[Closed] Is widespred citizen survellence that way to sort out driving in the UK?

If some type of driver-less car got me and my family to the places we want to go, safely, predictably and cheaply then I would be happy to forgo any (small) pleasure I occasionally got from driving.
I can plan my journeys to the places I want to be and spend more time doing the things I want to do. If that takes away my autonomy to break laws occasionally then that's a bonus.

GrahamS - Member

One argument I've heard against speed restricting boxes is that "sometimes you need to speed to avoid an accident"

Unless you're on a motorbike, we both know that is toilet.

Great bit of advice I was given when learning: "If you really must have an accident, try and do it as slowly as possible". 😆

Scrap the Highways Traffic Officers, employ more Traffic Police in their place. That's my very generalised view.

So why not design the boxes so that excessive speed creates an annoying beep (and shuts off power to the stereo)?

the hire car I had in oman beeped at you constantly once or twice a second if you went over the national speed limit. very simple but very effective.

I think theres a simple remedy here..

Turn Off STRAVA

Just a flying visit to this thread at work so I haven't read it, but how about having a network of people acting like PCSOs in their cars. You get a bit of cash each year, £100 maybe, and they put a camera in your car. If you see anything potentially dodgy you just hit a button and it beams the footage to the cops at the next opportunity where they can pursue it (even if it's just a stern letter). Even if the police don't prosecute perhaps they could put your name on a list that insurers can see.

Speeding is an easy thing to focus on - it's crap driving (by at least one party) that normally (and that element that is crap is usually poor observation) is the cause in 100% of accidents I'd suggest.

At the risk of turning the thread into another bore, an actual accident is a combination of both speed and crap driving. For example (and this is just one) if you are going faster, you are relying on other people's observation skills being better. Not a wise thing to do when you consider how poor some of them are.

Data shows the number of people dying on UK roads falling massively since 70s and 80's which would indicate we don't really have a problem.

But I'd like to see a study which shows what the causality is - is it people driving better or is it cars being so strong and with so many features to protect the occupants?

It's probably a combination of lower speed limits, 'better'* road design (more barriers that stop cars crashing into trees, for example), better testing and education and safer cars.

Didn't the last 'cycling minister' (Norman Baker, maybe?) say that we had better cycling safety than the Netherlands because a smaller proportion of the population were injured in cycling collisions here? Which entirely misses the point that cycling rates in Amsterdam are 20 times what they are in most UK cities. It suggests that they're glad that vulnerable road users have been scared off the roads!

I too would like to see more human road policing, but to make a real difference you'd have to put hundreds of thousands of extra police cars out on the roads. A camera can do speed/red light/bus lane checks 24/7 fairly cheaply. A pair of police officers in a traffic car can work for 40 hours a week, with a big chunk of that spent in the office/at base/planning operations etc, but they can cover more than the black and white type offences that the camera can do.

*Better is in quotes because it's only better for high speed motor vehicles. A barrier at the side of the road doesn't protect a cyclist from the car behind him.

Going back a good few years I bought a programmable scrolling LED sign for a small business i was doing. After being particulary hacked off with being tailgated and seeing the toolbags on Top Gear do something similar with a caravan I decided to programme it with a few things like you're driving like a *, if i open my boot would you like to get in, and back the * off.

It didn't work, it made people so angry!! To the point that i had one guy get out at a set of traffic lights hammering on my window and screaming how dare i tell him he is driving like a bellend.

LHS - try reprogramming something more playful, press the button and have the following scroll up with a second or so between each message...

"Auto Tailgating System activated!"
"ANPR logging numberplate..."
"3G signal acquired: Uploading video..."

See how quickly they back off
🙂

I think more on road traffic officers/police is the only way to catch 'bad' driving as opposed to speeding/RLJ etc, but often the problem is they are easy to spot and people drive like saints as they go past and then go back to being stupid shortly after, a lot more [b]unmarked [/b]cars could be a good idea.

Didn't the last 'cycling minister' (Norman Baker, maybe?) say that we had better cycling safety than the Netherlands because a smaller proportion of the population were injured in cycling collisions here?

It was Mike Penning, then the Road Safety Minister.
He quoted the figures based on Cycling Deaths per 100,000 population. 😯

Really quite worrying that someone in charge of road safety would have such a poor grasp of the relevant figures.

It's a bit like saying less people die skiing in England than they do in the Alps.

[url= http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/cyclesafety/article3394181.ece ]The reality[/url] is of course that if you use a proper comparator, cycling fatalities per 100 million km cycled, then the UK is over three times more dangerous (Netherlands has a rate of 1.1 fatality per 100m km cycled, UK is 3.6).

being particulary hacked off with being tailgated

I think tailgating is now so common that people have no concept of an appropriate gap.

The recommended gap is roughly one car length for every 5mph. So at 50mph you should be a [b]minimum[/b] of ten car lengths from the car in front.

If you tell people that, they look at you like you are mad.

Scrap the Highways Traffic Officers, employ more Traffic Police in their place. That's my very generalised view.

highways traffic officers are there to do the mundane activities that used to tie up the police for ages & are deployed to free up the police to allow them to get on with their job - ie exactly what you are advocating

Can anyone provide a link to some data which demonstrates that driving is getting worse?

