Grauniad comment piece about the reaction of politicians and the public to motoring deaths. It’s really very interesting – 7 people died this weekend in Taunton and the road was open 48hrs after the accident and there have been no knee jerk changes to laws/policy. 4 died in the hatfield rail crash and there was disruption to the entire rail network for months afterwards to ensure similar accidents didn’t happen.

about a thousand times more people die on our roads in year than other transport means, yet there isn’t any where near the same regulation.

the M1 was almost deserted yet he still felt the need to tailgate me, eventually overtaking and pulling into the inside lane

sounds to me like you were hogging the middle lane for no reason…

my first impression from the pictures was that it was at the end of
a slip road, sorry could be wrong, but it wouldn’t surprise if if it was.

the list of bad drivers should also include those with those with the little extra mirrors attached their real wing mirrors.

It’s noticeable that since speeding detection has become better that the average speed on motorways seems to have fallen.

…or is it simply down to pump prices increasing?

“I’m not sure you be up in arms if he’d said the same about cars sporting Baby On Board signs or Chessington World of Adventure stickers. “

A car with a “baby on board” sticker went through a red light on my commute this morning, as I was waiting to cross. Does thinking that owners of such messages are often selfish idiots make me stickerist?

Does *every* car driver you have ever seen with a sticker in the window display bad driving?

Does *every* car driver you have ever seen with a sticker in the window display bad driving?

#

saw one the other day:

“How is my driving?

Tel 0800 – Like I give Sh1t!”

😆

about a thousand times more people die on our roads in year than other transport means, yet there isn’t any where near the same regulation.

For some reason road deaths are an accepted risk.

If anything else caused as much death, injury & damage as motoring it’d be banned.

I heard the guy who opted out of it all on the radio, to be honest he was as lucky to have survived stopping in the central reservation and should definately be buying some lottery tickets with luck like his!

People drive like idiots end of.

All the talk of upgrading the A14 to make it ‘safer’, there’s nothing wrong with the road, it’s the tools who drive on it that are the problem.

sounds to me like you were hogging the middle lane for no reason…

Nope I was in the inside lane – why do you think I was in the middle lane?

I rode over the M6 just up from that lorry crash last night on the way back from work; the carriageway in both directions was totally dark and silent, it was very eerie indeed…

34 in a 30 I’m a very bad man

Stop lying. Police only do you at 35MPH, they won’t issue a ticket for 34MPH

Interestingdepressing read pjt201

But the message from him [Hammond ]and other ministers is that road safety isn’t a priority, it’s OK to drive at high speed, and we should learn to live with death on the roads. The impression is reinforced by a £38m cut in the road safety budget; by a failure to renew the targets for cutting road deaths set by Labour; and by a dusty response to an official study which concluded that a reduction in the drink-drive limit, from 80mg per 100ml of blood to 50mg, could save 168 lives annually. As Robert Gifford of the parliamentary advisory council for transport safety observes, “road safety fell off the agenda”. Ministers are nudging drivers in the wrong direction and, on a dark, autumnal Friday night in Somerset, that could just make a difference.

Sounds about right

Funny as I have the ticket here. 34 in a 30 in Wokingham Berkshire. Obviously I’m going to believe you over my lying eyes.

Nope I was in the inside lane – why do you think I was in the middle lane?

because:

eventually overtaking and pulling into the inside lane

implies that there was a lane to your left.

I was done for 33 or 34, and the guy taking the awareness/getout course said that they had someone in who was done for 32 in a 30.

Best thing to do is run a satnav that has an ETA on it, shows how little gain you get from driving aggressively.

because:

eventually overtaking and pulling into the inside lane
implies that there was a lane to your left.
Yes but it was a signposted and lane-marked feeder road for the exit to the Meadowhall Centre and I wasn’t going off at that junction so the ‘middle’ lane was actually the ‘inside’ lane as the motorway at that point only has two lanes, the others being feeder lanes for the exit. I can see why my post might mislead though 🙂

Like this
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=Meadowhall,+Meadowhall+Centre,+Sheffield&hl=en&ll=53.408574,-1.395768&spn=0.00149,0.002889&sll=53.800651,-4.064941&sspn=24.334859,47.329102&vpsrc=6&hq=Meadowhall,+Meadowhall+Centre,+Sheffield&t=h&z=19

EDIT – it is why the minibus driver then ended up trying to rejoin the M1 by driving across the hatchmarkings at the end of the exit and driving back infront of the van he had just overtaken.

