"Absolutely unacceptable": HGV driver blocks protected cycle lane... at dangerous junction where urgent safety works followed cyclist's death; £1 donation to charity for every photo of bike lane parking; Cancellara sells a PS5 + more on the live blog

It would have had to have cotter pins.

I think the consensus amongst is that the scenarios where accelerating above the speed limit to avoid an incident are vanishingly rare and normally braking is far more effective and safe. For example, cruising on the motorway in 6th gear will not give you much acceleration, and if acceleration is needed, changing to the correct gear and accelerating will take far more time than instinctively braking, and auto boxes are often sluggish at changing when you've been cruising as adaptive software tends to prioritise economy and avoid gear changing at first.

I've driven with a speed limiter on most of the time and the only time I've overridden it in about 10 years was where I misjudged the distance to the end of a dual carriageway (didn't see signage over the brow of a hill) and I chose to accelerate a bit to avoid cutting in or driving over the white line as I was about passed the other car - but even then braking would have been a perfectly safe option. That's not to say I haven't exceeded the speed limit on occasion in the last 10 years, usually when cars I've been passing have changed speed and I've ended up sitting in their blind spot so a couple of mph for a few moments will resolve that, but if they accelerate again I'll drop back and wait till they drop off to sleep or get back on with their next phone call. I genuinely can't think of a situation where only acceleration could have avoided an incident. After all if something does go wrong, which is safer - a high speed collision or a low speed one.

That being said, it does seem to be the case that dangerous amber lights require heavy acceleration to deal with judging by normal road usage

Correct.  It would be dangerous to brake when the lights turn red because other cars right behind you won't be expecting it so the only safe thing to do is put the pedal  down on red.

Wait - or ... you could take one for the team because you and the impatient idiot too close behind are both safely in protective metal cages.  Whereas you don't know who'll be relying on you to follow the rules that you were taught (once in your lifetime).

If cars were limited to 70 then drivers would be taught not to drive over 65 for sustained periods.
It would simply become a fact of life and people who drove up to the limit would be seen as poor drivers.

Patrick9-32 wrote:

Other than "The gammons would have a seizure" is there a reason it is still legal to sell a car that can go over 70mph? All modern cars have speed limiters that the user can choose to activate, why not mandate that it can't be turned off?

There is a valid argument to say that for safety reasons cars need a little speed in hand to get out of trouble in very specific scenarios, e.g. if you're in the right hand lane of a motorway travelling at 70 mph and two cars collide in the inside lanes and start to spin towards your lane, it may be safer to accelerate away from the potential crash than to brake. However, that really only requires a maximum 10 mph over the maximum limit capacity, the fact that even the dullest family saloon can do 120 mph is ridiculous and it should definitely be limited.

Rendel Harris wrote:

There is a valid argument to say that for safety reasons cars need a little speed in hand to get out of trouble in very specific scenarios, e.g. if you're in the right hand lane of a motorway travelling at 70 mph and two cars collide in the inside lanes and start to spin towards your lane, it may be safer to accelerate away from the potential crash than to brake. However, that really only requires a maximum 10 mph over the maximum limit capacity, the fact that even the dullest family saloon can do 120 mph is ridiculous and it should definitely be limited.

I am not disagreeing with you but I would be super interested to read a study if one exists into those types of incidents:

1 - How often do they actually occur?

2 - How much less often would they happen if everyone was doing 70 and there was no speed differential involved? (If everyone on the motorway was doing 70 or less then lane changes would be far safer.)

3 - When they do happen, how often would accelerating and therefore increasing the potential energy of an impact if it does occur actually be safer than braking to avoid the collision and reducing the energy if it does happen? 

Most cars can slow down far more effectively than they can accelerate, so I would expect the change in speed to avoid the collision would be accomplished far more effectively by braking in the majority of cases.

I completely agree, they are definitely edge cases that probably only occur a few times a year. I'm not aware of any data on them though.

What will be an interesting option in the future will be drivers being limited to the speed of the road they are driving. The technology is already in place with all EU cars from this year having speed limiters that restrict the driver to the posted speed limit; at present it's possible to override these but presumably it would not be difficult to remove that option.

99% of the time you are better off braking to get out of danger, in the other 1% of situations unless you have the skill and reactions of someone like lewis Hamilton then you are more likely to make the situation worse than better.

