Re: Victory for green lanes

The message <68d7dnF2rn30pU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
from Peter Clinch <p.j.clinch@xxxxxxxxxxxx> contains these words:

Turning the majority of motorists into common criminals doesn't help the
situation particularly when what has been perfectly legal for years gets
criminalised for no better reason than a non driving socialist not
wanting the rich to drive any faster than the volk in their volkswagons.

Oh dear. The rant-o-meter has just broken having gone off the scale,
leading me to suspect some angry rationalisation has taken the place of
informed thought.

What's the matter Pete? Got out of bed the wrong side today?

Roger, read your paragraph quoted above again, complete with
"non-driving socialists" and ask who it was might've got out of bed the
wrong side...

So you support the notion that a politician with a lack of basic
knowledge of and an antipathy to much of the remit is the ideal
candidate for an important ministerial position.

Barbara Castle was a Stalinist of the old school resentful of anything
that was not distributed equally be it wealth, intelligence or fast
cars. She never even learned to drive which further prejudiced her
against motorists. The arbitrary 70 mph limit had no justification other
than it was the top speed of the VW Beetle which had been widely
advertised as being capable of being driven flat out all day, unlike
many of its contemporaries. Hardly surprising when the 1200 cc Beetle
engine put out only a pitiful 34 bhp at maximum, the same as a 848 cc
Mini and 5 bhp down on a 997 cc 105E Ford Anglia which could also be
driven flat out all day.

So Ms. castle also managed to influence, say, the even lower limits
you'd have found in Texas, hotbed of Stalinism, in a similar time frame?
Wow! She was either /much/ more influential than I remember, or you're
having a bit of a rant.

I have no knowledge of speed limits in Texas in the 1960s but that has
nothing to do with what went on in the UK. One thing I do know about
Texas is that Texans always claim to have the biggest of everything so
having the biggest restrictions on car use would at least be par for the
course.

Transport research has long noted a "safety in numbers" effect. The
more cars/bikes/whatever there are, the lower the accident rates. If
people are more used to other vehicles, they pay more attention to them.
Perhaps counter-intuitive, but true, and neatly sidesteps you rant
about the evils of socialism.

Ah yes, that would be why road casualties soared as the amount of motor
traffic on the roads increased in the first half of the 20th century.

Because it hadn't reached the critical mass of numbers to be safe in
during the first half of the 20th Century. Cars were not a completely
normal thing of which everyone was aware and constantly on their guard
as is the case now.

You have an answer for everything Pete but your answer doesn't add up.
For it to make any sense you would have to be blaming the non-car
victims rather than the drivers who everyone tends to blame for
accidents. For those who did have cars cars were a normal part of daily
life even if they generally weren't used to take unfit kids a few
hundred yards to school.

It was perfectly normal for kids to play in
non-cul-de-sac streets up into the 1970s, it doesn't happen any more,
because cars are so much more pervasive.

Kids still play on the streets but these days many of the games are more
sophisticated and involve TWOCing. :-)

Motorists who are convicted of causing death by dangerous driving
generally end up in jail with a criminal record. I haven't heard
anything that leads me to believe that anyone in the NHS has acquired a
criminal record because of hospital acquired infection deaths, let along
bgeen sent to jail.

So losing your job isn't /any/ sort of punishment?

Since when has losing ones job involved either jail or a criminal record?

See above. There is ample evidence that by and large motorists do limit
their speed when circumstances demand it.

"By and large" still leaves a great deal of scope for them to get people
killed by not knowing how fast is fast enough.

So you would have it that when it is relatively easy to know how fast is
fast enough you should be denied using your own judgement but when the
conditions get worse you are are sufficiently responsible and
sufficiently experienced to know when to slow down from an arbitrary
speed limit that may be well below the safe limit for that particular
road.

Extending the scope would give
said motorists more opportunity to practice roadcraft and as everyone
knows, practice makes perfect. :-)

So the roadside memorial flowers I pass quite often these days on dead
straight sections of rural road, the folk they were left in memory of
really benefited from their "practice" at high speeds, and the reason
they crashed was they never broke speed limits and thus weren't good
drivers?

How do you know what the cause of such accidents is? Perhaps the drivers
just fell asleep at the wheel (IIRC driving when tired is at least as
big a risk as excessive speed and the majority of accidents where
excessive speed is a factor don't involve speeding).

--
Roger Chapman
Nearest Marilyn still to be visited - Great Orme.
89 miles as the crow flies,
considerably more as the walker drives.
.

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