I cannot believe what happened during my nice countryside pootle!! Had to make a reasonably quick stop on a little section of narrow single track road!! My **** flask fell of the seat and smashed! To top that id already broken the other one getting in the van this morning! 👿
As I’m a builder does this mean I need two days of work now! 🙄
Bloody country roads!!

I would like to see far more policing with the emphasis on unsafe driving rather than speeding. Presumably most police cars on motorways are equipped with cameras so a fixed penalty for driving too close to the car in front would be easy to prove.

I don’t do a huge amount of motorway these days but from recent experience, would estimate that at busy times probably 90% of vehicles are driving too close to the one in front.

Part of the problem is that sitting in your car is now virtually as comfy as sitting in your armchair in the front room and there are too many potential distractions from satnav, phones, ICE. Even the tv isn’t missing in some vehicles.

Re prosecutions for exceeding 30 in a 30.

http://www.avonandsomerset.police.uk/LocalPages/NewsDetails.aspx?nsid=24484&t=4

ACPO Guidance now revised and it’s up to local forces when they prosecute. Avon and Somerset have recently decided they are going to prosecute everyone doing over 30 in a 30 but offer the option of the course to everyone doing up to 39.

I would like to see far more policing with the emphasis on unsafe driving rather than speeding.

+1
I got pulled a little while ago on the M6 for “having no insurance”. Obviously I *did* have insurance, it was some sort of error in their ANPR database but it was all sorted with a friendly roadside chat. The police were on some sort of crackdown mission that day though, there were loads of marked and unmarked cars around.

If only there were the resources and the political will for that to happen on every motorway, every day.

I wonder the Gov are still considering raising the limit to 80mph?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-15116064

It’s not like there are more important things to sort out first…

Iknow, let’s increase the motorway speed limit by 10 mph

No one involved in promoting Road Safety would want to try to capitalise on this incident but if it does make people think again about their driving then at least something would have come out of it.

Thousands are killed and seriously injured every year yet it takes an incident like this to bring things into focus.

AnalogueAndy – Member
Thousands are killed and seriously injured every year yet it takes an incident like this to bring things into focus.

Andy, read my link above, incidents like this don’t bring things into focus. If there was a train crash that killed 7 people large scale changes would be bought in. As it is, there were almost 2000 people killed on Britain’s roads last year and the government have cut road safety budgets and removed targets to decrease the number of deaths on our roads. As it is, the m5 is open again 48hrs after the accident and nothing has changed.

Police only do you at 35MPH, they won’t issue a ticket for 34MPH

Allow me to take that back.

APCO guidelines say that 35MPH is when tickets should be issued, but it’s up to the individual to make the final judgement.

the list of bad drivers should also include those with those with the little extra mirrors attached their real wing mirrors.

As my standard wing mirror doesn’t have a wide angle section like a more modern car or an hgv, I have stuck one of these on, I can now see more, which is obviously a bad thing?

I would like to see far more policing with the emphasis on unsafe driving rather than speeding.

I think thats a good idea, but compared to a speeding offence, its a harder one to police. How do you quantify unsafe driving? Such things come down to perceptions and opinions, where as speeding is a case of you were doing X in a Y. no if’s no buts.

I think speeding fines could be better if they were proportional to the speed a driver was clocked at.

For example, the fine becomes the product of:

fine = mph over the limit * the speed limit of the zone you were in ( or a ratio of it )

that way, higher speeds = higher fines.

crazy-legs – Member

I would like to see far more policing with the emphasis on unsafe driving rather than speeding.

+1
I got pulled a little while ago on the M6 for “having no insurance”. Obviously I *did* have insurance, it was some sort of error in their ANPR database but it was all sorted with a friendly roadside chat. The police were on some sort of crackdown mission that day though, there were loads of marked and unmarked cars around.

