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20mph speed limits


Morkery

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There's been some interesting work on road safety in Holland and Denmark in particular. The principles they work on are that the main cause of harm in accidents is not speed in itself, but where there is a big difference in the speed or the mass of the things that collide.

So where you get the kind of accident that I just managed to avoid last week, where some bozo in a white van immediately in front of me was tailgating on a motorway, car in front slowed, he slammed on his brakes so hard black smoke came from the wheels but he still rammed him anyway, they were both doing 70 just before this, but when they collided the difference in speed between the two must have been far less and they both would have had similar mass, it wasn't too bad at all. The car which had been rammed was on the central reservation, bouncing to a stop along the grass, while the clown in the van came to a stop in the middle of the road.

But where you have something involving very different degrees of speed and mass, eg pedestrians at 3mph and cars doing 30mph, it's likely to be a lot more harmful, even before you think about the level of protection the human body affords. (Someone suggested that we have about enough protection to save us from serious injury when falling while running at the maximum natural speed we can achieve, which sounds about right).

Based on that thinking, the Dutch and Danes try to separate road users who have very different speeds or mass, where they can - hence the cycle lanes. Where they can't separate them, like on lots of roads in towns where there just isn't space to have separate channels, that's when low speed limits are needed. Makes sense to me.

Of course something like that won't win any support from the me-me-me brigade who just want to be able to do what they want at any time and at any cost to everyone else, but that's where enforcement of traffic laws comes in.

We probably need to toughen up a little on that. Maybe first offence fines and disqualification for a period, second offence crush the car, third offence crush the car but strap the driver in first.

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There's been some interesting work on road safety in Holland and Denmark in particular. The principles they work on are that the main cause of harm in accidents is not speed in itself, but where there is a big difference in the speed or the mass of the things that collide.
In other words, the obvious answer is not to reduce the speed limit to 20, but simply to speed the lamp posts up to 30.
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There's been some interesting work on road safety in Holland and Denmark in particular. The principles they work on are that the main cause of harm in accidents is not speed in itself, but where there is a big difference in the speed or the mass of the things that collide.
In other words, the obvious answer is not to reduce the speed limit to 20, but simply to speed the lamp posts up to 30.

:D

I expect that's already the case, in some alternate universe.

We could make the lampposts bendy. But I suppose that would catapult the offender back the way, increasing the danger to those following.

The bigger problem than boy racers killing themselves is pedestrians and cyclists being killed or injured by selfish prats speeding, without care for other people. Drivers whose sense of road dangers and driving ethics have been conditioned by a few goes on the dodgems, who see other road users as an obstruction to be passed, an annoyance to be outwitted, an opponent to be defeated.

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