OT: Speed limiters on cars

What if the speedo is broken, but the car's satnav can indicate whether or not you're exceeding the limit? What if a phone app can display the GPS derived speed on the car's screen?

What if, indeed ?

Despite their improved accuracy. I don't believe additional GPS devices can be counted as "speedometers" for the purposes of the legislation.

Surely even if there were "more accidents", it may be that given the presumably lower speeds involved, the amount or severity of any injuries sustained -- or the damaged caused -- may have been lesser. So I'm not sure that "number of accidents" is the correct criteria.

#Paul

criterion.

The figures quoted just as the Manchester scheme was completed showed that the death rate was higher.

In message <t44gt6$7qj$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, at 22:53:42 on Sun, 24 Apr

How much of that was pedestrians taking greater risk because the traffic was flowing more slowly (and quite likely more bunched together)?

It would be an interesting thing to unpack, I think. You could easily propose quite a lot of reasons why (or why not) this might have happened in spite of (or because of) the changes. Perhaps because of pedestrian or driver behaviour - and maybe because of changes in outlier behaviour rather than average behaviour. Or maybe even some background reason not obviously related to the speed limit.

You might, for example, imagine that drivers mostly ignored the new limits, and only slowed down by an average of less than 1mph, but pedestrians still felt safer and crossed more assertively, leading to more relatively more accidents against a background of (faster) decreasing accident rates elsewhere. If so, would the 20mph scheme be the thing that was to blame?

#Paul

Some satnavs do display road speed. Some don't.

But there is a website (maybe more than one) you can go to (eg, on a mobile phone) which tells you how fast you are travelling. Put the phone on a cradle and in effect, it's a speedometer. Useful, among other things, for checking the accuracy of the car's speedo.

mine is +1mph over a wide range, also the roadside blinking speed displays agree.

Also, when driving in a London borough that had fairly recently introduced a blanket 20mph policy I was alarmed when driving early one Sunday morning at 20.0mph how many other vehicles zoomed past me on the inside, the outside, but probably not both at the same time.

Many of those overtaking on the inside were also infringing bus/taxi lanes to do so.