No it fucking doesn’t. What kills is using speed such that you cannot stop in what you can see to be clear. The IAM should know this instead of peddling the tired, trite “speed kills” mantra. And a speed limit has nothing whatsoever to do with safety. It is an arbitrary line above which you get prosecuted. As to whether it is safe or not depends on fluctuating local conditions – not because some anti-car council decided to put an absurdly low speed limit in place.
Simon Best, the organisation’s chief executive, said: “149 miles per hour equates to nearly two and a half miles in a minute.
“If anything goes wrong at that speed, you’re unlikely to walk away and you are a grave danger to the innocent road users around you.
“Speed limits are a limit. They are not a target to beat.”
Yes, so one driver drove like a cretin and the IAM wants a crackdown. Like there aren’t enough enforcement cameras already, as if there aren’t enough absurdly low limits in place at the moment, like we are not constantly being harangued about speed to the exclusion of other factors. So we spend more time looking at the speedometer and less on the road in front of us and matching our progress to the prevailing conditions – which is what an advanced driver should be doing.
There was a time when I respected the IAM. I still have the certificate for the motorcycle exam I took with them many moons ago. But no more. They have just become another front for the hard-of-thinking “speed kills” cretins. Speed does not kill. What kills is driving too fast for the conditions. Then, the suddenly not speeding becomes fatal.
Speed kills, yes, that’s why jet planes never caught on and Mr Best travels abrosd by dirigible.
“Innocent road users”
Innocent of what?
Well a disproportionate number are certainly not innocent of something ignorant, lazy and which can often be downright dangerous. Fuck me if I had a pound for every time I was blinded by misaligned headlights either coming towards or behind!
Institute of advanced bansturbation more like. Sounds very much like a plea to become a fake charity.
“What kills is using speed such that you cannot stop in what you can see to be clear.”
It’s generally the rapid deceleration that kills:- even from 35mph to 0mph is fatal, if the deceleration is caused by a concrete wall, lamp post or large tree preventing your body from continuing at 35mph…
If I had £1 for every “discussion” I’ve had with an innumerate mantra warbling twerp at the Speed Enforcement / Safety Camera Partnership I’d buy a large Starbucks Latte.
20’s plenty, 10’s terrific, 5’s fantastic …. In Somerset + Wiltshire, quite a lot of mini executive estate building has gone on. The well to do incomers contribution to life in the countryside has been to try and impose their prejudices about noisy animals, smelly fields and “intrusive traffic” – the Community Speedwatch (almost exclusively retired) busybodies bleating about traffic they don’t like – usually because their bijou residences are built next to the road on the edge of the village… are the latest recruits to the public sector’s war on motorists,
It’s about control… and money.
I traveled through the new M4 / M5 “Managed Motorway” scheme north of Bristol at the weekend. Traffic flows were moderate – and moving pretty much as they have on most weekend afternoons for the last 30+ years (without “management”). What was different is that the dozens of gantry radars were flashing away regularly as the limit had been dropped to 60.
This is just banditry. They might as well give “speeding” fines by drawing lots.
In the meantime I see wildly dangerous overtaking, crazy tailgating, idiot cyclists without lights, idjits driving without lights in fog, pedestrians with earbuds sauntering into traffic and all the rest – all of which from my point of view as a two wheeled and four wheeled road user I perceive as going unjustifiably unpunished
At this rate municipal red flag walkers can’t be far away. Speeding fines are too easy an option – wantwit sloganeering by cretins, repeated by the incurious lazy cretins in the MSM just fuels the sort of moral panic that ends up making for monstrously stupid laws… all paid for by wringing the wallets of self evidently solvent drivers….
Oh … and how are those numbers going about the number of police officers and civvy support staff that’ve had their fines / points disappeared eh?
/rant
Twenty is plenty? One quick Google finds there’s actually an organisation of this name and I think it’s a reference to their collective IQ. Fcukwits.
