The greater the perception of danger, the safer the road. If a road had a speed limit of 40 parents would take far greater care of their children than in a 20 limit.
You only have to look at the BANES experience to show how death and serious injury increases where traffic calming measures are implemented.
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Jethro_uk
To be fair, a dedicated device should (and has) performed better for me.
I read that there is research into signaless GPS ...
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Jethro_uk
That relies on people having a half decent danger perception ability to start with. Which repeated research has shown they haven't.
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Tim Streater
Reminds me of my SiL, who visited the Mer de Grace glacier in France (it's above Chamonix). After the train ride up, you walk down to the ice and then step out onto it to visit the ice grotto. She stepped off the matting they put down to walk from the edge of the glacier out to the grotto, onto the ice, and was surprised to go arse over tit.
Instead of agreeing she'd been stupid to do that in ordinary shoes her reaction was that it "should be closed". No sense of danger in a dangerous situation, you see.
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The Natural Philosopher
You could do worse than an inertial guidance system plus GPS
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Jethro_uk
Nah, some sort of quantum mechanism. Apparently.
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The Natural Philosopher
Because they have been conditioned to drive to the street furniture, not to what's on the f****ng road
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Andrew
Compass, map, and someone without t*ts reading the map !
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Jethro_uk
It's a general problem.
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John Rumm
Most seem to stick them on either the rubbish or recycling ones rather than the green ones oddly... the green goes out every week, the others alternate. They could save the cost of an extra sticker!
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Theo
How do they work? Are they reading road signs, or using a GPS database, or something else? Or do you manually have to set the speed limit (how do you do that, with a stalk to click it up/down 10 mph or something)?
If you have to actively engage with it to input the speed limits, then presumably they don't want the next driver (who might not be you) taken by surprise to find it on.
(These presumably predate the current EuroNCAP requirements)
Theo
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John Rumm
It might - but there is also a risk that posting "extra" speed limits can invalidate the real one if you have a case where the limit is not obvious from the situation - say a rural unlit road that has a 30 limit, or a faster road that has a temporary speed reduction for some reason.
Adding additional conflicting signage could cause a driver to reject the real sign as not legitimate, and drive according to the "wrong" one, or in accordance with the road circumstance.
ISTR there was a legal case recently where someone added a extra (higher) speed limit sign in a bit of dual carriage way that had a temporary limit of 40 in place.
This one possibly:
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Bob Eager
Mine reads road signs (including the small repeater signs). It occasionally gets it wrong, but kickdown overrides it. I have no evidence that it uses GPS - but it might.
It can also be set manually.
Mine defaults to the last speed when you start the car, but doesn't actually engage it until you say so.
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Jeff Layman
That's something that /might/ happen once in many years, whereas the "status quo" is every day for many years.
Even more annoying is when our house was within a 3-way traffic light system recently while a hole was being dug at the end of our road. We were in the "side of the T junction" road, and couldn't see either of the lights in the main road, or indeed what the light in our road was showing. So if there were no cars moving, or waiting at "our" light, was it safe to pull out into the roadworks to enter the main road? A small repeater LED on the back of the traffic lights would have helped, but who do you contact to suggest that? I emailed RoSPA asking for a comment, but didn't even get the courtesy of a reply.
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charles
Temporary traffic lights usually have the owner's name on them and there should also be a sign saying whose work is being done,
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Jethro_uk
Manually set
Why is driving to the speed limit "a surprise". And that falls into my disqualification of a contrived situation.
From the description elsewhere I would concur.
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Jeff Layman
The ones near me just had who the lights were on hire from. I've since found a manufacturer at
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. Might be worth me sending an email to them to suggest adding LEDs at the back to show what's happening at the front.
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Harry Bloomfield Esq
My car's original ICE nav system, had something along those lines. If you went in a tunnel, where GPS was lost, it would show you on the map, progressing based upon impulses from the ABS, mixed with inertia, if you turned off in the tunnel.
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