No.
Fuckwit.
This is an EU “safety” directive. Speed limits have nothing to do with safety, they are a political tool. A safe speed is one in which you can stop within what you can see to be clear. Bugger all to do with speed limits.
Can we leave yet?
Correct. As a biker, that one line was consistently banged into my head.
Better driving standards have the potential to almost eliminate road accidents completely. I surely can’t claim to be a brilliant driver, but I’ve been driving for more than forty years without incident. Logically, if every driver was only as competent as I am, accidents would be really rare. There are obviously mechanical failures and impossible weather conditions that could cause accidents that were unavoidable but they would be really scarce.
Another point is, how safe are the roads already, considering the collective mileage that is covered? If you divided the number of serious accidents by the total number of miles covered, I think that the conclusion would be that the roads are remarkably safe.
I agree that Speed Limiters are not the best way to reduce road deaths.
I also agree that “a safe speed is one in which you can stop within what you can see to be clear”, with the proviso that your speed should also be commensurate with the weather, the condition of the road surface, the current speed limit and so on.
However (there is always a “however”!) an increasing number of drivers are ignoring those simple facts and there is also a rise in deliberate “bad” driving.
As an example of the first, a main road near where I live (speed limit 30 mph) runs about 140m from a roundabout to a hump-back bridge over which the road in front is obscured, and then for 30m to a right turn into a pub car-park. Following re-surfacing, cars and motor-bikes are now reaching some 50 mph by the time they reach the bridge. The skid marks on the road are testimony to the fact that a number of them have suddenly realised that there is a car waiting to turn right in front to them.
As an example of the second, on Monday of this week, traveling south on the M1, a van went from lane 3 and squeezed between the back of another van in lane 2 and the front of a car in lane 1 in order to reach the exit slip road.
Perish the thought, the industry (yes i’m part of it and have been for some 45 years), like many others, has been deskilled to a massive degree over the last 25 years espcially, whilst there is still a good percentage of HGV drivers doing the job competently and well capable of resuming the speeds they maintained regularly in the 80’s, an increasingly large minority you would not want at the helm of de-restricted vehicles.
Speed limiters have caused huge problems over the years, mainly bunching and tailgating, and when they get fitted to new cars, only a matter of time, car drivers will find out in short order all about elephant racing and the dangers therein, but they are here to stay for HGV’s.