Nuxx:5b5ea610-79ee-4565-aad7-f6517cb5aa21@s21g2000vbb.googlegroups.com

Path: num2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!num1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!number.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!postnews.google.com!s21g2000vbb.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Message-ID: <5b5ea610-79ee-4565-aad7-f6517cb5aa21@s21g2000vbb.googlegroups.com> From: Nuxx Bar  Newsgroups: uk.rec.cycling Subject: How Many Behaviours Are There... Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 11:50:53 -0700 (PDT) Lines: 30 Organization: http://groups.google.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 86.145.66.20 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1242327054 4826 127.0.0.1 (14 May 2009 18:50:54 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 18:50:54 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: s21g2000vbb.googlegroups.com; posting-host=86.145.66.20; posting-account=7_6kYAkAAABD6HrjM0VxehwvZOKMxm4g User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042316 Firefox/3.0.10 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729),gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Bytes: 2551 Xref: perfectly-safe.chapmancentral.co.uk uk.rec.cycling:701449

...where the following points apply?

- Being caught doing it four (sometimes fewer) times results in a driving ban.

- Every driver does it; the vast majority of drivers do it several times per journey in complete safety, and that includes police, magistrates, "safety camera partnership" employees, government ministers and their chauffeurs, councillors, pillars of communities, vicars, etc. So almost every driver would get banned at least once a day if every instance of the behaviour was detected and resulted in a conviction.

- It doesn't cause any accidents or increase danger in itself...it is completely victimless. It is often confused (sometimes deliberately) with inappropriate speed, but it is totally different to this.

- It is nothing more than a technical offence. One cannot tell whether a marginal "offence" is being committed or not without looking at measuring equipment.

- Whether or not an "offence" is committed depends to a large extent upon the whim of councillors who are not traffic engineers and are heavily influenced by the wishes of NIMBY residents.

- Road "safety" enforcement is heavily biased towards detection of this one "offence", with millions of millions of automated prosecutions per year and counting. The law regarding this behaviour is being enforced with no discretion not because of safety, but to make things harder for motorists and take their money.