RE: Please do something!

[ATG]

Interesting debate ... and not too many handbags at dawn either, given you all seem to have thought about your positions and value them ... anyway enuf brown nosing... Philshorts behaviour, 'slow in town, fast in clear conditions out of town', seems to me to be entirely sensible insofaras it is another way of saying 'appropriate speed'. That presupposes that philshort is capable of judging what an appropriate speed is. And there's the rub. We set restrictions on road usage (licenses, MOT, speed limits, culpability for 'dangerous' behaviour) in the hope that this will help your average driver and pedestrian to be sensible enuf not to kill themselves or others. And there is a payoff. The more restrictive the state is, the more some of our 'freedoms' are curtailed and the more certain costs are driven up. The looser the restrictions, the more people get killed. You inevitably have to strike a balance between reasonable restrictions and acceptable fatalities and injuries. It's a grissly thing to say, but acceptable does not imply zero. Same goes for stuff like school trips. If a teacher takes kids rock climbing, a percentage will die. Does the benefit to the survivors outweigh the deaths? Well, yes it does so long as the dead percentage is tiny. We usually make these type of judgements by default, i.e. we have school trips, we don't build concrete walls between pavement and road. Nobody will actually sit down with a pen and paper and try to quantify the cost/benefit. One exception to this is the airline industry where they certainly consider the "tombstone economics". Road accidents and school trips are just examples of this general wish to avoid having to think about these cost/benefit payoffs. Another classic is trying to determine what services the NHS should provide given that they will never have enough money to do everything. Are 50 replacement hips worth a heart bypass? Answers on a postcard...

[philshort]

Acceptable losses are a grizzly thing to contemplate, but realistically you are right. You are also on the button about differing abilities. Thats the thing that really grates about Gatso etc, which cannot exercise discretion.

[ATG]

Yup. Only way to allow that to be taken into account is to allow judges and magistrates and maybe even Plod to exercise discretion. Another can of worms...

[phil1]

Last post on this topic I think. I think very little of the government's dumbed down 'speed kills' statement. It just doesn't cover the real-world situations that we all have to cope with and unfairly targets a single party. Because of this it is disregarded even though it's intentions are supported by the vast majority. I'd like to see road deaths/injuries reduced but not by halting every vehicle. Equally I think little of a message of '100% blame' from someone who then goes on to drive at speed down lanes, and cites an example of how unavoidable an accident was, exempting the driver from blame. At the speeds quoted 100% avoidance is just not possible, I don't care what you think the definition of 'clear' or 'deserted' is. You cannot guarantee the 100% you are(were) so in support of. I'm not advocating strict adherence to speed limits. I'd like to see a fair few raised, especially motorways, and a stop to the blanket lowering of the rest. But if I'm ever unlucky enough to be invlolved in an accident in a car or not. I'd like to think that the situation might be investigated and objectively assessed before anyone starts laying blame. I'd hate to criminalised for something I didn't do as I also wouldn't like to see anyone else criminalised for something I was to blame for. Philshort, Sparks, Mel, It's been an interesting discussion. All the best. I hope we all manage to avoid that last 0.01%