That was my take. People are never going to be able to react to accelerate and there is also a lag unless you have some ridiculous performance car. Whereas brakes start working immediately.

Yep - also what accelleration do you get at 70mph?

I've never thought it made much sense.  I think it's at best "my pal said his friend once needed to so we can't fairly limit that".  That's if it's not "enemy action" like how the motor lobby invented "jaywalking" to make the death toll on the roads the fault of those being killed.

Like the "parked in a bike lane" story I'd probably make some Christmas donation (in a very small denomination...) for the number of times this was used in some spurious defence in court though.  (I recall an Isle of Wight? one here some time back).

But hey, I mostly ride a bike rather than driving, not IAMS etc.

Patrick9-32 wrote:

"I like doing crimes, don't stop me."

That neatly encapsulates the mentality of at least 90% of drivers.

Arguably on the motorway this is least required, and in many places covered by speed cameras and variable speed limits. The bigger issue is on roads with limit under the national and motorway limit. I question the benefit of putting the car or its software in control of limiting on these roads, it gets it wrong and the driver is assuming it is fine. Could even give another excuse for speeding, blaming the car.

This report gives interesting statistics for deaths and injuries by road type on page 21 from 2019

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploa...

I wonder how many of those "Rural Road" deaths were caused by speeds over 70mph?

Steve K wrote:

My mathematical pedantry objects to 'rounding up £100 to £150'.  

She said she got "about 100 submissions", so if she got 101 and she was working on multiples of 50 she could accurately say that she rounded down to £100 or up to £150, no?

Rendel Harris wrote:

Steve K wrote:

My mathematical pedantry objects to 'rounding up £100 to £150'.  

She said she got "about 100 submissions", so if she got 101 and she was working on multiples of 50 she could accurately say that she rounded down to £100 or up to £150, no?

In reality, yes, but mathematically, I don't think so.

I'm with Steve, mainly because rounding normally to the closest number - and rounding to half hundreds is not round! That being said, we should forgive casual usage where the intent is clear, "topping it up" might have been a better phrase.

IanMSpencer wrote:

I'm with Steve, mainly because rounding normally to the closest number - and rounding to half hundreds is not round! That being said, we should forgive casual usage where the intent is clear, "topping it up" might have been a better phrase.

Thanks, Ian.  To be clear, I think Hannah's done a really good thing.  I just can't resist a bit of pedantry; even more so when maths is involved.

She really bloody is!!!

FOT

Truth.

S13SFC wrote:

Truth.

Love it!

Imagine poor Hannah having to do that in other countries that actually allow this https://www.lifegate.com/cyclists-red-lights , maybe because they have opened their calendar and it doesn't say it is 1957.

If you actually care in the slightest about it, nobody is stopping you from running your own offer.

But you don't, so you won't. 

Largely because you are well aware that cyclists jumping red lights, whilst anti-social and illegal, poses negligible risk of harm to anyone - whereas the regular blocking of cycle lanes puts cyclists - particularly less experienced ones - at risk of harm, and contributes significantly to dissuading people who would otherwise consider cycling from doing so.

Hence why cyclists who care about cyclist safety are willing to raise money for charity while highlighting this issue - whereas you only care about RLJ to the extent that you can deploy it as a deflection of any criticism of risks posed by drivers.

Velo-drone wrote:

If you actually care in the slightest about it, nobody is stopping you from running your own offer.

But you don't, so you won't. 

Largely because you are well aware that cyclists jumping red lights, whilst anti-social and illegal, poses negligible risk of harm to anyone - whereas the regular blocking of cycle lanes puts cyclists - particularly less experienced ones - at risk of harm, and contributes significantly to dissuading people who would otherwise consider cycling from doing so.

Hence why cyclists who care about cyclist safety are willing to raise money for charity while highlighting this issue - whereas you only care about RLJ to the extent that you can deploy it as a deflection of any criticism of risks posed by drivers.

Haha, what a load of untruthful drivel. 

I'll tell you what, let's do an experiment:

• I'll stand in front of a stationary car in a cycle lane.
• You stand in the middle of the road and let a team of rugby players ride bikes and crash through a set of red traffic lights straight into you.

Then come back to me and tell me which one is dangerous and which one "poses negligible risk of harm to anyone". Deal?

I think the analogy works better if those rugby players are all driving HGVs in the main carriageway while you ride up to that parked car in the cycle lane and try to get past it...