Speed Limit Enforcement
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There is a Campaign here in Northern Ireland to enforce Speed Limits, All Over TV. The Message Is, We will Catch and Do you if you are over the speed limit by as much as 5%. Various unsubstantiated statistics are quoted, about the effects of impact at higher speeds. (i.e. Rate of Death or Serious Injury) The First and Obvious point is that those driving these issue are unaware of the subject of tolerances of measurement, both in the legal requirement for the accuracy of spedometors in cars, and the calibration tolerances in the equipment used by police. There are several more substansive issues to be adressed here. First of all, What is an acceptable death or Injury Rate. When I asked my Partner, she said Zero and Zero. I said, Well, In that case we forget about all motorised Trafic, and go back to say 1880. So, We have to accept that motorised trafic will cause death and injury. Why are Politicians trying to avoid this fact. Why can we not have a real discussion about the Issues surrounding, and take in items such as 'Benefit to Society' Rather than a Populist drive of No Road Deaths.
Bram van Kampen
Me again, with another tale. The village I live in has a 30mph limit. Fair enough. The roads leading to it are 60mph. Reasonable again. A few years ago a lad in his early teens was hit and badly injured. This was in the evening, whilst dark, and he had been playing chicken with his mates. The fact that there had been a serious injury meant the police could justify having speed camera vans parked on the road, and they do a lot. Just after the 60 becomes a 30 and before the houses start. I was caught doing 38 there last year, after 18 years and 4 days of a clean licence.
Every man can tell how many goats or sheep he possesses, but not how many friends.
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Dalek Dave wrote:
one of the lowest death rates
wrong.
Dalek Dave wrote:
Speed does not equal death, lack of driving skill equals death.
That is soooooo wrong. Ayrton Senna had one of the best driving skills in the world, but he is dead because he drove too fast into a wall.
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Yes, but if the speed of this car at that time were 90kmph instead of 150kmph, he wouldn't have died, and this no matter how good his skills were. The analogy is clumsy, but I think you get my point.
If it's as simple as 'speed kills' then set an example and limit all police cars to whatever the local limit is. Police are allowed to speed because they're trained to do it safely. Andy B
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If it's as simple as 'speed kills' then set an example and limit all police cars to whatever the local limit is. Police are allowed to speed because they're trained to do it safely. Andy B
LabVIEWstuff wrote:
Police are allowed to speed because they're trained to do it safely.
Actually, they're not. What they are allowed to do is make other vehicles give way or stop, so that they can go faster than they would have been able to if staying with the flow -- but not faster than the speed limit. If they speed, they have to fill out reports, etc, to explain why they exceeded the limit, and the reason has to be one that merits taking such a risk.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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LabVIEWstuff wrote:
Police are allowed to speed because they're trained to do it safely.
Actually, they're not. What they are allowed to do is make other vehicles give way or stop, so that they can go faster than they would have been able to if staying with the flow -- but not faster than the speed limit. If they speed, they have to fill out reports, etc, to explain why they exceeded the limit, and the reason has to be one that merits taking such a risk.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
And being officers of unquestionable integrity I'm sure they all follow the procedure to the letter :) . Andy B
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The sole issue is almighty Revenue. Few people have ever died of going too fast; in most cases, a failure to stop quickly enough was the cause. Slow moving, inattentive, inconsiderate, and inept drivers account for 90% of traffic fatalities. While public safety is the emotional flag all politicians and policemen wave, their only motivation is to make criminals of honest citizens in order to collect fines. Statistics are deliberately warped in order to support more stringent laws, and more revenue collections, as a matter of course. I witnessed an accident involving a couple who were on the way home from the store with groceries, a bottle of wine included. They were rammed by a non-legal resident Mexican lady with no insurance who made an illegal left turn right into them. The impact shattered the bottle of wine, and the couple was cited for open container. I looked them up and read the accident report. The box "alcohol involved" was checked. Although the open container case was thrown out of court, the "alcohol involved" statistic is forever part of history, helping to "prove" that alcohol and driving is a Bad ThingTM. When I was arrested for DUI 20 years ago, parked in my own driveway, I had consumed two drinks in the course of the evening. As I was leaving the bar, word got out that I'd just received the first job offer in two years, and several people insisted on buying me a shot. I drank them in a hurry, then went home, knowing that it takes twenty minutes for the booze to get into the bloodstream. I arrived sober, but the cop knew a bit about biochemistry, too, and kept me talking idly and engaged in silly tests (which I passed) for 40 minutes. Then he had me test for BAC, and took me in for being over the limit. Once I was safely booked and cited, he gave me a ride back home and to my car, keys in pocket. He even let me keep my butterfly knife, which is illegal to possess in Arizona. The reason given for stopping me was that I was driving at 40 mph in a 25 mph zone; I checked the next day and found that my car wasn't capable of reaching more than 30 mph in the span he cited. Public safety, my ass! It's all about revenue, and controlling the public with fear and economic losses. There is no such thing as a risk-free existence, but politicians never tire of trying to convince us that just one more law will make everything bad go away, and police are more than happy to play along, because bigger budgets let them buy more cop toys to make them look more scary and compensate for the tiny hardwa
Roger Wright wrote:
What was that awful movie, Tom Cruise was involved I think, where the cops could monitor your thoughts and stop crimes before they happened? It was an awful movie, but it would be far more awful to live it...
