> street racers have killed many innocent bystanders, You're not responding to the point. The parent was talking about solitary drivers, and used remote parts of scotland as an example.
The reality is you never know if you’re really alone. Plenty of people are killed on “empty” country roads because the driver didn’t see them due to inappropriate speed, distractions or a combination.
Unless you know the area.
The parent has a couple of counter examples to that. Seems like the caveats, that sometimes you do actually know you're alone, are exactly the scenarios we're talking about.
I once saw speed cameras as "un-sporting" until travelling elsewhere in the world where they are commonplace. In those countries, it seems like everyone just drives the speed limit. If the point of speed enforcement is to, you know, ensure that everyone is going the speed limit or slower, they're awesome. Norway's system of timed speed cameras are particularly wonderful -- they simply photograph a car and then photog…
I agree speed camera are necessary but "time of travel" speed cameras are absolutely violating the intent of the law, which is to have people drive safely. Part of driving safely is that you may need to speed up to avoid a situation, or change lanes safely or what have you - a time of travel camera (in the way they get implemented which is identical to single-point speed cameras AFAIK) is essentially just a random ti…
There are exactly 0 situations that require you to break the speed limit to become “safe.” The UK Highway Code and driving lessons are very explicit in how you respond to emergencies and “speed up” is not on the list.
The reality is you never know if you’re really alone. Plenty of people are killed on “empty” country roads because the driver didn’t see them due to inappropriate speed, distractions or a combination.
Unless you know the area. The parent has a couple of counter examples to that. Seems like the caveats, that sometimes you do actually know you're alone, are exactly the scenarios we're talking about.
Unless you have constant surveillance on the km in front of you, you cannot know you're alone. Things happen. They may not be likely at all, but as a whole we're not good judges of probability.
Also, even if you crash with nobody around at the time, someone else may crash into the rescue team just arriving to help you.
It shouldn’t matter. Owner is liable until proven otherwise.
To the people downvoting this: this is the U.K. law in this area. If you weren’t the driver, you must tell the police who was driving. If you don’t, you’re the one who gets the speeding ticket.
I once saw speed cameras as "un-sporting" until travelling elsewhere in the world where they are commonplace. In those countries, it seems like everyone just drives the speed limit. If the point of speed enforcement is to, you know, ensure that everyone is going the speed limit or slower, they're awesome. Norway's system of timed speed cameras are particularly wonderful -- they simply photograph a car and then photog…
My state in Australia have heavy, heavy fines, even compared to the rest of Aus. It doesn't reduce the amount of poor driving but speeding at least is unambiguous. There is no grey area. If the speed limit is 60kmph then you will get booked for exceeding it by 5kmph, and the only reason you get that 5kmph leeway is to account for camera calibration and some grace for speedometer calibration. They would ping you at 61…
I think that's stupid for one reason. As an engineer I often considered 10% tolerance to be sufficient. I think enforcing speed limits to anything greater than 10% is just silly. I often drift +/- more than 10% of my intended speed. It's just human nature. I pay more attention to potential dangers and obstacles, and less on whether I am within a % of the speed limit, and I really hope other drivers do as well.
The reality is you never know if you’re really alone. Plenty of people are killed on “empty” country roads because the driver didn’t see them due to inappropriate speed, distractions or a combination.
Unless you know the area. The parent has a couple of counter examples to that. Seems like the caveats, that sometimes you do actually know you're alone, are exactly the scenarios we're talking about.
If you know you are truly alone, then you know there's no police. Plus there's animals. I see dead foxes, dogs and cats all the time on the road.
Some of it is due to how easily speed can be measured but you're over-simplifying what the studies actually show. Speed is what turns minor accidents into major ones, especially for people who aren't themselves in cars[1] so while it's true that for avoiding vehicular collisions the most important factor is going around the same speed as the rest of the vehicles there's still a significant difference in injury/death…
There are some newer cars with AEB that have pedestrian detection, though. You can watch videos of IIHS testing those features [0]. It's not a perfect solution but will automatically brake if a collision with a pedestrian (or other VRU) is predicted and the driver is not braking. [0] https://youtu.be/TJgUiZgX5rE?t=109
That usually doesn’t kick in at higher speeds, due to the risk of it suddenly breaking on a motorway. In a way, this makes speeding even worse.
> To the inevitable dismay of U.K. street racers who > primarily partake in their favorite illegal motorsport > after hours, the TruCam II also features night mode > whereas the first TruCam, which has already reportedly > been in use for the past six years, only worked during the > daytime. I think this really comes down to the letter of the law vs the spirit of it. To the spirit of the law, i.e. saving third-party…
You're a danger to only yourself until suddenly you aren't as alone as you thought you were.
> To the inevitable dismay of U.K. street racers who > primarily partake in their favorite illegal motorsport > after hours, the TruCam II also features night mode > whereas the first TruCam, which has already reportedly > been in use for the past six years, only worked during the > daytime. I think this really comes down to the letter of the law vs the spirit of it. To the spirit of the law, i.e. saving third-party…
> doing 35 mph in a 30 mph really going to kill anybody?
Or specifically, not "speeding will kill someone" because we'll always have some level of accidents. But increased speed translates to increased accidents and increased accidents translate to more deaths.
It’s strange to see you advocate for 35mph. In many parts of Southern England I saw 20mph become the norm. It makes a lot of sense in terms of road safety as well as noise, and makes little to no difference to journey times.
20/35 is 4/7 the speed, and therefore it makes every trip take 7/4 as long. So you spend an additional 15 minutes on every 20-minute journey. You're rapidly going to waste more human lifetimes sitting in cars than you would ever save from driving slower.
Much of the time on a typical London car journey is spent idling in traffic, so it’s not so easy to calculate.