Raising the Speed Limit (Update)

Further to the post a couple of days ago about raising the speed limit to 80mph on motorways, the forums have been incandescent. (There is also a DSA alert about it here)

I’m not sure ‘incandescent’ is the right word. It means glowing with white or intense heat/light – but whatever it is the forums are incandescent with, it sure ain’t white or brilliant!

It’s worth just clearing up what the proposals actually say:

  • it would only apply to motorways
  • it would require a full public consultation before becoming law
  • it would be introduced in 2013 at the earliest
  • it goes hand in hand with proposals to limit many – if not all – urban roads to 20mph

Almost exclusively, those most in favour of increasing the speed limit in the main appear totally ignorant of the “on motorways” part. Many seem to think it means on all national speed limit (NSL) roads. Most are also ignorant of the 20mph proposals, or the fact that it isn’t going to happen next week.

Congested Motorway

Another obvious feature of those showing the most support for the proposed increase is the fact that almost all of them are car freaks – young or old – who think they know everything, and who are so wound up in themselves that they can’t recognise how other people might be different… and who might not be able to safely handle an increased limit.

Most frighteningly, some of those car freaks are ADIs. They are openly stating that motorways shouldn’t have a speed limit at all, that the limit should be higher than 80mph, and so on.

One of my pupils asked me for my thoughts on it today. I told him that I don’t have any issues with an increase in speed limits from my own perspective – but I have a major concern when it comes to trusting other drivers to handle it properly.

There were two good illustrations of the potential problems yesterday.

No Overtaking Sign

First of all, I was on a normal lesson with a pupil. We were on a dual carriageway and at one point we simply overtook cars which were going slower than us (I’d suggest we were doing around 65-70mph, whilst the other cars were doing 55-60mph). Since we were going 5-10mph faster, that’s the relative speed we passed them at. However, as we went a little further we came upon a large road maintenance truck, which was travelling at no more than 40mph – as we approached to overtake I advised the pupil to be careful. We passed safely – going about 30mph faster than the truck.

Once it was safe, I got the pupil to pull over and we talked about the difference between the first overtake and the second. The first involved us travelling at almost the same speed as the cars in the lane to our left, whereas the second involved us closing in on the truck at a relative speed of 30mph. I asked the pupil to consider the risks and dangers if a car pulls out in front of you when you’re only doing about 10mph, compared with those if one pulls out at 30mph. That was why I advised caution in that second situation.

The second example came while I was doing a Pass Plus session on the M1. We were in the middle lane overtaking lorries on the section of the road approaching Leicester, where there are warning signs about slow vehicles as the road climbs. I’d just mentioned to the lad driving that lorries can pull out at any time and without warning on this section, when that’s exactly what happened. What made it worse is that if the lorry had done it 10 seconds earlier it wouldn’t have mattered so much – but he waited right until we were literally five car lengths behind and then he pulled out. He rapidly pulled back in again, then tried to pull out once more as he saw us brake hard (the car we were in was an automatic and picked up very quickly). The last I saw was him waving his arms around as though we’d done something wrong.

Speedometer

But rather than go on about moronic lorry drivers, the point is that if a driver was inexperienced and approached such a situation at 80mph (or maybe 85mph – you know what will happen whatever limit is set), he could be closing on the vehicle wanting to pull out at a relative speed of 30-40mph. Sudden braking at an absolute speed of 80-85mph, though, is likely to cause a skid or roll, which in turn could cause others to swerve, brake, or skid – and before you know it you have a multi-vehicle pile-up.

I’m not saying they don’t happen with the limit set at 70mph (not with prats like that lorry driver on the road, that’s for sure). But you need to be an idiot to think that if it happened with the limit set at 80mph the outcome would be less serious.

The media needs to stop keep trotting out statistics like “49% of cars go faster than 70mph on the motorway” if it isn’t going to include other statistics like how many miles of motorway are shut every day of the week due to accidents caused by people going too fast.

And anorak societies like the IAM need to stop publishing misleading data like those in this story. The simple fact is that speed DOES kill. The silly semantics over “appropriate speed” and “speed limits” is fine when debated over a half a pint of Old Scrotum Best Bitter down the golf club, but it has bugger all to do with the real world. All accidents are down to speed one way or another – if you weren’t moving, and no one else was, then you’d never have a collision.

As soon as you start moving, you need to make judgements about your own speed and other people’s. The larger the speed range involved, the harder that is.

And one final point about this Mickey Mouse government’s so-called reasoning. It claims that raising the limit will increase productivity. Will it? Well, consider travelling from London to Liverpool – a distance of about 200 miles.

If you could do it at a steady 70mph, it would take you just over 2¾ hours. If you could do it at a steady 80mph, it would take 2½ hours. So under totally theoretical and impossible-to-achieve conditions, you’d save about 15 minutes of travel time.

In reality, assuming that congestion isn’t so bad that you’re at a standstill, you’ll be able to do 80mph from one hold-up to the next. As you approach each one, the risks of an accident will increase as you’ll be doing a much higher speed relative to the slower people around you (raising the limit to 80 doesn’t mean those who drive at 60 will go any faster). You’ll need more concentration and skill – and by definition, you’ll be a prat in a hurry, so all that’s right out of the window before we even start!

All this coalition shambles is after is votes from brain-dead petrol heads.

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