MLOC with style 1085

If I give you an argument in favour, will you do your very best not to accuse me of being a mindless sheep who can't drive etc etc etc as some others seem to do?

Well, I'll have a go.

The problem with having "driving in excess of the appropriate speed" as a limit is that we, as drivers, would never know whether or not we were offending in the eyes of a watching plod. The appropriate speed will depend on all sorts of things which an observer can't hope to know: car characteristics (how many people here know what the brakes on a DS are like?), driver experience and state of alertness, tyre type and all sorts of things as well as the obviously observable. Nobody who wanted to drive fairly fast would ever be sure that they were not, in the opinion of a watching policeman, exceeding the appropriate speed for that road.

One easy solution is to set a maximum speed limit for each stretch of road to apply to all cars and drivers. It's not ideal, by any means, but it does mean that a driver knows exactly what speed they can legally do - one less thing to worry about. Sure, it may take a small amount of attention to monitor speed against a number, but personally I'd rather do that than be constantly second guessing a cop behind a bush.

So for simplicity and understandability, I think there is a lot to be said for setting absolute maximum speed limits. Howver, as I have posted many times, I think they should be considerably higher than the current ones - maybe 80 and 90, -10 in the wet - and reviewed constantly as technology changes.

Incidentally, I think the sort of road where the limit constantly varies - 40, 60, 50, 40, 50, 60 ... - is completely pointless and in that case I strongly suspect there is no significant safety benefit for a huge amount of aggravation. Limits should be high enough to allow reasonable drivers in reasonable cars to make good progress in reasonable conditions.

There is one other safety benefit to having a fixed upper limit. Every driver has to take account of the other drivers on the road, and it is much easier to do so when you have a reasonable idea about what top speed to expect them to appear at. Imagine driving along a single carriageway, wanting to overtake, but having cars appear in the opposite direction at anything up to, say, 150mph instead of the current de facto maximum of 85-90? Sure, we should all be able to cope with occasional extra-fast drivers at the moment, but allowing unlimited maximum speeds might have quite unexpected results on safety and end-to-end speeds.

So, on the whole, and although I would like to drive faster, a lot of the time, than I legally may, I'm not convinced that the free-for-all some propose would really be much better than the system we have at the moment.

As a parallel, supposing all parking restrictions - single and double white lines, parking bays, notices on lampposts, the lot - were abolished and replaced with a single offence "parking in an inappropriate manner", prosecution and conviction to depend solely on the work of a parking warden as expert. Would that be an improvement, do you think? Popular with motorists?

I expect there will be some insanely furious responses to this. To be honest, I don't really care. It's a sunny day, I have the points box cover off on the 2CV and there are many more interesting things to do than play at flaming. For those who might like to respond that way, yes, I'm a sheep, dependent on a number on a stick, can't think for myself, illogical, no idea about physics, shouldn't be on the roads and so on. Whatever makes you happy.

To anyone else who'd like a more reasoned discussion, fire away. I'm open to persuasion on almost everything, including this!

Ian

PS I rather like the Californian model where, as I understand it, speed limits have to be reevaluated every five years to be legal, and must be set at or above the 80th percentile speed of those actually using the road, regardless of the speed limit at the time of survey.