GPS FORUM

On 07 Jun 2005 10:40:31 GMT, Adrian wrote:


Now you see that piece of stupidity pisses me off. Driving ability is
likely to be normally distributed, number of legs is not. Legs come
in the following numbers: 0, 1 or 2; you could stretch a point and
allow halves for amputations at the knee. Nobody (to a good
approximation) has 3 legs. There is no realistic parallel with
driving ability, which is continuously variable with no effective
upper limit and not much of a lower one (other than the very low level
required to pass a driving test - remember Maureen?).

There have been a lot of surveys on this, and it is a completely
reliable finding that drivers overestimate their own ability. It can
be expressed as rating themselves above average, or as rating the
skill level of others as low and their own as high, or in any one of a
number of different ways, but the result is always the same.

I am not aware of any informed dissent from the view that drivers
routinely overestimate their own skill. It is a stable feature of
road safety debate.

Are you seriously denying that drivers do not overestimate their own
skill? If so, do you have any actual evidence?


Completely irrelevant. The laws of physics apply: the likelihood and
severity of crashes on a given road increase with speed, and its
really very simple to understand why this is. What you are saying is
that we may not deal with one significant contributory cause without
dealing with all of them - that is not how life works! In any case,
speed is either a primary cause or a necessary contributing factor
(i.e a factor without which the crash would not have happened) in a
clear majority of serious crashes.


If you are referring to the idea that some people will drive to the
limit, not to an appropriate speed for the conditions - that, too, is
largely irrelevant. They are unsafe drivers and should not be on the
roads in the first place. Why is it that arguments against speed
cameras are so often founded on pointing at the people they cannot
detect? Red light cameras cant detect people who block the junction.
Is that a good reason for not having red light cameras? I dont think
so. Same with speed cameras. They detect people who drive faster
than they are legally permitted.

If you think limits are nannyish, and there are too many different
ones, you may be right. In France you tend to get one limit for rural
roads with an automatic slower limit for villages, and it seems to
work quite well, but then France is much less densely populated than
the UK. But that is an argument for simplicity, not against
enforcement.


No, that is a misdirection. The law always applied. We were always
supposed to obey it. The fact that the number of police was never
sufficient to enforce the law to any meaningful extent is irrelevant
to whether it should be enforced now - and even back then you would
get speed traps, which would catch sometimes hundreds of drivers, and
all the same claptrap would be trotted out about how the police were
targeting motorists as a soft touch. In the end its all just
smokescreening. Most people accept that a law restricting speed is
reasonable. When placed outside the context of their own driving,
most people have no problem with any traffic law. But when their own
driving is challenged, suddenly its somehow different, because it is
not some dangerous driver, but them, and how could their own
judgment of the acceptable level of risk ever be anything less than
perfect?


No, thats not right either. Its more like pursuing drug addicts
because we have an easy and convenient way of doing so, and then
telling police that actually we dont care i they pursue the dealers
or not.

If you want to argue for traffic policing to be a core duty for police
forces you will find no opposition from me!


Precisely. But the non-existence of the Twatso camera does not mean
that we should not pursue other offences. As previously posted, they
do seem to catch the most dangerous drivers. Not always, and not
exclusively, but often enough.


Cite your evidence for that claim. The growth in prosecutions (i.e.
not camera-based FPNs) for speeding seems to suggest otherwise.

Where there has been a reduction in prosecutions since the early 1990s
(e.g. dangerous, careless, drunk driving), that decline is traceable
to the very early days, when cameras were few and far between. There
is no obvious correlation between these figures and the sharp
increases in numbers of cameras from late 2000 onwards. In fact, the
trends for prosecution of some non-camera offences seems to be
increasing since then.

Even if there were a correlation that would not prove cause, but
actually there doesnt seem to be a correlation.

The number of FPNs roughly doubled over the period when cameras became
widespread. The number of cameras increased


Yes, its due to a change in the police core duties which dates back,
IIRC, to the mid 1990s. And thats when the big drops in police
prosecutions for things like dangerous driving seem to have happened.

Guy
--
May contain traces of irony. Contents liable to settle after posting.
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk

88% of helmet statistics are made up, 65% of them at CHS, Puget Sound