If only there were the resources and the political will for that to happen on every motorway, every day.

I couldn’t agree more. A good friend of mine in Canada who served with the RCMP for years as an accident reconstructionist could not believe my descriptions of motorway policing here. Cameras are not, and can never be, a replacement for real police officers out there monitoring driving as well as speed.

On top of which, such policing would also mean catching more real criminals as they spot them on the move.

If only governments and police forces would listen to me.

Some Police forces do listen, the issue is resources, if you see the different directions that traffic police get pulled in that takes them away from, yes, road policing.

TJ only a day or so ago you were railing at people who made ex cathedra assertions for which they were unwilling to supply evidence…

there is an easy solution to this. Ban seat belts and fit all cars with a nice sharp spike in the middle of the steering wheel. people would either drive carefully or die quickly.

Risk compensation is a part of why this is happening – people feel so safe they take more risks – so the answer is to make them feel less safe

sad to see this ancient Clarkson-like cliche trotted out. Just think about it for a minute or two…

Look at the design of American Cars of the mid 1950s and you will see that is pretty well exactly what they did have. And then look at the death rates then in those cars, and then look at the work of Ralph Nader et al. and then you can try and prove that seat belts and/or airbags have led to an increase or even a stable risk of death-per-road-user mile, rather than being part of a safety movement which has led to a huge fall in deaths… and breathe…

Risk compensation behavior changes can occur, but in this field the overall net safety effect is still massively positive.

To declare an interest, my life was saved 18 months ago by an airbag when hit head-on by someone who had fallen asleep.

The issue isn’t speed per se, its inappropriate speed.

Trouble is there is no way of enforcing inappropriate speed with just speed camera’s. More police on the roads is what’s needed but we are unlikely to get them anytime soon

Staatsbrother do you really think I was making that as s serious suggestion? However it is proven that safer cars lead to more risk taking by car drivers. Drivers of cars with ABS go faster in the rain and leave less gaps for example. The car drivers kill more innocents as a result of this behaviour – they are safer but others around them are not.

The real answer of course is to test drivers far more thoroughly, retest regularly, make them pay the full costs of driving and enforce driving law much more harshly. Lets see jail terms for drink driving and for dangerous driving. Lets see more bans for speeding.

To declare an interest, my life was saved 18 months ago by an airbag when hit head-on by someone who had fallen asleep.

TJ will be along shortly to ask as to why you think that… 🙄

and the Edinburgh defense is wheeled out…

And how many cars do not have ABS now?

I will be hitting the M3 in around 40 minutes time and I guarantee that I will see people driving too fast, too close together with very poor lane discipline and plenty of people on the phone etc.

I may well get to see an accident which on average occurs at least once a week on my stretch between Bracknell and the M25. Until people have a bad crash they just won’t listen.

Stoatsbrother get a grip man. If you really think that I was being serious then you really have lost the plot. Yo are accusing me of lying with that offensive canard “the edinburgh defense”

its a flippant way of making a serious point – risk compensation occurs and is one of the reasons that people follow too close.

I would like to see far more policing with the emphasis on unsafe driving rather than speeding

+1

As my standard wing mirror doesn’t have a wide angle section like a more modern car or an hgv, I have stuck one of these on, I can now see more, which is obviously a bad thing?

possibly not but imho there does seem to be a correlation – just like passats and middle lane hoggers (had to get that dig in there for molgrips benefit:-))

maybe it is something to do with the driver not being comfortable enough to actually look into his blind spot to look for something – my mirror has one of these enhanced edges but I will still glance round to check.

A bit like a cyclist not being confident/competant enough to glance round.

TJ

ah ha…

so how exactly are we able to tell which things you are saying are seriously meant, and which ones are meant to be humorous ? Not even a 😉 to tell us, let alone anything funny in your text…

Trouble is – that tired old cliche you trotted out – I mean – even here is quite common – seems to have become a meme, something trotted out all over the interweb as substitute for thought.I’ve seen it raised repeatedly on other forums.

You do seem to be over-reacting to being challenged here. No one said you were lying – just implied you might be backtracking when your statement was challenged.

I’d get those anger issues dealt with… xxx