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What do you do when loads of drivers get nicked for speeding?
Simple: you suggest that since so many people are breaking the law, maybe we should abolish the law!
At least, if you're the self-entitled wanker called Hugh Bladon (founder of the Alliance of British Drivers), that is.
'If a lot of people are being caught it may be that the speed limit on that road is ridiculously low. The speed limit needs to be reassessed to see what the normal speed of the road is. The limit should be set at the speed that 85 per cent of drivers take the road at...'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6846749/Britains-busiest-speed-...
Sent this e-mail to the Alliance of British Drivers today:
Subject: FAO Hugh Bladon
'Good afternoon,
I read with interest the comments attributed to Mr Hugh Bladon in the Daily Mail article referenced below:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6846749/Britains-busiest-speed-...
Mr Bladon is quoted as saying:
'If a lot of people are being caught it may be that the speed limit on that road is ridiculously low. The speed limit needs to be reassessed to see what the normal speed of the road is. The limit should be set at the speed that 85 per cent of drivers take the road at'.
Would you be kind enough to :
1. confirm for me that the words above were indeed spoken or written by Mr Bladon?
2. if the answer to 1. is 'yes', would you please provide references to when Mr Bladon has advocated the repeal of the Theft Act 1968 on the grounds that a lot of people are stealing (3,591,000 offences of theft reported to the police in 2018)?
Thank you so much.'
If you're new please join in and if you have questions pop them below and the forum regulars will answer as best we can.
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Well Gloucestershire are getting better. I'm being told whether or not action is to be taken, but not what action, within a few days of each report...
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Churnalism nowadays - mostly clickbait stuff and regurgitation in the local rags/comics and beyond.
- DogOfOB 12 hours 47 min ago
I'm glad the barrier wasn't damaged. Whew, close one there! \s
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35 comments
HawkinsPeter, from your question to our newer member, do you consider the disk brake issue to be slightly less contentious than the plastic hat debate?
Yeah, I thought I'd ease him into the discussions.
I find similar information at gambling website https://1xbet.ci/fr/ - I do not have a direct link, somewhere on the forum. Also you can find a lot about bike racing.
Seems legit, 1st post just says "Hi All!" and 2nd post is a link to a gambling site.
2940151946599_p0_v1_s550x406.jpg
What do you mean? It's my first day on site.
Apologies - I thought you were a spambot.
So, what's your opinion on road disk brakes?
I accept your apologies
Would you be kind enough to :
1. confirm for me that the words above were indeed spoken or written by Mr Bladon?
2. if the answer to 1. is 'yes', would you please provide references to when Mr Bladon has advocated the repeal of the Theft Act 1968 on the grounds that a lot of people are stealing (3,591,000 offences of theft reported to the police in 2018)?
If not, at least introduce a theft license and give bank robbers 3 points for every bank they are caught robbing and only ban them for two years if they reach 12 points in any three years and it would not cause them undue hardship.
Provided, of course, that the police only set traps to catch them at banks that have been attacked previously and they publish in advance where they will be.
Motorists are already the most priviliged and numerous law breakers.
I don't understand speed limits. Sometimes I would agree that the limit on a stretch of road can seem unduly low given the lack of junctions, pedstrians etc.
But other times, you will see a national speed limit sign on a single track road which pedestrians use and there are houses along, just for example-
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.0688482,-4.7492277,3a,51.7y,336.04h,87.14t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1ssCkV7MGNCafgtc9jNtkssw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
It's clearly untrue that a majority of people break the law regarding speed limits - because only 2/3 of the adult population even hold a driving licence (and I am sure far from all of those drive regularly). So we are only talking about the habits of a particular subset of the population.
If 100% of the bank-robbing community break the law by robbing banks, does that mean robbing banks should be legal?
The fallacy in the argument is the assumption that the 'driving community' is the only relevant population, that the speed limit is of no concern to anyone else. That is evidently false, so its a flawed argument.
There's a park near me where a path has been worn in the grass at a point where it's quite obvious the tarmaced path takes a roundabout route that nobody wants to use.
In that case, the fact that everyone walking through the park disobeys the 'rules' is a sign that the path should have taken a different route in the first place. But in that case 'people walking through the park' is the the only group of people affected, and the only relevant population. That's not true when it comes to speeding motorists.
Also that 85% figure in the article is the same thing that American poster came out with, and as far as I can tell its just an abitrary figure American petrol-heads made up a long time ago. Yet it gets quoted as if it's some scientifically-determined precise figure.
I have to say that I don't disagree with him in principle - regular re-assessment of law is right and proper and, if found to be genuinely incorrect, should have the capacity to be amended.
Speed limits on roads are set according to a fairly well-established set of guidelines/parameters, which suggests that motorists speeding along a certain stretch of road are missing a possible hazard at some point.
But that's not to say the original assessment was correct, or the hazard has since been removed and the speed limit not updated, which is quite a lengthy procedure.
Well, yes. But 'incorrect' isn't (or shouldn't be) a synonym for 'routinely ignored'.
statement 1 from drivers
If a law is broken by a majority of people the law should be changed to reflect reality
statement 2 from drivers
all cyclists go through red lights
therefore red lights should no longer apply to cyclists, simple.
I should make it clear that I asagree with none of the above statements, but anyone who agrees with the first two, should logically come to the conclusion the 3rd is also correct.