Whether cycling, walking or driving, my impression is that not bothering to look properly or just outright lawlessness is on the increase but I don't know if the data reflects this or I'm just getting grumpier in my old age 😀

Certainly when I rode on the road as a kid in the 80's, I never got verbal abuse or people trying to knock me off, and I didn't in 2005 when I started road riding seriously but it's happening an awful lot at the moment - but that may just be because I'm riding so many more road miles.

One anecdote is nearly getting hit twice in a day when I stopped at amber lights - the cars behind had no intention whatsoever of stopping. But tbh that's been a problem since I first started driving regularly in London so I'm really not sure if the 'falling standards' is factually correct or just something that people are noticing a lot more

No extra surveillance please.

[u][b]No nanny state please.[/b][/u]

Let people die as they should be please.

Do not prolong suffering so let them die.

🙄

Can anyone provide a link to some data which demonstrates that driving is getting worse?

While I wouldn't disagree with you its hard to find numbers to back up the anecdotal stuff we would probably all agree with

[img] [/img]

Road deaths are falling while more people use cars, they are around half the level they were 10 years ago.

A lot of this is down to safer cars, but its hard to imagine such a dramatic downward trend is accompanied by a measurable increase in bad driving

but its hard to imagine such a dramatic downward trend is accompanied by a measurable increase in bad driving

Impossible to plot but it would be useful to see it against the introduction of ABS/Air bags etc etc.

Let people die as they should be please.

Bad drivers are often not the victims though.

Impossible to plot but it would be useful to see it against the introduction of ABS/Air bags etc etc

It's really hard to pick this kind of stuff apart.

And while there are definitely big factors improving car / road safety such as Motorways, seatbelts, reduction in drink driving, Euro NCAP etc, this is also set against a huge increase in the number of cars on the roads in the same time period

2012 (not on the graph) has the lowest death figures ever at 1754.

Maybe an national "Don't be a dick" campaign is the answer

To the point that i had one guy get out at a set of traffic lights hammering on my window and screaming how dare i tell him he is driving like a bellend.

Thereby proving you to be 100% correct - if he was that out of control of his anger whilst driving, he's not emotionally fit to be driving really!

Impossible to plot but it would be useful to see it against the introduction of ABS/Air bags etc etc.

Looking at the dates below (from Wikipedia) and the graph above, there;'s no correlation - deaths went up slightly after ABS was introduced, and no decrease when airbags were introduced - was stable for a while

ABS: In 1985 the Ford Scorpio was introduced to European market with a Teves electronic system throughout the range as standard. For this the model was awarded the coveted European Car of the Year Award in 1986, with very favourable praise from motoring journalists. After this success Ford began research into Anti-Lock systems for the rest of their range, which encouraged other manufacturers to follow suit.

Air bags: In Europe, airbags were almost entirely absent from family cars until the early 1990s. The first European Ford to feature an airbag was the facelifted Escort MK5b in 1992; within a year, the entire Ford range had at least one airbag as standard. By the mid-1990s, European market leaders such as Vauxhall/Opel, Rover, Peugeot, Renault and Fiat had included airbags as at least optional equipment across their model ranges. By the end of the decade, it was very rare to find a mass market car without an airbag, and some late 1990s products, such as the Volkswagen Golf Mk4 also featured side airbags.

Far more people die from preventable health issues than on the roads. Its politically impossible to introduce some of the stuff being suggested here, whatever government tried would be voted down and into oblivion even assuming they could get elected without such a thing in their manifesto.

how long did it take not just for new cars to get ABS, Airbags etc. as standard, but for (say) 50% or 90% of the road traffic to have those features?

probably talking decade scale?

the flat bit between early 1990's and early 2000's on that chart above is "interesting"

Far more people die from preventable health issues than on the roads

What you need here is some joined up thinking in government.

IIRC, obesity-related deaths are around 30,000 in the UK (have not been able to find a source for this though)
Meanwhile, the main reason people don't cycle (when surveyed) is they're too scared

So people [i]are[/i] dying of bad driving but not in a way which the recorded numbers are showing...

I suspect cycling campaigners and health organisations will have pointed out this connection to ministers but as there's no direct causation proven by putting these figures together, it's easy for ministers to side-step

On a related note to the obesity point above, if we're concerned about people then the externalities of driving are a much bigger issue. Taking 2010 for example, about 2000 people died on UK roads, whereas about 28,000 people died prematurely as a result of chronic exposure to air pollution, the bulk of which is associated with motor vehicles.

Whilst poor driving - mainly with respect to cyclists - does anger me, the bigger picture dictates a move away from motor vehicles, rather than driving them better.

This could be remedied, but unfortunately people-killing is preferred to vote-killing.

Based on figures from Wikipedia etc:

[img] https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-7DhehWN6OqISYcRnyTLZ-aj7EtWWYXhPBHperlGXk4=w1278-h719 [/img]

1992-ish ? for introduction of speed cameras?

too many single introductions, most of which take years to roll out to be able to draw any conclusions.

Nice one Graham

You could also add Euro NCAP set up in 1997 to the graph.
Before Euro NCAP manufacturers could talk about safety but there was no objective measure

I'm going to posit that this is the one of the main reason for the fall from 2000 to 2010

Yeah it is hard to do anything meaningful - most introductions will have an impact measured in decades and some, like improvements in crash barriers, signage, lighting, tyres are a continuous thing.

And there are a few I missed out too: NCAP and tighter legislation of crash safety, skid protection, power steering, etc