I’ve just got back from a camping trip in Derbyshire. It’s home to some fantastic roads including the well-known Cat and Fiddle – well known for having the highest recorded accident rate in the UK. I deliberately refrain however from the phrase “most dangerous road in the UK”; the Cat and Fiddle, like any road, can be driven quite safely. Characteristically, it is like many roads in the region, with a mixture of tight bends, other vehicles and other hazards, but also featuring straight sections and in some places, fair views of the road ahead.
The thing that struck me, not having been to the region for a while, was the almost scatter gun approach to road safety. The sheer mass of road now red-ringed to 50 MPH; the mass application of no-overtaking areas; ridiculously densely-placed warning signs; speed camera vans placed on straight sections, not to catch those flying dangerously into a corner, but those creeping up to 56 while accelerating onto a straight.
This all creates several problems based on the differing behavioural reactions of different drivers.
Take our first driver – the speed limit frustratee. He’ll quite happily slow down for a village, school, any other hazard. He’ll do the speed limit if he can see why it’s there. Problem is, he’s now been driving at 50MPH down a wide, open road with a good view. He gets frustrated with the pointlessness of this and so says, “sod it” and puts his foot down – probably going faster than if it had been a NSL (National Speed Limit). Now imagine the same behaviour applied to an excessively-long overtaking restriction.
The second is the speed limit drone. They understand that the 50MPH limit is “for their safety” and so assume that by doing the speed limit round every corner, they will be safe. They’ll still be doing 50MPH when they crash.
Finally, take the advanced driver. Doing the safe speed around corners means they end up with the speed limit drone right up behind them. As the straight opens up, there’s progress to be made… but an over-conservative speed limit prevents this. Reality is, if you removed the speed limit completely, these guys would be able to concentrate on purely doing the safe speed.
This all really points to the problem: a speed limit is an attempt to set a blanket safe speed for a section of road. Given that we are taught to accept this, the vast majority of drivers of course do not learn how to actually gauge the safe speed from the road itself. Due to this and the behaviours above, the accident rates do not fall. All the while we’ve got misguided campaigners (not police, not advanced drivers – generally people with little driving acumen and often themselves falling into the speed limit drone category) convincing the government that the best way to prevent all accidents is to lower the speed limit everywhere to 20MPH.
So where do you stop? If 50 isn’t working, should we make the entire of Derbyshire a 40? How about a 30? Why don’t we just stop driving entirely?
Alternatively, we could stop dodging the point – the point that driver education and driving standards are the single, fundamental problem.
…but of course, we couldn’t make the driving test harder, could we? I mean, it’s everyone’s human right to drive, right?
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