As any fule kno, the real cause of most road ‘accidents’ is driver inattention. Twenty mph is frustrating and very boring. Even the meanest intelligence will concede that a bored driver isn’t simply paying enough attention to driving. They will fiddle with the in car entertainment, gossip with their passengers, daydream. Anything but actually drive. Therefore road deaths will actually increase if the ‘speed kills’ morons get their way. Didn’t Swindon find that out when they ditched all their speed cameras?
How many of you drivers out there have a decades long 100% safe driving record? I have and I’d like to bet that millions of others out there have too. My insurance has been claimed against just once when, as a dozy teenager, I ran my 125cc motorbike into the back of the car in front. Slow moving stop-start traffic, not paying enough attention, no real harm done. I have been driving for nearly forty years since then, I’ve had just three mishaps, all of them rear end shunts but in each of these cases I was the innocent party. Non of these incidents involved anyone exceeding the speed limit. You are of course correct in saying that the IAM should know better. If there was anyone that I was going to look to for some sensible comments on road safety it would have been them, otherwise they might just as well be effing BRAKE.
I started riding and driving in 1975 – so that’s 39 years. I’ve had two insurance claims. One was for theft, so not road traffic related at all. The other was last year when I hit a deer on the M4. If I had been doing 30 instead of 60 maybe I would have avoided it…
Either way, neither of my insurance claims involved excessive speed. I teach as I drive; to look ahead and adjust speed to the conditions. Unfortunately, I also have to tell new riders to adhere to the absurd local authority speed limits even when it is obvious that they are inappropriate for the road and prevailing conditions and other traffic is ignoring them.
The police round our way are very bike friendly. They do free riding assessments. I was told to stick to posted limits in town and to “make good progress” on the open road. Sitting at 75-80 with a police bike in the mirror was interesting, even moreso when he said I was competent but tentative!
Just a side thought – would the advent of the driverless car have a happy side effect of putting Mr. Best out of a job?
😉
It can’t be long before someone successfully claims against a local authority for failure in its duty of care by NOT putting an appropriate speed limit in place. Shouldn’t every hazard be signed with a safe speed? It certainly looks like we are going that way. Alternatively we could just expect all drivers to adapt to road conditions.
The value of signing has been lost by overuse, (crying “wolf!”). On one of my driving routes there is a stretch of road obviously bordered by agriculture related ‘shop’s. The sensible driver can see this and should be aware of vehicles turning on/off the forecourts. The LHA has applied a 40 mph limit to this stretch of road, which is too high at the height of the trading day and far too low out of hours.
Why do limits have to be the same in both directions? It makes sense to have a deceleration zone before a village but why can’t that be an acceleration zone at the exit?
Ah… the war on motorists – see what the municipal wantwits get up to when dealing with a traffic bottleneck in the ever so precious little town of Bradford on Avon
See here http://www.wiltshiretimes.co.uk/news/11244163.Bradford_on_Avon_s___2_5_million_Historic_Core_Zone_on_course__residents_told/
That looks suspiciously like a variation on shared space. If it is, then it will work just fine. I’m all for removing white lines, less so on putting up bollards, though.
Aye – “shared space” is fashionable … – but the town is on the convergence of two main routes north / south and it is already a bad bottleneck – particularly in commuting hours – the volume of traffic is a fact that the busybodies choose to repeatedly ignore and traffic is so dense that pollution is one of the highest scores outside London.
The town jams up morning and evening for over an hour – and I mean jam. There is presently no practical alternate route for most travelers. The proposed changes are narrowing the carriageway, making some sections single carriageway chicanes, humps , bollards , expensive brick paving and artisan made “Welcome to Ye Olde Bradforde upon Avon” signs … Oh and even less car parking spaces …
What is actually required is a bypass – a thing successfully resisted by a recently deceased well known (and connected) local nabob for over 50 years…
http://youtu.be/OoETMCosULQ
These trite, patronising “20s plenty” signs our local streets have been blessed with, always tempt me to add “but 50s nifty”, I doubt anyone would even notice.