Anything based on a P K Dreck story is going to suck. Casting Tom Cruise was one of the best choices the idiots making it could've done. His fanboi's would still watch it, and the rest of us wouldn't even if it was casted with talent. X|
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
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What you're saying is that you speed, you want to continue to speed, and you don't want anyone to punish you for speeding. I have a feeling that it wouldn't matter what the speed limit was, you'd want to go faster. Put a sock in it. Cars, particularly cars going faster than the speed limit in built-up areas, are one of the major causes of child mortality. And here's an absolutely can't-****ing-argue-with-it fact: The faster a ton and a half of of metal and cretin is moving when it hits a child, the more damage does. I don't want to see a posting here later about how sorry you feel for yourself because a little boy stepped out in front of your car when you were going too fast to stop, avoid him, or slow down enough to not do much damage. The best drivers are Careful and Cautious. The worst ones begin with a C, too.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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"for the children" has been used to justify more atrocities than any other phrase except "in gods name" X|
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Dan Neely wrote:
"for the children" has been used to justify more atrocities than any other phrase except "in gods name"
I didn't say "for the children". I leave statements like that to perverts like Michael Jackson. Are you arguing with the (completely unarguable) Physics of it, or the figures? In 2008 (annoyingly, the most recent figures), "Great Britain had a road accident child fatality rate of 1.11 per million population". That's the whole population, not just children, so factor age in to make it "per million children", and the figure is much, much worse. And that's a drop of almost 10% from 2007, possibly because money became tighter in 2008, and alcohol consumption dropped -- but who knows why, and let's not look a gift horse, and all that. And you want to bandy terms like "for the children" and "atrocity"? Bollocks. Every time you drive fast enough to kill a child in a built-up area, you risk killing a child. That's fact. It's up to you how often you want to take that risk, but bear in mind that a lot of lives (including yours) will become very miserable if the risk becomes a reality. And I doubt very much that any sane or sensible person would call a speeding fine an "atrocity", but sane and sensible people don't take stupid and senseless risks, either, so we're not talking about them.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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And being officers of unquestionable integrity I'm sure they all follow the procedure to the letter :) . Andy B
LabVIEWstuff wrote:
And being officers of unquestionable integrity lazy ****ers who hate doing paperwork, I'm sure they all follow the procedure to the letter
A little reality, s'il vou plait.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Dan Neely wrote:
"for the children" has been used to justify more atrocities than any other phrase except "in gods name"
I didn't say "for the children". I leave statements like that to perverts like Michael Jackson. Are you arguing with the (completely unarguable) Physics of it, or the figures? In 2008 (annoyingly, the most recent figures), "Great Britain had a road accident child fatality rate of 1.11 per million population". That's the whole population, not just children, so factor age in to make it "per million children", and the figure is much, much worse. And that's a drop of almost 10% from 2007, possibly because money became tighter in 2008, and alcohol consumption dropped -- but who knows why, and let's not look a gift horse, and all that. And you want to bandy terms like "for the children" and "atrocity"? Bollocks. Every time you drive fast enough to kill a child in a built-up area, you risk killing a child. That's fact. It's up to you how often you want to take that risk, but bear in mind that a lot of lives (including yours) will become very miserable if the risk becomes a reality. And I doubt very much that any sane or sensible person would call a speeding fine an "atrocity", but sane and sensible people don't take stupid and senseless risks, either, so we're not talking about them.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
You might not have used the phrase, but you were using the argument; one with all the debating legitimacy of the reducto ab hitler. Edit: and which equally should be sobjet to Godwin's Avenger. Unsafe driving is unsafe driving, whether the pedestrians are eight years old, eighty years old, or six legged and encased in chitin.
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18