Reconcile this garbage.

[crisis]

Yes, but my point was that paying attention to one's driving at all is better than not paying attention. Enforcing speed limits by any means might provide a monetary incentive for people to avoid using their mobile telephones while driving, if doing so increases the chance of them creeping. If it fails as an incentive for law-breakers, there is reason to believe that it would also not provide sufficient incentive to distract conscientious drivers from the road and their vehicle.

If people use mobile phones while driving they are unlikely to have considered possible associated dangers like creeping as a problem. They are doing something potentially dangerous already which suggests they are not really thinking all that much about any safety or potential fines.

The results suggest that reducing speeds would result in a further reduction by 25-30%.

The claims make no mention of improved vehicle safety. There is no further. The authorities would have us believe it is all about speed reductions.

The safer design of cars might balance out the increased risk from increased speed, but if both speed reductions and car design are considered, a cumulative effect could result, reducing the overall risk, instead of keeping it roughly stable.

Well let’s make the speed limit walking pace then. At what point do you set the limit? How is it derived? Any speed is dangerous. Driving is dangerous.

No. Both studies only considered one question. In one case it was the correlation between speed and accident rate, and in the other it was the effect of car design on safety. The results are not weighted. They are simply restricted to answering the question posed. Does higher travelling speed correlate with higher accident risk? Yes, it does. Do more safely designed vehicles reduce occupant injury? Yes, they do. They are not weighted or biased. They only report the influence of the particular factors that they set out to measure.

But if we are making informed decisions about what are the best methods of increasing road safety while still making it possible to commute effectively we should be using tests that include all reasonable information. Not information restricted to delivering a desired result to support a policy the authorities wish to implement.

[crisis]

Now this is something worth looking at.

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/s...-1226437187755

http://thinkers.sa.gov.au/wegmanflipbook/index.html


Exactly how much weight can be given to one individual I not certain however I like the rationale and the government appears to be behind it. I wonder just how “behind” it they will be of his opinions fly in the face or at least challenge the "treat everyone as an idiot" notion and use revenue collection as road safety. I have not read all of it as yet but there is some interesting stuff for starters.


Road safety needs to become integral to decision making. While road safety can be improved using the traditional approaches of making existing roads safer, using safer vehicles and improving human behaviour through education and enforcement, we need to acknowledge that humans make mistakes, and some deliberately violate traffic laws. We must manage the road system with these things in mind and create an environment that ‘nudges’ people towards adopting the best behaviours: it is no longer good enough to blame the road user for all the consequences.

2 Politicians
4.2.1 Create a climate of genuine bipartisan support for road safety.
4.2.2 Build political and administrative support for evidence led decision making in road safety.

When reading reports on road safety analyses in South Australia, one result struck me, and that was the answer to the question: why are crashes occurring? This simple answer was repeated many times: because the individual road user violated the law or made a stupid mistake. In almost all crashes, the human being could be blamed. Although this way of thinking was not unknown to me, I was surprised that this appeared to be the
dominant way of thinking in South Australia: expressed by decision makers, the media and the public. This answer (‘blame the driver’) is not my answer — see also my Westminster Lecture on Transport Safety (Wegman, 2010). I shall come back to my view on this in Chapter 2.

The attached table screams out what I have been alluding to. Firstly the majority of fatalities are the result of extreme behavior, not this creeping rubbish we are led to believe is the cure all. Secondly in the cases of non fatal crashes it is “system failure” ie the roads and conditions ie stobie poles and trees inches from the road side that are a main contributors.