GFX707 said:
Well, I'm not saying I agree with where they put the speedometer on cars, I mean, common sense would dictate that that alone should be where you can see it without taking your eyes off the road, but its position is not THAT inconvenient, and it really only takes a fraction of a second to check your speed every now and then. No one's instincts are as accurate as an instrument with only one purpose, I mean I am not saying every speedometer is perfectly accurate, but how many times have you been driving down a hill or overtaking only to realise you have gone over the limit? What if the person behind you while you are doing that is using their "instincts" and travels the same speed as you while you are doing that? Then the person behind them does too....before you know it you have a potential pile-up of everyone braking when the car in front of them brakes.
I still think we're talking cross purposes. Are we talking about safe driving or strict adherance to an arbitary speed limit?
If it's safe driving, then I absolutely guarantee you can do that without checking the speedo, hence why I suggest that anything that makes you have to take your eyes off the road more than necessary is a bad thing.
If we're talking about strict adherance to the speed limit, then yes, you need to look at the speedo more often. This is one of the reasons why I, and many others, oppose the current emphasis on speed, given that strict adherance to the limits would not have any effect in 90%+ of accidents that occur for other reasons (primarily observational and anticipational failures on the drivers part).
I want safer roads, therefore anything that has no positive effect, but definite negative effects (the decline in road deaths has slowed dramatically since the introduction of cameras and the 'speed kills' policy, despite large improvements in car safety during that period) is something I consider unacceptable.
In this case the law, or at least, the current enforcement of it, is not helping road safety. The government's own figures back this up, but it does generate a lot of money and is easy to create a boogeyman in terms of speeders, and thats why the government keeps going down this pointless line. They don't want to have to tell half the drivers in this country that accidents are there fault because they are bad drivers, so they target something else.
