Future Postulation...

[Plotloss]

Ok, its 2030 lets say.

The incumbant Labour government passed a law in 2025 forcing all road users to implement GPS based speed limiting equipment yet road accidents are still occuring and people are still dying regardless of the fact that people are obeying speed limits everywhere.

What next?

Admit speed is not the cause or lower limits?

I have a funny feeling it will be the latter.

No real point to this as such I am just interested what would happen if we completely eradicated speed from the road safety argument.

[apache]

It would be a disaster, jobs would be lost, Pressure er Safety Groups would fold, money would be lost, oh and the roads would become safer

[omitchell]

well of course the next sensible step to take would be to ban all forms of transport and chain peoples legs together so they couldn't run and potentially fall over

[lunarscope]

2010-15 is a more likely timescale for this.
Of course, it won't work and will cost billions but the Government will just fiddle the figures, as usual.

[supraman2954]

If the London Congestion charge increases from £5 (Feb 17th 2003) to £8 and this trend continues (60% every 3 years perhaps?), and the zone is continually extended so it eventually covers the whole nation, we'll all be paying a charge of £251 per day in 2030. That should be enough to force everyone off the roads.

The government will be patting themselves on the back for reducing the rate of KSIs, assuming by then they have sorted public transport - I won't hold my breath

[kevinday]

Not forgeting that the country would be broke, no payments for the 98% of the labour force out of work. Crime is widespread as people try to survive from day-to-day in the anarchy caused by poor government policy

[Balmoral Green]

I am absolutley convinced that if every one obeyed the speed limit, either voluntarily, or enforced by technology, the death rate would escalate massively.
Bad driving would spiral out of control in line with complacency, impatience and intolerance. Road rage would become extremely nasty.

[dilbert]

If the government were really serious about saving lives on the roads, they'd be producing meaningful policies that encorage a wider spread of business activities over a wider general area.

The net effect of this would be a scenario where people would have to travel less far to their place of work. The reduction in passenger miles would have a dramatic effect on road saftey.

As it is the far south east is for housing, london is for business finance and politics, and the M4 corridor is for science engineering and technology.

I'm sure that the same is true on a macro scale i.e. country wide, and on more than one micro scale.

All of this information is brought to you with the benefit of Mk1 eyeball, no GPS required. Government (whichever party) sponsored GPS snooping is not necassary, but is enevitable, since no one is likely to stand against it. No one is likely to stand against it because it will be introduced as a cost cutting measure. The government will enevitably pull the public "greed lever", when it suits their desire.