National speed limit to be cut to 50mph on "most roads" as early as 2010

Government are a bunch of ******** to be honest. Theres far more important things to be spending tax payers money on rather than sticking in stupid pointless fancy cameras just to find another way to rob the hard working man of his wealth. Why not spend the tax payers money on actually fixing the god damn economy and focus more on putting the petrol costs down and creating more jobs put it into helping businesses along.

I sometimes wonder if this country is run by a bunch of brainless monkeys, get the priorities right first eh?
 
Because lowering the speed limit will stop cars going over it magically... May aswell build all vehicles restricted to 50mph. This won't change anything other than more congestion in my opinion.
 
Dup said:
What are people doing in the road to get hit by a car. Greater pedestrian training is needed tbh..
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Totally agree with that statment. people need too learn that trying to cross a busy road unaided, when there is a Pedestrian crossing 10 yards down the road is stupied.

The a roads around here have already seen some cuts, but most of them are in the middle of the sticks and dont need a change in the speed limit. many of todays limits were brought in when cars had drums alround, and personaly, i think its just anyother money making, power snatching scheme from an outdated Goverment.
 
stockhausen said:
Yet ;)

I suspect that it is pretty much unheard of for a stationery car to kill anyone, even less to exceed the speed limit, and since when did cars start paying for the construction and upkeep of the roads?
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Or if someone gets hit by a car, the primary reason is that a PERSON was in the ROAD which CARS use. I dont think that sarcasm really worked in the way you intended did it :p

I think that the former is what is proposed. As to the latter, since it would probably be cheaper and just about as effective, why not just place pedestrian crossings every 20 yards?
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I was hinting more towards cross over bridges on main school routes. Most towns have black spots where crossing the road is a nightmare, back to my first point of people getting it by cars... they generally have to be in the road for that to happen.
 
stockhausen said:
According to BBC Online today:I don't really see how any rational person can argue with these proposals :confused:
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Because a lot of rational people remember back to how the government fiddled the accident statistics to justify the speed camera sites (and call them a success) in the first place and expect exactly the same thing to happen again as this government continues to wage war on the motorist.

For those of you who don't remember, or wern't paying attention. A number of trial sites were chosen for testing the effectiveness of speed cameras. These were all sites that had seen an unusually high number of accidents in the previous reporting year. At all the sites the number of accidents went down and the figures were presented like so: (example figures, you can find the actual figures on the ABD or SafeSpeed sites)

2000 (before speed camera): 13 KSIs
2001 (after speed camera): 8 KSIs

Therefore speed cameras work

The actual figures were more like this:

1995: 9 KSIs
1996: 7 KSIs
1997: 8 KSIs
1998: 6 KSIs
1999: 7 KSIs
2000: 13 KSIs
2001: 8 KSIs

Basically 2000 was an unusually bad year, possibly because in that year one of the accidents was Barry the Chav in his clapped out Nova, having drunk 20 pints that evening, Barry and 4 of his mates climbed into the Nova and drove it into a tree at the car's top speed of 80mph, killing all occupants.

This is a freak event that bares no relation to the safety (or lack of safety) of the site in question. In statistical terms it's called an "outlier" and should be ignored. The following years figure is a phenomenon called "regression to the mean" and doesn't demonstrate that the camera had any effect, without the camera the number of accidents would probably have been the same anyway.

ALL the trial sites suffered from this problem yet the data was presented to imply that the cameras worked and justify spreading them everywhere.

RTTM struck again with the introduction of the hypothecation scheme in the mid 00's. The rules for siting cameras under this scheme were that they had to be on a road where a persistant speeding problem can be demonstrated (ie. a road where a traffic survey shows that lots of people speed) and where there had been 5 KSIs in the last year.

Now, think about this for a minute, if you pick a road where everyone speeds the chances are it's a road where it's pretty safe to exceed the speed limit, because believe it or not most drivers aren't lunatics who want to have a crash. Already we're limiting ourselves to the most profitable roads.

All we need now is for Barry's younger brother to get his licence and buy a Corsa. He then follows in his older brother's footsteps and gets leathered on alcopops, loads his car with his mates and crashes head on into an oncoming lorry. *bam* 5 KSIs, camera please.

Next year the KSIs on the road drops back to zero. Woohoo! The camera prevented all the accidents that happened the previous year. RTTM again

Thanks to the work of SafeSpeed and the ABD the government were called out on the RTTM issue and they now claim to account for RTTM in their figures, however I have no doubt they will be abusing a different statistical anomaly to choose their roads for this scheme and to call it a success.

Watch this space in a couple of years time when someone figures out exactly what trickery they were up to this time, of course it'll be too late then and we'll have 50 limits everywhere.
 
Lum said:
<snip>
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ABD - The Association of British Drivers - "Campaigning on behalf of Britain's beleagured (sic) drivers."
SafeSpeed - "Arguing for the wider use of safe speeds without the excessive emphasis on speed limits."

