These are set to be trebled will it help RTAs or just be another hypocritical method to raise revenue for HMG justified on the back of safety.

It's funny but nobody suggests fines for shoplifting are a 'hypocritical method to raise revenue'. Speeding is a serious and major hazard on the roads, is a breach of the driver's licence and should, in my opinion, be much much more heavilt enforced than it is. Bring back camouflaged cameras. In fact this change in level of penalty will make no difference as everybody speeds (apart from a few geeks like me) all the time; effectively the percentage of people ever penalised for speeding is effectively zero, so higher fines will make no difference since, effectively, nobosy is ever fined, John

Re speeding: I think it is time for a thorough overhaul of speed limits on every road. Whilst there appears to be good reason for some existing limits, many, in my opinion. are just nonsensical. I live on a typical suburban estate with narrow streets, parked cars and a 90 degree bend in the road. Anyone travelling at the 30mph limit is driving very dangerously; conversely, the main A road approaching the estate has the same max speed limit and is wide, has excellent visibility and wide set-back pedestrian walkways. A 40 mph limit would be more appropriate here. The 70 mph motorways limits were introduced to reduce fuel consumption during one of the fuel crises at a time when cars were relatively rudimentary compared to today's technical marvels. Surely a higher max speed should be allowed, combined with enforceable lower limits when absolutely needed.

David Bannister wrote: Re speeding: I think it is time for a thorough overhaul of speed limits on every road. Whilst there appears to be good reason for some existing limits, many, in my opinion. are just nonsensical. I live on a typical suburban estate with narrow streets, parked cars and a 90 degree bend in the road. Anyone travelling at the 30mph limit is driving very dangerously; conversely, the main A road approaching the estate has the same max speed limit and is wide, has excellent visibility and wide set-back pedestrian walkways. A 40 mph limit would be more appropriate here. The 70 mph motorways limits were introduced to reduce fuel consumption during one of the fuel crises at a time when cars were relatively rudimentary compared to today's technical marvels. Surely a higher max speed should be allowed, combined with enforceable lower limits when absolutely needed. I completely disagree. Firstly there is the environmental issue. My car does 42mpg at 75MPH and 54MPG at 65MPH if we drove slower then we use less fuel, cause less pollution and - significant if you live by a motorway, less noise. Secondly a significant proportion of the vehicles on motorways are limited to 56mph. Some HGV's are now limited to 50mph. If we raised the speed limit, the closing speed would be greater with the increased risk of collision especially when changing lanes. If you are not convinced try driving along the motorway from Milan to Venice at 70mph...

I DO "like" that post

You said it all "it's a) got nothing to do with logic". Councils and their staff do have a duty of care though don't they. Also, the Highways Act requires it. So, fine them zealously for "unsafe" roads due to their lack of maintenance; let's have a fair application of the rules all round. Incidentally another way to show that "safety cameras" are not "money raisers" would be to donate all revenues from the aforesaid "safety cameras" to charity. Cue tumbleweed................. Incidentally I have no problem at all with "traffic cops" enorcing road safety - we should have more of them, and less dumb, ripoff cameras. IMHO.

A staggering amount of people (including many children) are killed or seriously injured due to road accidents every year. Aside from the human cost, this likely has monetary costs in the hundreds of millions. Not to mention the lifetime of NHS care to be provided to those left with life-changing injuries due to avoidable accidents. I find it very hard to view anybody fined for speeding as a victim.

See post 14

Point well made. It is not possible to say whether a particular speed is safe or not. It all depends on the information the driver has, or more importantly, does not have in a particular circumstance. A good driver will take into consideration what he/she can see, what he/she cannot see and what may reasonably be expected to develop. I recommend RoSPA RoADAR training for all drivers and riders. It is excellent value for money, you will learn a lot and it will influence your approach to safety. I have completed IAM and RoSPA training and feel that the RoSPA training was better value as it requires you to keep up your standards with retests which are free.

GPS or road-side data point speed-limiter control for all vehicles other than emergency vehicles. Immeidate ban for interference with these = No speeding, much improved emissions. While we're at it, can we ban these blarty "boy racer" exhausts and sound systems?

