At present the death toll on our roads is around 3500 people a year. There are 60 million people in the UK so thats a percentage of .00584%. This small percentage are killed because of speed according to the goverment and the police farce, sorry force.

I would have said it was more to do with crashing, or driver error then?

Surely, the many millions that the goverment are pumping into combating speeding would be better spent on other things, like making the police farce, sorry force, more effective at actually catching criminals who commit crimes against the person and against property (You know real crimes, like rape, murder, etc). Or perhaps spend it on the NHS or a better roads or Public Transport system????

Can we really bring the percentage of road deaths down any further! Maybe, maybe not, but I think that the money being spent is being spent in the wrong places.

Surely the money spent on thousands of speed cameras would be better spent on traffic calming schemes in our town centres where the majority of Pedestrian deaths occur. Bringing the speed limit down in town and cities is surely more sensible that sticking speed cameras in secluded country lanes at supposed accident black spots.

I am not against trying to stop speeding, I live on a main road and during the weekend and evenings, the local boy racers and motorbiking fraternity use our main road as there own personal race track, the police caught a biker a few weeks ago doing 93mph in a 30mph zone... Stupid speed. recently however the police don’t seem to be doing much about speed on our road. Their to busy sitting in Presbury where all the rich people live!

Now, I think that bringing the speed limit down to 20 mph in our towns or residential areas, as is the norm in some areas of Germany, would solve lots of problems as pedestrians involved in low speed collisions with cars have a greater chance of surviving, on the other hand your creating a slower moving volume of traffic which will just choke the town up. However the only reason residential areas need protecting is because of commuter traffic taking that short cut because of traffic. Something has to be done as it is no longer safe for kids to play out on the streets any more.

Just to throw a spanner in the works, Why does the traffic become lighter during the school holidays?

Because the parents aren’t taking their kids to and from school. Whatever happened to school buses? When I was a kid, there was a school bus which picked us up from the end of the street and returned us there at the end of the day. Surely one coach is better than 52 cars invading the area around the schools morning and night! However I digress!

As for the motorway system, I am of the opinion that the speed limit isn’t high enough and nobody sticks to the speed limit of 70mph anyway. Just go and look at your local motorway. I really think that a limit of 100mph is realistic on the motorway, however this is the absolute limit and being caught doing 110mph will earn you an instant ban with a retest the only way to get your license back. Most cars these days are more than capable of this speed and are safer should a crash occur. However I don’t think that most peoples driving skills could cope with this, not saying that most people can’t drive at 100mph, but there driving skills aren’t up to it.

This is a short coming of the learner driver system, how can you expect somebody who has had no tuition of motorways to be able to drive on a motorway after they have passed their test. Extra tuition should be manditory. After you’ve passed your test you should have to have lessons on motorway driving. I did and I am thankfull for it now.

Whatever happens I think the goverment has a very blinkered approach to speeding and traffic problems as a whole and it should look at all transportation in whole before they condem one part of it.

If you can get cars off the road, you’ll have less accidents! So a better public transport system might be a better idea!

Just as a quick foot note, the UK has one of the lowest road traffic death rates in the World! How low can we go?

Links
» Safespeed.org

Last Updated: 22/12/2006 20:55:48

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