Both are pressure groups wishing at best to increase speed limits and to decrease the likelihood of speeding drivers getting caught and/or punished. Neither of them are sites that I would take seriously as having a primary interest in reducing RTAs or their consequences.

However, regardless of whether or not speed cameras are the most effective way of reducing RTAs and their consequences, it does appear that road safety researchers such as RoSPA (http://www.rospa.com/RoadSafety/advice/driving/speed_cameras.htm) and the DoT (http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roads/managingspeedonourroads) seem agreed that reducing the speed at which people drive will save lives.

Personally, I would agree that there must be better ways of catching and successfully prosecuting speeding drivers than static GATSOs - e.g. average speed, hand-held and vehicle mounted speed cameras.
 
People have touched on this and I tend to agree, the main problem with the motoring in this country is a lack of education on how to drive safely.

Infact I'd be bold to say that a lack of decent education is one of the main problems with this country as a whole. Well that and the newspapers who get away with bluemurder :mad:
 
stockhausen said:
Both are pressure groups wishing at best to increase speed limits and to decrease the likelihood of speeding drivers getting caught and/or punished. Neither of them are sites that I would take seriously as having a primary interest in reducing RTAs or their consequences.
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Funny that, since the guy who started SafeSpeed did so after becoming convinced that the introduction of speed cameras was actually increasing RTAs and costing lives. He used to post his findings on uk.rec.driving before giving up work and starting his own site and campaign. His findings, statistics from various sources (including the DFT) and conclusions are presented on the site for anyone to view and challenges to his honesty and accuracy are welcomed.

Sadly he is no longer with us (his widow is running the campaign now) but I'd say he's done more for road safety in this country than the Labour government has done since being elected 12 years ago.
 
[TW]Taggart;13926830 said:
People have touched on this and I tend to agree, the main problem with the motoring in this country is a lack of education on how to drive safely.

Infact I'd be bold to say that a lack of decent education is one of the main problems with this country as a whole. Well that and the newspapers who get away with bluemurder :mad:
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Correct, the older members of this forum may remember such things as "The Green Cross Code", "Dip don't Dazzle", "Only a fool breaks the two second rule"

These days the Green Cross Code is non existant, dip don't dazzle is replaced with headlights during the day and foglights during the night and the two second rule has been turned into a maximum rather than a minimum. (and anyone who exceeds that maximum is likely to get some **** pulling into the "massive" gap you left)

Also back then if you were driving like a **** you could get pulled and the copper would explain to you what you were doing wrong and maybe even let you off with a warning. Reasonable people would take heed of the warning and behave a little better next time (at least when there is other traffic around)

These days it's just a ticket in the post a week later, you've probably forgotten what the circumstances were at the time and it's just "meh money grabbing wastes of space" nothing is learned, standards are not improved and respect for the police gets just a little bit worse.

When the government does choose to tackle something other than speed they go about it in the most ham fisted way possible, take the mobile phone ban for instance, there is plenty of research out there showing that it is a phone conversation that causes distraction and accidents, not the act of holding something in your hand, yet the government chooses to only ban hand held mobiles. Why? because it's easy to see and can be enforced using a camera (yes, this is coming, the new range of talivan equipment can also get you for mobile phones, eating, drinking, probably even nose picking if they wanted to)

If you look at the long term statistics, you can see a very obvious change in direction at the same time that the focus on road safety shifted to "Speed Kills" being the only message promoted.
 
Correct, the older members of this forum may remember such things as "The Green Cross Code", "Dip don't Dazzle", "Only a fool breaks the two second rule"
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Yup, if Darth Vader cant make you behave when crossing the road, no one can!!

On a related note, my motorcycle instructor has been hammering the 'Only a fool....' thing really hard and I have found myself muttering it, even in the car, so repetition has had an effect on my driving. OK I am oldish and can remember the Green Cross code (And still use it!) but it shows that repeetition during learning can make a difference.
 
We received a petition asking:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to not reduce the national speed limit to 50mph.”

Details of Petition:

“Following the announcement that the government is planning to reduce the national speed limit to 50 miles per hour, we the undersigned oppose this, since it will make no difference to road deaths and the cut in carbon emissions is so insignificantly small it’s laughable.”

· Read the petition
· Petitions homepage
Read the Government’s response

Thank you for your e-petition.

The Government is not proposing to reduce the national speed limit.

On 21st April the Government published a consultation on the new road safety strategy: A Safer Way: Consultation on Making Britain’s roads the Safest in the World, which closed on 14 July. It sought views on the vision, targets and measures for improving road safety in Great Britain in the period from 2010.

Regarding single carriageway roads where the national speed limit applies, the Government propose to revise our existing guidance to highway authorities, recommending that lower limits are adopted where risks are relatively high and there is evidence that a lower limit would reduce casualties.

The Government believes that this targeted approach is the best way to ensure that speed limits are set at the appropriate level for each road.

The Government will announce the results of the consultation at the end of the year.
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Just had that through in my email..
 
I see they are reducing all the big straight 60 limits yet I see loads of one track lanes with blind bends that you would be mad to do more than 30 on yet they still are 60 limits.
 
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