Likely to be better maintained( mechanics in a fully equipped garage cover the maintenance of all buses)
Driver likely to be more alert (this is their actual job so it is unlikely they have just been dragged out of bed to drive the five miles to the out of town shopping centre)
Driver likely to be better trained (Driving license +PSC+CPC).
Note the likely(s) we all have stories of the wreck of a bus piloted by some mouth breathing knuckle dragger who was half asleep
It's often worse than this. There is a budget for repairs and a separate budget for new works. Road safety may be better served, say, by repairing deep potholes rather than imposing slower speed limits but the budget for new works cannot be used for repairs.
This was demonstrated by my local council who spent rather a lot of money putting new "weatherproof" paths through the local woods. Unfortunately it was difficult to get to these new paths because the existing paths had degraded to ankle deep mud. There was no money to repair the existing paths.
Speeding is also driving too fast for the conditions.
Driving too fast is frequently why they don't look, they don;t give themselves time to look properly.
Well change the rules.
speeding is bad driving.
The fines from the automated speed traps could fund more traffic police. If you look around drivers that deliberately speed also do other things, like texting, running reds, etc.
What percentage of accidents happen without any braking and speed reduction before the point of collision?
Anyway. The use of blanket 20mph zones has been shown in practice to increase the number of accidents. This has recently been admitted in Manchester, but they now say that they haven't enough money to change them back - despite them finding the money to narrow 74 miles of roads to add "cycle superhighways" on the most congested roads in the area!
Speed limits are what they are. You either obey them. Or not. If you don't you get punished.
If you don't like the limits, there's the ballot box.
It's eternally fascination how speeding seems to be the only crime where we allow the perpetrator the space to whine about how unfair it is, and agree with them.
"I was caught with a knife ... it was only 1 centimetre over the law, but they did me ...."
Quite often those that are very anti speeding drive too fast for the road conditions but are below the speed limit. There are times when common sense SHOULD tell you to be doing 20MPH in a 30MPH zone.
My gf does it and she is anti speeding. She drives faster than me on our estate but she calls me the speeder as I have my cruise control set to
94MPH (true speed 90MPH) when on a motorway.
I never have to slam the anchors on when driving on our estate because at 30MPH overtaking the 4 parked cars on a bend I did not have time to see the car coming the other way at 30MPH.
They will have access to the same data from the Transport Laboratory, but I don't know what their official guidance is. You will need to search to see if they issue any.
The main groups of causes, with percentages for 2016, are:
2% Vehicle defects - mostly defective tyres or brakes
10% Vision impaired by external factors - e.g. parked vehicles or sun dazzle
12% Road environment - e.g. slippery road, due to weather
13% Impairment or distraction - e.g. impaired by alcohol
22% Injudicious action - e.g. following too close
25% Behaviour or inexperience - e.g. driver careless, reckless or in a hurry
71% Driver error and reaction - the main one being failure to look properly, followed by failed to judge other persons path or speed and poor turn or manoeuvre
There can be up to six factors recorded against each accident, so the percentages don't add up to 100.
Out of 47,162,000 cars observed in 30mph limits during 2015, only 4% exceeded 39 mph and the number that exceeded 50mph was too small to be shown on a table that gave percentages as integers. So, that was very much an exception.
It is driving faster than is legal. That does not mean that it is also too fast for the conditions. The number of RTCs reported to the police where both factors are present is about 2%.
The figures suggest that failure too look properly is far more likely during low speed manoeuvrers.
They are based upon the principle, first established by the Road Research Laboratory in a 1962 report but also repeated in later DoT and DfT policy documents, that the purpose of a speed limit is not to get traffic to travel at or below the limit. It is to reduce significantly the number of vehicles that grossly exceed that speed. The ACPO guidelines quantify 'grossly exceed'.
Even if you accept that point of view, it is far from the most significant bit of bad driving. The top ten contributory factors for RTCs reported to the Police, with figures from DfT document RAS50002 for
2016, are:
44,557 Driver failed to look properly
22,775 Driver failed to judge other person's path or speed
18,175 Driver careless, reckless or in a hurry
16,119 Poor turn or manoeuvre
12,208 Loss of control 8,782 Pedestrian failed to look properly 7,709 Slippery road (due to weather) 6,768 Sudden braking 6,595 Travelling too fast for the conditions 6,551 Following too close
Exceeding the speed limit doesn't make it into the top ten, but RAS50001 gives the number of accidents in 2016, where that was a factor as 5,102
The money from speed cameras goes into the Treasury general fund, which means it can be spent on anything the government chooses.
Automatic equipment permanently installed around the country, away from locations, like speed traps, which may modify the drivers' behaviour.
Which suggests that the limit has been badly set. It is well established that speed limits only work when they match the drivers' expectations of what the limit for the road should be. If drivers routinely and significantly exceed the limit, then either it needs to be raised to a realistic level or the drivers' expectations need to be changed.
As an example of the latter, a road I know was originally laid out as a three lane road. Marking it out with two lanes resulted in wide lanes, which encouraged speeding. Adding cycle lanes on both sides narrowed the vehicles lanes, which changed the drivers' perception of the road, and speeds dropped.
The general principle is that the lower speed limit will apply where two roads meet. However, that does not necessarily apply where 20mph zones meet a 30mph road. The junction will be at the default 30mph for a built up area, unless there is specific legislation applying the 20mph limit to the junction.
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