Good Point, well made. Unfortunately we will never influence every drivers behaviour to the point where the roads are safe. But the benefits outweigh the costs significantly. I would disagree that speed alone is a risk factor, it is., IMHO, only inappropriate speed that presents significant risk. A fact borne out if you look at the safest roads being motorways where the speed limit (often exceeded) is the highest (National speed limit dual carriageways excepted of course). Some of the best drivers and riders on UK roads are Police drivers who have completed training in the appropriate version of Roadcraft (motorcycle or car). Of course they often exceed the speed limit when on blues and twos but their safety, and that of others, lies within the additional training they receive and their ability to observe, plan, position and act on the information available.

I have to severely bite my tongue at threads such as these, given I'm a motoring enthusiast as well as a risk management professional! (and clearly and openly biased on such matters). The struggle with the speed argument is the notion that the speed limits of the day are correct and proportionate to the risk of the road - unfortunately this is often not the case. The safety / risk argument is completely separate to the driving license, complying with the law argument etc. and often gets mixed in with or substituted for the argument about “speed kills”. Speed alone does not, it is the inappropriate use of speed. Some of the most dangerous drivers on the roads will never break the speed limit, but fail to indicate, practices poor/non-existent lane discipline, pull out in front of people and fail to grasp the concept of roundabouts. The opposite can be said for some of the best drivers I know / am aware of. Speed alone does not increase risk, inappropriate use of it does. More importantly, the type of poor driving I mentioned above has a far greater impact on risk than the speed used appropriately. If someone is travelling on a well sighted, quite road, maintaining good visual awareness and understands their stopping distances etc. I struggle to see an argument that suggest travelling at 70 instead of 60 or 80 instead of 70 increases the risk? Where is the risk? The driver is aware of stopping distances so should the need arise, the car would be slowed / stopped accordingly. Conversely if the road is busy, not so well sighted etc. then travel at the speed limit may not be safe, and the good driver would reduce their speed as appropriate. The amount of drivers that travel at 50-55mph on a NSL well sighted country road only to continue at 40-50mph in 30mph village section amazes me. What amazes me even more is their reaction when I overtake them on the NSL road, for them to catch up and tailgate me when I drop to >30 as appropriate to the village section!! Should speed cameras be camouflaged? You’d be hard to argue against it, as you are breaking the law in speeding, however you could never argue it was anything other than income generation. Flame jacket, helmet and gloves firmly donned :-)

The gaping hole in this argument is the assumption that all speed limits are only about whether or not the car driving at speed crashes into something. They are not. They are also about the effect of traffic on the local community (including safety perception, noise, pollution). Even the safety argument assumes that nothing unexpected is going to happen - no mechanical failure, nothing falling out of the sky. How many of you that prepare safe systems of work or method statements would accept as a valid excuse for failing to comply with them "I couldn't see any problem with ignoring that requirement"? By all means campaign to get speed limits changed, but where they exist you should comply with them, and if you fail to comply with them you should be penalised, in my opinion.

This made me think - Happy Friday Oh and Puffin!

I would argue that it isn't 'speed' that is the problem. It is 'relative speed'. Consider that two vehicles are travelling in the same direction, one at 30 mph and one at 35 mph. The speed difference is just 5 mph. However, two vehicles travelling in the opposite directions, both at 20 mph and the relative speed difference is 40 mph. And I feel that the concentration just on speed is dangerous as it ignores many other potential causes of accidents. Consider: 1. Motorway, clear, very little traffic, dry, no wind, quality vehicle travelling at 80 mph. (exceeding speed limit), no other vehicles anywhere near. 2. As observed by me: M4 westbound, fairly heavy traffic but flowing normally, small saloon travelling at 50 mph in centre lane so not exceeding speed limit but causing traffic to have to change to outside lane. Two small children unrestrained and bouncing about in the back. Young female driver texting! Which presents the greater hazard? Chris

JJ, you're wrong. It's not the change alone, a rapid change in speed from 0.2 mph to 0 is unlikely to kill anybody, decelerating from 90 mph to zero in the sane time has a very high chance of causing death. Please would the speed apologists explain why they think allowing drivers to speed improves road safety (one-off and rare occasions when a brief burst of speed might get you out of trouble; in my experience this is very very rare, at least it has almost never happened to me in over a quarter of a million miles of driving). John

