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LATEST LUNACY: DONCASTER TO GET PACE CARS
In an astounding display of lunacy and ineptitude the Doncaster 'Road Safety Education Unit' has launched a scheme intended to recruit citizens for 'mobile traffic calming' duties.
In reality this means members of the public promising to keep within the speed restrictions at all times and displaying a sticker on their vehicle to say that they are doing so.
These misguided souls will then act as mobile barriers preventing following traffic from exceeding the speed restriction.
The scheme is both highly dangerous and totally unrealistic. It will undoubtedly INCREASE road dangers due a number of factors:
* Risks due to frustrated overtaking.
* Risks due to tailgating.
* Risks due to traffic bunching.
* Risks due to a pious attitude.
* Risks due to traffic obstruction.
Road safety works best when road users co-operate thus adjusting their speed to suit the hazard environment – but Doncaster's mad scheme undermines both of these principles.
Imagine, for one moment, the chaos that would be caused by a Doncaster-style pace car at 70mph in lane 3 of a UK motorway - but the Doncaster message appears to suggest that to do so would be 'good driving'.
This degree of incompetence is astounding, and someone in the Doncaster partnership should be held responsible.
Road safety depends on drivers adjusting their speed appropriate to the hazard in a given environment. The 'driving by numbers' approach is gradually, inexorably and dangerously replacing this vital behaviour.
British road safety is in a parlous state. The streams of false messages about the importance of the speed limit have left a generation of 'professionals' shooting at the wrong safety targets. The public has lost faith and turning off to the whole subject. Dumbing down the roads and does not work.'
The speed restriction does not represent a 'safe maximum speed'. It does no such thing and we all know it. We know it because we have to assess hazards and we have to adjust speed to suit the particular hazard.
Speed restrictions are a useful but minor part of road safety.
Modern road safety policy has promoted them way beyond their level of function from useful servant to cruel and incompetent master making us a nation obsessed with speed limits which is to say the least dangerous.
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