Nuxx:4e2219d5$0$2485$db0fefd9@news.zen.co.uk

Path: num2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!num1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!number.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border3.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!goblin1!goblin.stu.neva.ru!news2.euro.net!feeder.news-service.com!tudelft.nl!txtfeed1.tudelft.nl!dedekind.zen.co.uk!zen.net.uk!hamilton.zen.co.uk!prichard.zen.co.uk.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID: <4e2219d5$0$2485$db0fefd9@news.zen.co.uk> From: Nuxx Bar  Newsgroups: uk.rec.cycling Subject: Re: RLJ Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2011 00:08:04 +0100 References:  <65eb0aac-964c-4c7a-b428-9327c127ba71@dp9g2000vbb.googlegroups.com>    <4e1f4224$0$2536$da0feed9@news.zen.co.uk> <624712c0-1a07-4836-8b0a-0c2d67bb42a1@fv14g2000vbb.googlegroups.com> <9893dkFk6mU1@mid.individual.net> <18ou175kand98fc4b4dq3mjecgb7sfeg9m@4ax.com>  Lines: 71 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; en-US; rv:1.9.2.18) Gecko/20110616 Thunderbird/3.1.11 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To:  Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Organization: Zen Internet NNTP-Posting-Host: a6f400f0.news.zen.co.uk X-Trace: DXC=MMoPej@Z1PCD7bh[1AJdHD0g@SS;SF6nGR9OH0:RnENDjXf;XAKU?bF`:ITG5aA:cGO0bn`J4hX?O X-Complaints-To: abuse@zen.co.uk Bytes: 5807 Xref: perfectly-safe.chapmancentral.co.uk uk.rec.cycling:817174

On 15/07/2011 11:15, Simon Mason wrote: > > I can confidently say that > more than 90% of drivers will exceed the speed limit down this road.

In that case the speed limit is too low, and surely only someone with a general prejudice against drivers and/or a misunderstanding of the situation as "slower is safer and that's that" would say otherwise.

No matter how inconvenient it may be to some, those travelling at the 85th percentile speed are statistically the safest drivers. Also, the slowest 10 percent of drivers are statistically the *2nd most dangerous* group (after the very fastest 10 percent). In other words, that speed limit is criminalising *all* drivers except for the 2nd most dangerous 10 percent. The speed limit on that road, and many others, needs raising to reflect reality, as it achieves nothing useful.

-- For those who care about the facts, and about road safety, rather than simply about giving drivers a hard time under the guise of safety: If, on a road without a stupidly low speed limit, you divide drivers into the fastest 10% (the 90th-100th percentile speeds), then the next fastest 10% (the 80th-90th percentile speeds), then the next fastest 10% (the 70th-80th percentile speeds), etc, all the way down to the slowest 10% (the 0th-10th percentile speeds), and then you determine which 10% bands are statistically the safest, then despite what the "slower is safer" brigade would have you think, it is *not* the slowest 10% which are the safest, then the next slowest, all the way up to the fastest.

In fact, it's virtually the complete opposite. The safest 10% is the 80th-90th percentile. The next safest is the 70th-80th, then the 60th-70th, all the way down to the 0th-10th, and the most dangerous is the fastest 10% (90th-100th). This means that, once you remove the nutters (the very fastest), then the *faster* a driver is, the *safer* they're likely to be. This is why speed limits have, for decades, been set at the 85th percentile, so that the safest drivers are within the speed limit, and the fastest 10% are speeding.

Of course, the car-hating pretend road safety brigade found those well-established facts to be inconvenient, so they simply cast them aside like all uncomfortable truths, trumpeted the much more palatable "slower is safer" in their place, and started setting speed limits way below the 85th percentile, joyfully ignoring the fact that the safest drivers were now disgracefully being criminalised. It's just another thing about current "road safety" policy which is monumentally screwed up.

People like Chapman know all this and purposefully ignore it because it doesn't fit their "anti-car before safety" agenda; people like Simon Mason adopt the "La la fingers in ears not listening" approach when told about it because they've set out their stall and they're loathe to accept that they've been wrong all this time. Other people, of course, are simply too stupid to understand the above (not that it's rocket science), but "slower is safer" appeals to them because it's simple. Councillors and officials who set speed limits frequently fall into one of these categories; that is why impartial, independent traffic engineers without an axe to grind should set speed limits. As long as we're criminalising 85th percentile drivers, we're doing something wrong: there's no *point* in getting them to slow down as it doesn't make them any safer. I'm right, aren't I JNugent? ;-)

(Footnote: none of the above, of course, means that if you're driving, say, at the 65th percentile, then if you accelerate to the 85th percentile then you'll automatically become safer. It simply means that those who tend to choose the 85th percentile speed tend to be safer than those who tend to choose other speeds.  This is certainly borne out by my experience: the very fastest drivers are reckless nutters, but those who are slightly less fast seem to know what they're doing and are a joy to share the roads with, while if you're behind someone who's very slow then they tend to make basic mistake after basic mistake, and quite obviously wouldn't pass a test.  They're a good reason for why we should all have driving tests every 5 or 10 years.)