Consider: 1. Motorway, clear, very little traffic, dry, no wind, quality vehicle travelling at 80 mph. (exceeding speed limit), no other vehicles anywhere near. 2. As observed by me: M4 westbound, fairly heavy traffic but flowing normally, small saloon travelling at 50 mph in centre lane so not exceeding speed limit but causing traffic to have to change to outside lane. Two small children unrestrained and bouncing about in the back. Young female driver texting! Which presents the greater hazard? Chris' In my experience it is the combination of the two which poses a hazard; slow moving traffic hogging the middle lane combined with people speeding in the third lane; texting is of course beyond the pale. All three of these practices are now illegal, and should all be penalised. It is easy to penalise speeding drivers using available technology, so why not do it? It is possible to penalise middle lane hoggers using technology available in average speed cameras, and I'd quite like to see that done as well. It's much harder to catch people texting, but a move towards greater enforcement in general might well reduce all instances of bad driving. But the fact that we can't do something (stop people texting in their phones) is not an argument not to do something we can (stop people speeding), John

I agree with many points made here. Personally, I don't think that my appreciation of speed in relation to road type had been significantly tested until I moved to (very) rural Dorset. Since then I have learnt the following: 1. As Jake says, a significant number of drivers drive at 40mph, no matter where they are, what the speed limit is or how dangerous that might be. 2. After stopping to check if 2 drivers are OK following a very near miss just ahead on a blind bend with enough room for 1 and 7/8ths of a car (the typical road width around here), your mouth will drop open when the driver who was clearly going too fast for the road condition, who's car is half way in a hedge, states that 'well if it says 30, you must be able to go at that speed'. 3. You can go at 30mph around a very tight country bend on a narrow country road and you might be OK. 4. However, if you meet a tractor, a driver from number 2, a lorry, a horse, a sheep, yet another loose farm dog, a deer, a cyclist or a teenage skateboarder who has decided to have some fun on a hilly road with bends, you will end up in a ditch, in a hedge, with no windmirrors, calling the RAC or, if you're very unlucky, take out the side of someone's 15th century thatched cottage. 5. Number 4 meetings happens at least 4 times a week and emergency stops, even when going very slowly, at least once a month. You HAVE to appreciate this or risk lives. 6. Rural roads may look like they take 2 cars, until you meet another car and realise that in order to avoid them, you will need to 'fall off' the side of the road and hit the rutted, pothole come small ditch at the side which WILL break your wheels, puncture your tyres and make you change your car regularly in the hope that a 4x4 will do a little better. 7. Tractors go by rule number 1, especially when driven by one of the farmer's sons. 8. You would be better off hitting a wall than a tractor because the tractor might just go straight over you instead! I have experienced or witnessed several of these events and I will never again look at speed limits in the same way. To say that they are 'hopeful' around here is an understatement!

Jake, I would agree with you if it was a question of one or the other. But it's not. The pro-speeding brigade always claim that speed cameras are a cash cow, so a) cameras will pay for themselves and b) the technology is already widely available. Speeding can be very easily controlled in a way that will arguably take very little in the way of resources, and might even generate the necessary revenue to eliminate texting while driving. Stopping speeding is a quick win, low hanging fruit etc etc. In any event, the current situation of an almost complete laissez faire attitude on the roads promotes all aspect of poor road behaviour, any attempt by the authorities would, in my view, improve safety in all aspects. Finally 'you eliminate speeding but texting continues - the overall road risk in the UK would drop'; good, how many lives a year might that drop save? One? Or more? If we can save even one life, and cause a bit of aggro to those who enjoy ignoring road rules because they're a bit inconvenient, wouldn't that be worth it? Even a 5% reduction in deaths would save between 30 and 80 people at work every year from dying on the roads. Not a bad result for a simple safety solution, John

Mootoppers, great post! It's not quite that bad around here, though it is very very rural we do at least usually have unusually wide grass verges so it's usually safe to take emergency evasive action. The road to our hamlet is very narrow, has the embankment for the river Hull on one side and a large very old solid Hawthorn hedge on the other. It has a couple of blind bends and is just wide enough for the HGVs that occasionally come down here to go to one or another of the local farms. It's a 40 limit.... But that's great, because until two years ago it was national speed limit, and most people tried to go down it at that speed, now most people at least stick to 40.... which is way too fast for most of it, John