Excellent deduction! -
Using this principle cyclists should legally be allowed to
Can we also argue that we should not be obliged to pay "Road Tax"? Plenty of drivers claim we don't. That alone would save me £155 a year.
I happen to agree with statement 1, but not statement 2, yet I'd happily agree with the 3rd (though maybe treat red lights as give-way signs for cyclists).
Certainly, I think we should have a turn-left-on-red law for cyclists (and if that works, maybe allow motorists to do the same) similar to the U.S. system. I remember reading something about them trialling it in France as well.
I'd be a fan of relaxing one-way restrictions for cyclists too.
My car has adaptive cruise control which is fantastic on motorways and an elective speed limiter, set manually, which I use quite a lot for urban driving. One less thing to worry about and allows more attention to be paid to what is going on outside the car.
'...one fewer'.
Our car has cruise control too. My wife won't let me use it, as she says when her father got cruise control in his car, he became a shit driver.
Happy wife, happy life...
I wouldn't say I enjoyed using it on the Merc I hired a couple of months ago, but I could see how it would change behaviour if enabled by default. On Mercs it just needs a double tap of the accelerator to disable it which works well when you pull out, forget it's on, and call for "more powaaaaah!"
Sign recognition seems impractical given how many signs are obscured but I'd say that once there's a, erm, critical mass of cars using the technology speeding will become impossible.
The fact that it uses sign-recognition cameras opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities.
(A cycling jacket with a "10mph" sign on the back of it, for example)
I'm with him on this, we just need to find out when they are taking the 80% measurements and turn up en masse at 5mph...
Alternatively, lots of drivers are breaking the law because they know they are not going to get caught (for the most part) so it doesn't matter.
You could just as easily say that as so many pedestrians complain about cycling on the pavement the law banning that clearly isn't working so we should allow them to do so with impunity and so on.
However you slice it, it is just stoopid.
I disagree.
If there's a law that makes a significant proportion of the population into criminals, then it raises a problem with selective enforcement.
e.g. imagine if you will a police officer tasked with keeping the roads safe (unlikely, but stay with me) and he realises that 90% of drivers are breaking the law. Imagine also that the same police officer has a major problem with people of a certain skin colour and s/he decides to only prosecute people that s/he personally doesn't like.
Now, I get that random enforcement can be an effective way to police a population, but the problem is if the police are given too much freedom in when to prosecute or not. Especially if the police have a historic problem with racism.
I would also like to point out that the vast majority of speed cameras have their locations posted online, satnavs give automatic warnings when you approach them, they are very well signposted, there are measurement markings on the road where they take their pictures and they are brightly coloured. If speeding motorists do not notice any of these things, and still getting caught, they really aren't paying enough attention to what they are doing.
Oh, no. That's just the state being 'sneaky'. All part of 'The War', don't you know?
It's like the fucking snivelling, lying muppets who get caught on camera going through Bank Junction between the hours of 7 AM and 7 PM, but who bleat that 'they didn't know'.
No, of course you'didn't know'. It's been publicised in every fucking newspaper and on every fucking TV channel, as well as on fuck off and die 25 feet high signage on every road approaching the Junction.
But you 'didn't know'.
You fucking lying cunts.
I'm not into burglars making the laws that are relevant to burglary, moped robbers defining the laws surrounding street robbery or paedophiles having anything to do with the legislation concerning their disgusting acts.
If I may make a prediction, this year, speeding motorists will kill more children than paedophiles.
The less charitable among us might prefer motorists to redress the imbalance by making a more concerted effort to kill paedophiles.
Unfortunately the number of children killed and injured by motorists is unlikely to drop significantly until there is a change in drivers' level of respect for other road users.
The speed cameras in West Mercia are publicised AFAIK and are usually sited in places with a history of collisions. I'd prefer that the locations were not publicised, that Gatsos were painted grey / camo and that mobile units were unmarked.
I'd also vote for a flat rate VED increase or levy (including those vehicles in the zero VED band) and the income ringfenced for more speed/ANPR cameras to be deployed nationwide with an increased focus on 30 & 40mph areas. And for every force to replicate the work done by the West Midlands Road Harm Reduction Team.
I'd vote for that. But it will never happen.
Any candidate for public office who suggested measures like the above, would be unelectable. The Daily Mail would see to that. Any incumbent who suggested measures like the above, would be removed from office either through losing his seat, or - if he or she had been elected recently and therefore wasn't up for election for a long while - by having the brake lines in his car cut.
What you're in fact proposing above isn't a 'legislative' change, but a cultural one. And that will take generations.
I think with modern persuasion methods it wouldn't take very long to bring about cultural change. Perhaps we could crowd fund a new commission for Cambridge Analytica?
It "uses GPS data and sign recognition cameras to detect speed limits where the car is travelling, and then will sound a warning and automatically slow down the vehicle if it is exceeding the limit."
A step in the right direction. But...
"drivers will be able to override the device simply by pushing hard on the accelerator"
Not great but if it's recorded on GPS/vehicle datalogger they'll be bang to rights when the evidence is produced (presuming the police and CPS can be bothered).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/27/all-new-uk-cars-to-have-sp...
Meanwhile a primary school in Shrewsbury had its first car-free day:
https://twitter.com/HarlescottJrSch/status/1110178439598886912
Hopefully the first of many, it was even featured on local radio.
Harlescott Junior school, you ROCK!
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