroduced for speeds construed as dangerous driving.
What's wrong with allowing motorists to exercise their judgement?
I think there's a
lot wrong with doing that.
The main difficulty with the way people drive is, I think, the fact that there is a huge variation in skills in evidence (as well as a huge variation in the accuracy of their perception of their own skills). My guess is that the more competent and experienced drivers
will have a more accurate view of their own capabilities, and those of their vehicle and how all that relates to the prevailing conditions; the less competent drivers will, in many cases, have an inflated view of their own capabilities (2/3 of drivers regard the standard of their driving as "above average" - an unlikely statistical scenario, if true), and their judgement is likely to therefore be dangerously faulty, as is their perception of their vehicle's capabilities, the environment, and the other drivers around them.
The net result is probably - I'm talking qualitatively, not statistically, here - that on a given road in given circumstances, a competent and experienced driver might consider it safe to drive at (say) 80mph, based on his skill and ability, while the inexperienced and less competent driver also considers the safe speed to be 80mph, despite the fact that, if a hazard arose, he would be far less able to negotiate the situation safely.
The only solution I can see to that issue would be to narrow the skills range considerably: some of that could be achieved by more intensive (and ongoing) driver training, but it would be inevitable that a large part of that process could only be achieved by taking a substantial proportion of drivers off the road. Personally, I think that would be a great ideal to aim for, but it would be political suicide for any government that proposed it (think how many votes just 10% of drivers would represent), and there would have to be much better alternative provision of public transport across the board.
In my view, an ideal situation would be that speed limits were advisory, so that the competent driver could use them as part of his risk assessment as he negotiates potentially unfamiliar roads: prosecutions for traffic offences would not then be made for driving in excess of a potentially arbitrary speed
limit but for driving in a manner that was deemed as unsafe. Quite apart from the enormous change in the current enforcement regime, which has already in the last 10 years moved hugely away from discretionary enforcement to a formulaic process whereby a speed limit (and little else, it would seem) is now enforced as an absolute, with no exceptions, no consideration of the circumstances, and no allowances made for the competence (or otherwise) of drivers, that this would require, it would also be very difficult to enforce with our current legal system, which relies on "hard" evidence and incontrovertible proof of an offence.
So I think we're stuck with our - often quite arbitrary - limits. What I do believe could be changed would be the means of enforcement. Cameras result in people being prosecuted whether they were galloping down a motorway at 90mph for 50 miles, or might have briefly, in the course of cresting a hill, hit 36mph in a 30 zone. This seems wrong to me, as it penalises many drivers who, outside of the hit/miss quasi-certainties of a camera, were driving perfectly safely and with due care for the situation they were in at the time.
