On Feb 2, 12:15*pm, "dennis@home" wrote:
"Ste" wrote in message


There
could well be a gunman at the side of the road taking aim at the
driver, but the reality is that most drivers are not going to see him,

I almost killed a copper because of that.
I saw him aiming a gun at me and I ducked.
It turns out it was a test of speed guns.
They never did adopt those, something to do with being a hazard.

because experience suggests that no such thing generally needs to be
guarded against, and that limited resources of attention should be
properly focussed elsewhere to managing scenarios that do more
commonly occur.

You aren't very observant are you?

I observe what experience has taught me I have to observe. General
experience suggests to me that stationary and inanimate objects set
back at least several feet from the kerb, have extremely low
relevance, so I spent disproportionately less time looking there, than
for example looking directly ahead at my expected course.



I would not have come to that verdict and the coroner should be
re-educated
as it was obviously poor driving.

No, it was intentional on the part of the agency that installed the
speed camera, that the driver should have reacted in that way - that
he should have devoted more attention to his speed, and therefore
necessarily less attention to anything else.

The driver should always be aware of his speed and the limit.

He should be aware of the pedestrian stepping out, above virtually all
other concerns. As I've said, you have simply enforced a reallocation
of concentration away from scanning for pedestrians, to additional
checks of vehicle speed (including visual checks of the speedometer).

I haven't.
If you can judge your speed without referring to your speedo you lack
experience.

The question is how accurate that judgment needs to be. As I say, no
one does 70mph in a 30 limited town centre without realising it, but
I'm pretty sure I could do 35mph in a 30 without realising it.



For example you don't need to look at your tacho to know when to change
gears, you use other indicators.

Generally, you use the note of the engine, but even that is misleading
if say you are accustomed to petrol engines and then step into a
diesel, or if you are accustomed to larger engines and then step into
a car with a smaller one. And I don't know about you, but I have
driven all sorts of vehicles, and I almost exclusively use
instrumentation for ascertaining vehicle speed - any other means would
be far too haphazard in this day and age.

That said, at lower speeds in lower gears, there is quite a radical
tonal change over a relatively small range of vehicle speeds - but in
higher gears and at higher speeds, this is less so. I would struggle
to judge the difference between 50mph and 55mph in 5th or 6th gear,
based purely on the engine note.

Someone who is musically-trained might be able to make extremely quick
and accurate judgments based on tone, but I'm not one of them.



even though I (and most others) exceed posted limits as a
matter of routine, and that it is not necessary to drive any safer. I
accept intellectually that my driving is not perfectly safe, but
emotionally my standard of driving causes me no particular concern -
if it did, I would change it so as to alleviate my concerns.

By menacing me with the criminal law, you do not make me more
concerned with safety - you simply make me more concerned with
avoiding the sanctions of the criminal law. And if, for example, you
successfully force me to reduce my speed so as to avoid criminal law
penalties, then the surfeit of driving safety that I would then be
enjoying, would simply allow me to bankroll more dangerous styles of
driving (in particular, those styles that require less skill and less
concentration), because there would be no point me engaging in the
various safety-improving behaviours that I do presently, that I do
only to alleviate what would otherwise be an unacceptable level of
danger given the speeds that I currently drive at.

Such self confidence, if only self confidence were matched by skill

The self-confidence is indeed matched by skill. I'm not arrogant - I'm
not saying my driving does not involve risk, or that my skills are
perfect, or that they could not possibly be improved. I'm saying that
the risk, tiny as it is, is acceptable in my view, in the
circumstances that prevail. One cannot be obsessed with every tiny
risk in daily life.



and
understanding the world would be a much better place and we wouldn't have
several people a day killed on our roads.

I don't think the world would be a better place at all, if people like
you got full control of the levers of power, as we suffered all sorts
of unpleasant regimes designed to make us "safe".



You need to slow down and stop being an idiot.

I have no intention of doing so, unless I am forced, and if I am
forced then I fully intend to offset my enforced cooperation with an
increase in risky behaviours elsewhere, of the kind that you will not
be able to detect as reliably as my speed or red-light jumping.

Are you claiming to be insane now?

No. I'm simply making clear that whereas I will not comply willingly
with these measures to improve my safety, because I do not accept that
there will be any significant improvements in safety as against the
costs of the measures to me (whether in terms of consuming more time,
brainpower, or whatever), nor will I comply with your attempts to
enforce them against my will.

If I'm successfully forced, for example, to spend more time driving at
slower speeds, then I intend to reallocate that time to other
interesting things, like listening to the radio or making telephone
calls, so that in net effect I will recoup the time that you have
stolen from me, and the effects of that will almost certainly be to
increase danger in a way that offsets the improvement in safety
attributable to the lower driving speeds.



I wonder, do you ever have any trouble on unrestricted rural roads,
given that the posted limit will be of little guidance in choosing an
appropriate speed? If you have no trouble inferring an appropriate
speed from general observation, then why do you feel the need to
rigidly follow posted limits at all?

I don't. The limit is a maximum not a required minimum.

But how do you choose the minimum? If your judgment of the minimum
exceeds the legal limit, do you say to yourself "I must be wrong", or
do you say "the person who put up the sign must be wrong"?

The minimum can't exceed the maximum.
Maybe that's your problem you don't understand maximums and minimums.

On the contrary, I was referring to two different scales. As I say,
you *must* be able to make some sort of judgment from the general
circumstances about what is a reasonable speed, otherwise you would
often be travelling too fast (albeit below the legal maximum). What I
am asking you, is what happens in your mind when your own judgment
about what is a reasonable target speed, yields a figure that exceeds
the posted limit?

Do you insist that your own judgment is wrong, or do you insist that
the judgment of the person who posted the sign is wrong?